>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.
Right, Habermas goes on to say that the realization of the 'ideal speech situation' (which is easily misunderstood as a place) is impossible - and undesirable.
> 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?
See above. Habermas is making the hypothetical claim that when we speak with one another we 'enact' idealizations: like, the assumption that what we say could - potentially - be understood by another person. That's all. He goes on to say that we can derive, through theoretical inquiry, the conditions under which understanding could be guaranteed - "communication free from distortion." He knows that this is impossible in any substantial sense, yet, he does argue that we can approximate these conditions, or at least encourage them...
>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.
I don't see how "no one should be excluded against their will" can be reduced to "only those voices educated enough carry weight."
>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.
The idea of freedom comes before/with/though/within democracy.Ideal speech has nothing to do with it.
>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.
I know. I haven't been reading it. The thing is, Carrol is playing the role of intellectual terrorist. I don't mean that in a harsh sense. He's opting for the 'shock value' of a person resisting assimilation, which is great (really). It is important. But he's adopting this role as a reaction to the discussion on the list. We've seen (at least) two sides of Carrol, the shock-meister and the argumentative interlocutor. When I made, some 2 years ago, a comment about the 'chora' in Greek tragedy, Carrol jumped in with all sorts of good reasons for rejecting whatever I had said. I think Carrol is holding out for the idea that we can choose to be communicative or instrumental, and now he's choosing to be instrumental, and refusing argumentation on the basis that instrumental actions can be... well... instrumental in fostering understanding. Habermas's doesn't disagree with this. He simply argues that instrumental actions are parasitic on communicative actions. One must understanding something with someone prior to being able to act with purposive intent. This, it seems to me, is correct. Carrol has a goal, and its pursing this goal for certain reasons, shock value, to educate, to amuse, to hystericize... whatever (ultimately, I don't know, and I won't know until Carrol explains the reasoning behind the action). This is a worthwhile project. But, in terms of theory, it says nothing. We can't use poetry to design landing gear - we need a combination of both communicative and instrumental actions to do this. Poetry might insipire us, it might motivate us... it might even be a vital means of creative-expression. But it is meaningless unless people can understand it. Understanding it is a hermeneutic task... which... well... has something to do with reasoning...
ken