PREFACE

1. Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); henceforth Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. For two critical reviews of this work, see Robert Hanna, Review of Metaphysics 38 (September 1984): 109-12; and Christopher W. Gowans, International Philosophical Quarterly 25 (June 1985): 207-11; see also Saguiv A. Hadari, Ethics 95 (October 1984): 164-65.

2. Bernstein's choice of words is precise; the dichotomy, he argues, is not between, say, objectivism and subjectivism or between relativism and absolutism given that, in the case of the former, there are subjectivists that are also objectivists (e.g. Kant, Husserl) and, in the latter case, the sense of fallibility which characterizes the contemporary mood strongly mitigates against professing claims to absolute knowledge in any field. Cf. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 11-13.

3. Ibid., 231.

4. Fred R. Dallmayr, Notre Dame University, ibid., backcover. Indeed, Bernstein's book, in the words of Hanna, is "an able defense of post-epistemological philosophy, and presents what seems to be its strongest case" (112, see n. 1 above).

5. See n. 49 below.

6. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 8. This definition exhibits the four basic claims of objectivism: (1) that there are neutral, overarching conceptual schemes; (2) that these schemes are universal insofar as they transcend space and that they are ahistorical in the sense that they transcend time; (3) that such schemes may be articulated for the standard philosophical disciplines including logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics; and (4) that one or more of these schemes are envisioned as a safeguard against the radical skepticism of the relativists, who the objectivists criticize as self-referentially and pragmatically inconsistent.

7. Ibid., 9.

8. Ibid., 16. A related and much neglected issue is the relationship between cognition and volition in the "creation" and development of a philosophy. What is at stake is of crucial importance, as Harold A. Durfee elucidates, when commenting on recent American philosophy: "It raises in all seriousness the question as to the relationship of the self to the philosophical position which one maintains, whereas modern concern with objectivity has seriously neglected any such analysis. The dialogue challenges the major self-interpretation of the discipline since the Greeks and thus calls in question the fundamental proposals of most major classic Western philosophers. It raises the crucial question as to the centrality of the role of reason in philosophical interpretation, and thereby the place of the irrational in philosophy itself, leading to a dialogue between rationalism and voluntarism. . . . At stake therefore, is a grand dialogue regarding the philosophical self-interpretation of philosophy as a purely rational endeavor" ("Freedom and Cognition in Recent American Philosophy," Tulane Studies in Philosophy 35 [1987]: 43-44). For other studies on this question accentuating the voluntaristic point of view over the cognitive, see Durfee, Foundational Reflections: Studies in Contemporary Philosophy (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1987).

9. Influenced by the later Wittgenstein/Heidegger/Dewey, Richard Rorty articulated this now familiar view in his subtle critique of professional "objectivist" philosophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). For an excellent critical review of this work, see Richard J. Bernstein's "Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind," Review of Metaphysics 33 (1980): 745-76.

10. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 12-13. This definition exhibits the four basic claims of relativism: (1) that there is no privileged access to unconditional verities; (2) that all conceptual schemes are relative to a given place and time; (3) that there are no metalanguages for critically evaluating and adjudicating competing schemes; and (4) that all conceptual schemes should be challenged as a safeguard against the dogmatism of the objectivists.

11. Ibid., 18.

12. Ibid., 19.

13. The work of the later Wittgenstein exerted notable influence in these developments, particularly his view against the purported pretenses of overarching frameworks. His analysis of language in the Philosophical Investigations--as consisting in a tool, a convention, a social practice, a language game, a form of life which serves the needs of a given language community--expresses a conception of language that repudiates recommending any one language game as somehow superior to any other: "Language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments" (Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1958], sec. 569). This view of language as a functional apparatus consisting of terms and rules adopted to serve pragmatic or perceived needs mitigates against elevating any one language game to the status of a metalanguage. Words do not represent symbolic signs for fixed metaphysical essences or epistemological foundations or unconditional scientific or social verities derived by this or that method; they represent, rather, signs whose meanings have been stipulated conventionally in order to fulfill the aims of a given verbal community. What is of interest here is that Bernstein would appear not to interpret Wittgenstein as espousing a blatant form of skepticism but rather as a central voice committed to the deconstruction of the Cartesian language game so as to lay the groundwork for greater flexibility and dialogue among the proponents of conflicting views. The work in speech-act theory of J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), has also contributed to the emergence and influence of the dialogical model so central to post-Cartesian thought. It is precisely the nature of the rationality that animates this dialogical openness which Bernstein endeavors to articulate in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism.

