>Habermas says:
>>"Proposals for reconstruction are hypotheses that stand open to the testing
>>and revision usual for rational reconstructions. To this extend I do not
>>share the Kantian a priorism. The intuitive, non-reconstructed knowledge
>>has no theoretical certainty, even for the communication actors
>>themselves... but rather that kind of everyday certainty that is
>>characteristic of background knowledge in the lifeworld, and even more so
>>of the background knowledge that is constitutive of this world."
>
>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.
Habermas, in 1971, clarified that this cannot be solved in terms of epistemology (as he had thought circa 1965). The Theory of Communicative Action *is* an investigation of the sociological, psychological etc. conditions under which communication occurs. I've be outlining his formal pragmatic argument, in a round about way, which is then supplemented by the analyses that you are suggesting. Habermas is arguing that the necessary conditions must be graped (they are, in fact, grasped) in terms of validity.
For example, regardless of what you say, it can be logically broken down into one (or more) of three distinct orientations toward the world: objectivating, intersubjective, subjective:
The sky is blue. Murder is wrong. I am happy.
In each case, we take up an orientation toward a worldly sphere. These statements can be thematized into validity claims. These validity claims can then be debated in a procedure way with consensus - on the basis of 'good reasons' being the final word. Until a consensus is reached, these claims cannot be said to have a valid status, they are not legitimate. If you are worried about this, pick sentence that you can think of and subject it to this analytic. You'll find that the tripartite distinction is valid *in all cases.*
Prior to any discussion about validity, there must be agreement about the meaning of a symbolic form (verbal, nonverbal, whatever).
>>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.:
Not that we accept these conditions, we presuppose them. It is crucial to distinguish here between the logic of communication and the actual historical dynamics of communication. Naturally, we are surrounded by liars and cheats, that's the dynamic of our communicative experience. But the logic of communication is different. I'm speaking to the logic of communication, not to our sorry ass historical dynamic. I don't think I'd made that clear until now.
>>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.
Fair enough. But I'm talking about the legitimacy of the truth claim in the context of truth-seekers. You can't just say, "It is true because I say so." The claim might be true, but this is irrelevant if no one believes you. I mentioned before that consensus is not a criteria of truth. Consensus is a criteria of the recognition of a truth claim as being held valid.
> 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.)
You can find Habermas's comments on Davidson and Tarski in Maeve Cooke's anthology On the Pragmatics of Communication.
>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.
Habermas disagrees, and provided a critique of the semanticist approach in On the Logic of the Social Sciences. The semanticist approach fails to consider the performance aspect of language, linking it with the coordination of action.
> 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.
Right, you've come pretty close to outlining Habermas's critique and his position. But he draws on the notion of a lifeworld to illustrate the idea of 'background consensus.'
>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.
The key idea is understanding. After understanding then we move on to agreement. Gadamer argues that agreement and understanding go together, which is why people who like Aristotle tend to like Gadamer. Habermas argues for a logical separation - and he does so on the basis ofa theory of meaning. That's why meaning is important, so we don't slide into a fusion of agreement and understanding: which is Habermas's critique of Gadamer's rehabilitation of prejudice.
>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.
Ok. This is the problem. The slave can never know, with certainty, that they have shared meanings, because the relation is not reciprocal. In order for the possibility of mutual understanding the slave must cease to be a slave and the master cease to be the master (ie. back to Hegel).
>>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.
I would agree, but, as Habermas notes, our relations are relations of domination. But, in principle, mutual understanding is possible.If one person can understand X, there is no reason in the world to assume that another person cannot understand X. This is why MacIntyre's incommensurability thesis is wacked. We can't know that worldviews are incommensurable *unless* we already understand them, which is a contradiction.
>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.
But we can't decide about whether or not something is private unless we talk with other people and figure that out... (see above).
>>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.
Well, perhaps there is a connection between sentiment and theory then. It doesn't take a theory of CA to suppose that free and equal is better than not being free and equal. But it does take a theory of communicative action to demonstrate, through reconstruction, how we can actually get out of the cycle of violence. Habermas outlines the objective cognitive conditions required for collective action that has the capacity to problem solve - on an individual and social level. He even points out how these capacities are destroyed by the economy and systems of domination. Habermas might be a bit obsessed with grounding social theory in a normative core, but the alternative is philosophical terrorism: if you cannot ground your critique, then criticism is nothing more than a military drill. In this sense, Habermas's theory packs the explanatory power that is lacking in other disciplines.
>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.
Maybe I just didn't have a substantial disagreement. On a really basic level, arguments are more persuasive if you can supply reasons. Habermas's theory explains why this is the case, he links it up with sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy and so on. No, you don't need to read TCA to get it - after all, Habermas is simply reconstructing what we already know.
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