> > > There's nothing empirical or sociological about the idea that we can
> > > only communicate if we accept conditions of free and equal
>association.:
> >
> > this is, of course, not what ken or habermas is saying!
>
>Well, I think you got Justin on that one.
I guess I am stupid. I don't understand what Ken or Habermas (according to Ken) is saying if not this. Try this again, real slow, for the cognitively challenged here. If the ideal conditions of freedom and equality are a necessary condition or presupposition of communication, why or how is it that we can communicate if we don't have them?
>Does the objection to Habermas involve a suspicion
>of the old temptation to disembody "reason"--to
>treat is as some abstraction in itself that is
>never related to concrete evidence or the the
>concrete circumstances of people's lives?
Yeah.
>
>The objection to Habermas seems to me to be
>mitigated by his insistence that an "Ideal Speech
>Situation" (not necessarily the current situation)
>involves the democratic participation of
>"everyone" (forget for the moment the complexities
>of that) in the debate and decision-making
>process.
Nah, cause we don't have it, so it's still disembodied and has nothing to do with people's lives.
But that is why it is called an
>"ideal." The philosophical debate seems to be
>about whether or not it is "presupposed" in speech
>acts (a utopian social moment in speaking, perhaps
>based on the idea that we sometimes speak in order
>to figure out how we are going to cooperate to
>solve a problem).
I can understand how we might aspire to the ideal speech situation, although as I've said, it seems to me that doing justice and minizing suffering rather than communicating adequately are the main merits of that situation. What's the relevance of communication here? It's subsidary and incidental. We also have to move oure bodies to solve problems, so why not a theory of just behavior? But in any case, of the ideal speech (behavior)( situationis ideal, nonactual, maybe unattainable, how can it be in anys ense "presupposed"? When Kant says that experience presupposes the condition of sensibility and understanding, he thought he had shown that we actually must have, and do have, here and now, and not as a regulative ideal, these transcendental conditions.
>
>Bu By the way, is
>it something about LAWYERS and JUDGES? From what
>people have said, Posner seems to follow in a
>similar vein, although (I don't really know --
>haven't read him either) possibly less
>egregiously.
Yeah, bad lawyers like, um, Lenin, or Clarence Darrow, bad judges like Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan. Give me a break.
Bork is a reactionary crank. Posner is a brilliant and quirky, if economically conservative, scholar and judge of wide humane learning and contrarian instincts. I would not say their name in the same breath. Neither of them are representative of the legal profession or the judiciary, though if Posner were more representative, we would have a better profession and a better judiciary. Read some of hsio essays in Overcoming Law. They go down smooth, they are written in elegant, nontechnical prose, they are extremely interesting.
--jks
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