Well, then, why talk of necessary conditions, etc., rather than in terms of investigation of the sociological, psychological, etc. conditions under which communication occurs? Thsi quote sounds like q Quinean naturalization, epistemology as sociology of knowledge.
>These are assumed and taken for granted by anyone who wishes to speak.
> >Those who don't make these assumptions engage, Habermas proposes, in
> >completely self-destructive behaviour. Try communicating with >someone
>while >*consciously* rejecting the assumption that what you are saying will
> >mean >something, anything, to the person(s) you are saying it to. It
>kind >of >takes fun out of it, eh?
Well, we do communicate with liars and cheats all the time. But this stuff takes back all that naturalizing, detranscendentalizing talk in the quote. "Anyone who wishes to speak," indeed, rather than folks around here with this and such cognitive equipment, as demonstrated by the following studies. There's nothing empirical or sociological about the idea that we can only communicate if we accept conditions of free and equal association.:
>I said: I >>go >>with Davidson and Quine that meanings are truth
>conditions.
>
You said:
>And truth conditions are related to the conditions required for the
>justification of truth...
Oh no, certainly NOT. Here you run into my hard-edged realism. The truth is true, whether or not belief in it is justified. Truth conditions are just those states of affirs in virtue of which propositions obtain. Nothing epistemological about them. (Davidson wafflkes on this. He extended the Tarski Truth schema from formal to natural languages, and then proceeded to muck it up with all this charity stuff.)
The problem with the semantic or >representationalistic concept of truth
(and I'm not sure if Quine or >Davidson qualify, but you seem to be pointing
them in that >direction) is >that it ignores the requisite assumption of a
normative agreement >that must >exist between subjective investigators prior
to empirical or >theoretical
>research...
>
Davidson, at least, does not "ignore this"; he harps on it--both wrongly and irrelevantly. Irrelevantly, because meaning qu atruth conditions is pure semantics, no epistemology involved. Learning meanings, of course, is social psychology, but that's different from having meanings, which is just grasping the truth conditions. Wrongly, because Davidson's a priori theory of agreement, that overwhelming agreement in the background is a necessary condition of treating others as agents at all, is inconsistent with his own pragmatist premises, inherently implausible, unnecessarilys trong, and anti-empirical. It's enough to understand others that we know why and how their views diverge from ours; we didn't "make" them agree,a nd then presume we'll all mostly right.
You said:
If I say, the ball is red - I suspect that
>>>you >grasp the meaning of this statement, that the ball is not blue.
>>
I said:
>>No, that's not "the meaning" of the statement. That's an implication of
>>the statement. The meaning of "The ball is red" is just the ball's being
>>red.
>
You replied:
>But we can only know this if we are in agreement,
Do you mean, we can only know what the T-conditions are if we are in agreement that something that is blue is not red? Why put so much effort on agreement? That's just the way we use the words. We don't "agree" to use them that way; it's just a convention. If that's our convention, and you disagree, it's not that we dob't know the T-conditions; you are just wrong.
which requires
>specific
>social conditions, ie. the fact that you aren't beating me over the head.
Obviously wrong. As I said, and you agreed, the slave and the slavemaster have shared meanings throughout history. If not, slavery wouldn't work.
>If you beat me into agreeing that the ball is red, this violates the
>condition of reciprocity required for the claim itself.
Not at all. Masters have imposed their languages and meanings time out of mind. There are no such conditions of reciprocity as you say, or, because they have not ever obtained, no one has ever understood anyone else. This is, as I said, a reductio.
Ie. if there
>is
>only a single person living on the planet, then the ball can be anything
> >the investigator wants it to be. But if there are others, then
>the>statement can hold valid only the in the context of agreement.
> >Agreement >rests on understanding, and the bridge between the two is
> >argumentation.
I can't speak to Habermas on this, but you might think about about Wittgenstein's private language argument. W says, on Kripke's reading, that words mean what we intend by them collectively, and not what each individual assigns to them (that is why W denies that there are meanings), but there is no agreement to use them that way, and the convention is not something attained by argument. In might be imposed (though W does not talk about this) by brute force. In history, that is the rule.
>
You said:
>
>Meaning isn't a special entity.Its a property of language use. Meaning has
>two levels: semantics and grammar. Something is meaningful when the
>semantics and grammar can be understood by another person.
OK, we actually seem to have some agreement.
>
>I'm drawing out a potential, immanent to speaking, for the rational
>coordination of action. We can go the strategic route or go the
>communicative route. However, at some point, we *must* engage in
>communicative action for our own well-being, in as fragmented a form as we
>might see fit. We don't have a choice in this, cognition is linked to
>language, and this has normative implications.
>
What does this mean, that we will be worse off if we are not free and equal? Does it take a theory of CA to tell us this? You can arrive at this result far more directly, without getting meaning, etc. mixed up.
>That you think freedom is better than slavery is an existing state of
>affairs. That's one level of it. The other level is moving toward a reality
>where slavery is abolished - that implicates us, at a motivational level,
>to take action.
>
Sure, that freedom is better than slavery is motivational. But freedom is better than slavery here and now. It's not that it will be better than slavery only when we have abolished domination. It is better even as we speak. ANd not just "ideally," in my thought, but in reality. That's why it's motivational: it gives me a reason to enhance freedom and overthrow slavery because freedom is now better than slavery.
I note you didn't address my point that much (most) of science is about nonactual states of affairs. Maybe your point is that science isn't motivational that way. But isn't it? Sort of depends, right? That is why I gave the global warming example.
--jks
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