>The proposition "Communication is distorted" is incoherent.
Carrol,
We won't be able to find agreement about this. You reject the idea of the unconscious ex cathedra. The idea that we can do something without knowing why we do it is unthinkable for you, because you're taking up an anti-psychoanalytic standpoint.
However, this is only one of two issues. Gadamer also rejects the idea of distorted communication. How can communication be distorted, Gadamer asks - one would have to assume an 'ideal' world of speech!?! Gadamer goes on to accuse Habermas of being unrealistic, overestimating reason, and of intuitively relying on an anarchistic utopia.
Habermas then points out that without the idea of communicative competence, one is *necessarily* bound to the status quo, because any and all critique becomes limited to semantics, as if to say that all we need is a dictionary to solve global domination.
The debate isn't over, and gets rehashed again and again (in the last few months, no less than six full length books have been published on the Gadamer-Habermas debate. Most criticism sides with Gadamer, Habermas is in a minority view. But then again, most of those sympathetic to hermeneutics also dismiss the idea of ideology as well, simply saying that we need to pay closer attention to the facts, because the *text* is more important that the people, who can only interpret it without actually changing it. And there was this german guy, exiled in london... worked in a library, complained of boils... what was his name?
ken