But as I pointed out I do not agree with W. on this. It makes perfectly good sense to say one knows that one is in pain since to say that one is in pain has a performative function of giving ones word. You aren't feigning pain, putting on an act..etc.
Cheers, Ken Hanly..
P.S. I have no idea what you are talking about.. As far as understanding what Habermas is about I am probably much more cognitvely impaired than Justin. I sympathize with Searle's not continuing to read him, although I did read quite a bit a decade ago when I was on a committee that surpervised an honor's undergrad thesis in sociology. I would have passed the student just on the basis of his having plowed through and summarised a huge amount of material by Habermas! There do seem to be some interesting ideas in Habermas but they are so abstract and I have so many specific objections to everything that I read I gave up. Life is just too short. But Habermas is clearer to me than Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and others..They are simply beyond the pale as far as I am concerned. I would sooner listen to Lawrence Welk than subject myself to that sort of abuse and I detest Lawrence Welk, but at least I know what he is about. This is not to imply that there may not be some significant ideas put forth by these writers. Foucault has interesting things to say about madness for example. Some secondary sources make some sense to me. It just boggles miy mind how some people on this list write. I grew up in the analytic tradition of Moore, Austin, Ayer, Warnock, Wittgenstein, and the like so there is just a huge cultural shock involved in trying to make any sense out of authors such as Habermas. and worse Foucault or Derrida. You might say that there are presuppositions of intelligent communication but these authors somehow manage to violate them continually including Habermas!
. Cheers, Ken Hanly
----- Original Message ----- From: Kenneth MacKendrick <kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, July 30, 2001 11:10 AM Subject: Re: Ethical foundations of the left
> At 11:40 PM 7/28/01 -0500, you wrote:
>
> > My understanding of W. is that he holds that when we claim we have a
pain,
> >we do not have criteria for saying it.
>
> Habermas leaves a great amount of room for creative expression. It would
be
> interesting to trace the history of the expression, "Ouch." However, I
> don't really see how this proves to challenge Habermas's theory. Language
> is reflexive, in the sense that it can be used to formulate and
reformulate
> without every having to appeal to a meta-language to ground itself or its
> statements. Habermas sides with Gadamer on this point.
>
> **Lacking criteria for "proper" expression, it seems to me, is an argument
> that actually confirms Habermas's view, that we presuppose proper
> expressions. We wouldn't think about criteria unless we already had an
> intuitive sense of criteria for expression.
>
> ken
>
>
>
>