As interesting as the details speech act theory can be, the emphasis on the details of it doesn't quite get at the larger issues of the debate for me.
How about this. The kinds of standards for agreement that Habermas's ideal speech situation hold out seem so high that it is unlikely that the cafeteria worker next door to me will be able to live up to them. Does the ISS mean that she has nothing to contribute to the social debate? If she's getting screwed economically, does she have to wait until she can articulate a marxo-neopragmatist-onto-metaphysical-speech-act analysis before she's allowed to point out that the restaurant industry and its legislative corporate and anti-labor lawyers have screwed her and her family yet again? Or if she enjoys jazz but can't explain why, should she not make her pleasure known to the people at the local music club?
In other words, the ISS would seem to lend itself to accomodating the voices only of those who are educated enough to carry on the kind of extended evidentiary analysis necessary to win academic arguments. Now, I wouldn't say that there's no value in that. It's necessary, and I'm all for a better analysis that can vanquish the (usually college educated) apologists for exploitation and misery (and Hootie and the Blowfish?). I even think that it's a good thing that the population at large be able to understand the better analysis and even contribute to it, although not necessarily in the highly technical form that it takes among academics and policy wonks. After all, we're not usually talking about things that most people can't understand, like plasma physics, but about the distribution of social responsibilities and goods, and who gets to bear the brunt of the human risks, and who gets what privileges if any, and whether or not we want to cooperate or compete.
If people are the focus of the worse effects of an unhappy social balance of power, for example, I don't think we should be insisting that they "fully" understand the explanations before they complain or voice their experience. They should, and they should probably be demanding some accountability to their interests from the people making the analyses and decisions (isn't that what the G8 protest was about?), not excuses for why their problems can't be addressed (because the "global marketplace knows better"), or only addressed in hyper-rarified debate, then shelved in the university library.
There is a lot of plain old ordinary speech about the actual circumstances of people's lives that needs to go on before you can solve what you think is a "social problem." You can't know the problem without it.
Hence democracy comes BEFORE "ideal speech" (and if such exists, is it really the kind of language we find in Kant's Critique of Reason, or is it less abstract?). The former isn't "grounded" in the later. The later needs to grow out of the former.
Perhaps that is what Justin and some others are trying to get at?
>From what Kenneth has said, I'm still not sure
that Habermas really does put the "unrealized
ideal" BEFORE the means of reaching it. Perhaps
it is only all the philosophical apparatus (you
know, sythetic apriori and all that) and
interminable wordiness that makes it look so.
I could be wrong. Maybe he is more the kind of unreconstructed Kantian that some seem to be making him out to be?
Peter Kosenko
P.S. By the way, I get Carrol's protest in tossing a bunch of poetry up on the list. He'd rather read IT than 800 pages of Habermas. It seems to him to have more "flesh and bones" to it.
P.S.S. The problems to be solved aren't necessarily the finer points of analytic language philosophy (which may just be a tool of thought for getting clearer about some issues -- for example, that language does not "point" to things as if it had fingers).
And: I'm taking off for a long weekend, so I have to check out of the list for a short while (what a glut of posts! a couple days and my server mailbox runneth over). May catch things tomorrow.
============================================================= Peter Kosenko Email: mailto:kosenko at netwood.net URL: http://www.netwood.net/~kosenko ============================================================= "Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe."--Benjamin Franklin