14. Besides the work of Thomas Kuhn that follows below, the move beyond the objectivist/relativist framework of the Cartesian dichotomy is evidenced in other notable authors in the philosophy of science, viz.: Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: NLB, 1975); and Imre Lakatos, "History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions," and "Replies to Critics," both in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science of the Philosophy of Science Association 1970, eds. Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen, n. 8 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1971). Karl R. Popper, though harder to place as a result of his objectivistic tendencies, nonetheless recognizes that scientific hypotheses and theories should be open to serious criticism; see Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 4th ed. rev. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972) and "The Rationality of Scientific Revolutions," in Problems of Scientific Revolutions, ed. Rom Harré (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Though never explicitly treated by Bernstein, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars has also contributed to this post-empiricist philosophy of science.

15. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd. enl. ed. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970).

16. In a later work, Kuhn explicitly recognizes the importance of hermeneutics: "In my own case, for example, even the term 'hermeneutic', . . . was no part of my vocabulary as recently as five years ago. Increasingly, I suspect that anyone who believes that history may have deep philosophical import will have to learn to bridge the longstanding divide between the Continental and English language philosophical traditions" (Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977], xv; as quoted in Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 31).

17. Bernstein clarifies the "internal dialectic" that has led to the development of what is coming to be called the "post-empiricist philosophy and history of science," a term coined by Mary Hesse in her article, "In Defence of Objectivity," reprinted in her "Revolution and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1980), 167-86. He states, "In the philosophy of the natural sciences, this development has been characterized as having begun with an obsession with the meaning and reference of single terms (logically proper names and ostensive definitions), moved to the search for a rigorous criterion for discriminating empirically meaningful sentences or propositions, shifted to the evaluation of competing conceptual schemes, and finally turned to the realization that science must be understood as a historically dynamic process in which there are conflicting and competing paradigm theories, research programs, and research traditions" (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 171). Three basic tenets of this post-Cartesian philosophy of science follow: (1) a move away from proposing rigid "pious generalities" that attempt to state permanent methods of scientific inquiry in favor of examining actual historical practices and standards that have been "hammered out" in the course of scientific inquiry; (2) a move beyond objectivism (the "myth of the given" and relativism (the "myth of the framework") that while recognizing the "self-corrective nature of scientific inquiry" equally recognizes the rationality of the enterprise in the sense that reasons can be advanced to show "why a research program won over its rival"; and (3) a greater sensitivity to "the role of choice, deliberation, conflicting variable opinions, and the judgmental quality of rationality" in the practice of scientific inquiry. Cf. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 71-79.

18. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 23. Kuhn's position highlights the inadequacy of traditional views concerning the nature of scientific rationality: "As I have said before, . . ., I do not for a moment believe that science is an intrinsically irrational enterprise. What I have perhaps not made sufficiently clear, however, is that I take that assertion not as a matter of fact, but rather of principle. Scientific behavior, taken as a whole, is the best example we have of rationality. Our view of what is to be rational depends in significant ways, though of course not exclusively, on what we take to be the essential aspects of scientific behavior. That is not to say that any scientist behaves rationally at all times, or even that many behave rationally very much of the time. What it does assert is that, if history or any other empirical discipline leads us to believe that the development of science depends essentially on behavior that we have previously thought to be irrational, then we should conclude not that science is irrational but that our notion of rationality needs adjustment here and there" ("Notes on Lakatos," Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science of the Philosophy of Science Association 1970, eds. Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen, n. 8 [Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1971], 143-44). See also Kuhn's Essential Tension: Selected Studies in the Scientific Tradition and Change. Yet this is not to say that Kuhn does not recognize the progress of scientific inquiry as a problem-solving enterprise: "Though science surely grows in depth, it may not grow in breadth as well. If it does so, that breadth is not in the scope of any single specialty alone. Yet despite these and other losses to the individual communities the nature of such [scientific] communities provides a virtual guarantee that both the list of problems solved by science and the precision of individual problem-solutions will grow and grow. At least, the nature of the communities provides such a guarantee if there is any way at all in which it can be provided" (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 170).

