Ethical foundations of the left

Kelley kwalker2 at gte.net
Fri Jul 27 21:59:40 PDT 2001



>> we might be able to come up with criteria for the "perfect"
>>or "ideal" communicative situation. But what's the point? What
>>does it have to do with the world in which we live and use language?
>>
>>Miles

miles, it was once an attempt to ground social theory -- a conundrum that plagued many when Habermas first started the project and addressed the Ideal Speech Situation. He argued that we all gauge one another by the ISS, whether we are aware of it or not. if you say that you think i'm lying, then you're using it. if you say that you think i'm being a sarcastic snot and not taking this discussion seriously, then you're using it. if you say that you think i don't really mean what i say because i never act on it, then you're using it.

if there's anything we all share it is that. and this holds, he suggested at the time, for everyone so it can be a ground upon which to assert the superiority of his social theory over others on a metatheoretical basis, while also calling for a systematic research program on that dynamics of capitalism, the relations between the market, state and civil society, with a focus on social movements and social struggles, etc.

why was it important to him at the time? well, how did marx ground his social theoretical claims? some have argued that he pointed to a proletariat consciousness immanent to capitalist society. his was grounded in a philosophical anthropology of human labor. habermas wanted to build on a similarloy philosophical anthropology of communicative action. marx argued that the relentless workings of capitalism would give painstaking birth to the working class as a class for itself. habermas argues that immanent to all communicative (inter)actions is the implicit assumption of an ideal speech situation against we can possibly measure the reality of our communicative (inter)actions.

it is a logically airtight argument since if you argue against it, then you are engaged in a performative contradiction. you prove his argument as you reject it by-voila!--arguing.

does it matter in a direct way? no. it's about logic, the ISS, not about reality. it's about metatheory, not substantive theory.

it doesn't follow, though, that he rejects or doesn't care about actual communicative action in all its messiness.

also, that said, he has argued that our communication is systematically distorted _because_ of domination, power, exploitation.

my recent query of justin re: why he talk ABOUT ken, rather then TO/WITH ken was a trick to illustrate just that.


>Ok. Habermas accepts this (I think) but then also examines not just how
>language is used, but how we use language to coordinate our actions. As
>you note above, Wittgenstein's study calls for empirical studies of how
>people use language to do things... but Habermas is calling for study
>about how we do things using language... it is a question of an 'enlarged
>mentality' - and Habermas doesn't make any claim to 'read Wittgenstein
>properly' - he makes it explicit that he's ripping what he wants from
>people and then setting it to use for his own theoretical purposes...
>Habermas is, truly, interested in everyday language use. And, the idea of
>the 'ideal' communicative situation is only and 'idealizing' tendency of
>language use, it isn't a place or an actual situation, nor does it
>describe an actual situation - but the logic of communication can be
>explicated such that the formal conditions of validity / meaning can be
>outlined. Following Wittgenstein, Habermas goes on to Chomsky's
>understanding of linguistic competence. He argues that linguistic
>competence is a semantic concern, but he takes something from this too. He
>argues that underlying linguistic competence is communicative competence,
>which deals not only with semantics, but also with performance,
>communicative performance. Basically, if you combine Wittgenstein,
>Chomsky, Peirce, Mead and Gadamer on language and understanding and
>meaning - you get Habermas (with Kant, Hegel, Marx, Popper, Lukacs,
>Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons thrown in for good measure).
>
>ken



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