> Without a normative foundation, social criticism has no carry - it can
> yield neither reasonable nor rhetorical weight without some sort of
> behavioural expectation that goes along with it. Normative expectations are
> implicit in anything that you say, whether you intend it or not. If you
> deny this assertion, you end up contradicting yourself, because
> understanding is normative, wholly aside from the propositional normative
> content that practical discourse posits
Hardly. Norms and normative foundations are juridical structures of equivalence; you might as well say that every language implies grammar, every legal system implies statues, every molecule implies atoms. That's always only half the story. Habermas in this respect is an unreconstructed Kantian: the Ought is transformed, via the magic wand of discourse theory (which he needs, because he *has no theory of late capitalism*), into the Is. The antinomy of communicative action is, it's never clear what, precisely, is being communicated.
> I find this dumbfounding. That you consider
> the single most important aspect of cognition subjectivity and
> intersubjectivity to be irrelevant is simply mind-blowing.
Why is communication the be-all and end-all of subjectivity? This excludes vast arenas of human experience, bedrock things like memory, longing, affection, wishing, etc. Just as the best things in life are priceless, some of the best things in life are simply incommunicable.
-- Dennis