19. It is crucial to note here the parallel problem experienced by natural and social philosophers: Both are attempting to understand, so as to learn from what is initially different, alien, foreign; in the case of the natural scientist, between distinct conceptual schemes, theoretical frameworks, paradigms; and, in the case of the social scientist, between distinct forms of life, cultures, societies.

20. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).

21. Clifford Geertz states, "In all three societies I have studied intensively, Javanese, Balinese, and Moroccan, I have been concerned among other things, with attempting to determine how the people who live there define themselves as persons, what enters into the idea they have (but, as I say, only half-realize they have) of what a self, Javanese, Balinese or Morrocan style, is. And in each case, I have tried to arrive at this most intimate of notions not by imagining myself as someone else . . . but by searching out and analyzing the symbolic forms--words, images, institutions, behaviors--in terms of which . . . people actually represent themselves to themselves and to one another" ("From the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding" in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. Rabinow and Sullivan [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979], 228; see also Geertz's The Interpretation of Culture [New York: Basic Books, 1973]).

22. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 29.

23. As Winch concurs, "My aim is not to engage in moralizing, but to suggest that the concept of learning from which is involved in the study of other cultures is closely linked with the concept of wisdom. We are confronted not just with different techniques, but with the new possibilities of good and evil in relation to which men may come to terms with life" ("Understanding a Primitive Society," Ethics and Action [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972], 42; as quoted in Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 29).

24. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).

25. For an excellent historical account of hermeneutics, see Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969). Up until the 19th century hermeneutics was limited to the study of literary and sacred texts; Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher expanded the scope of hermeneutics as a mode of rationality appropriate for defending religious thought from the domination of the positivist model. Wilhelm Dilthey in his Critique of Historical Knowledge (Texte zur Kritik der historischen Vernunft [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983]) argued that hermeneutics provided the proper methodology for the study of the human sciences (Geistewissenschaften) in contradistinction to the positivist model of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). In the 20th century, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), accentuated the importance of hermeneutics for philosophical reflection. Gadamer's Truth and Method may be read as an explicit attempt to dissolve the Cartesian dichotomy by articulating the ontological nature of historic reason. Paul Ricoeur in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. and ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981) has endeavored to apply hermeneutical understanding particularly to the philosophy of psychology. Jürgen Habermas has been developing a critical hermeneutics of the social sciences. Cf. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 107-115. These studies confirm the suspicion that hermeneutics has been largely a Continental phenomena. The relevance of hermeneutical study in Anglo-American circles was brought about largely by Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; in the last chapter of this work, titled, "From Epistemology to Hermeneutics," he argues for hermeneutics not as a "successor subject" to epistemology, but, rather, as "an expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled" (315).

26. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Problem of Historical Consciousness," Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 129-30. Cf. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 34.

27. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 91; Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 120.

28. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 91-99; Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 120-23.

29. Gadamer puts it in these terms: ". . . the form of operation of every dialogue can be described in terms of the concept of the game. It is certainly necessary that we free ourselves from the customary mode of thinking that considers the nature of the game from the point of view of the consciousness of the player. . . . the very fascination of the game for the playing consciousness roots precisely in its being taken up into a movement that has its own dynamic. . . . Now I contend that the basic constitution of the game, to be filled with its spirit‑‑the spirit of buoyancy, freedom and the joy of success‑‑and to fulfill him who is playing, is structurally related to the constitution of the dialogue in which language is a reality. When one enters into dialogue with another person and then is carried along further by the dialogue, it is no longer the will of the individual person, holding itself back or exposing itself, that is the determinative. Rather, the law of the subject matter is at issue in the dialogue and elicits statement and counterstatement and in the end plays them into each other" ("Man and Language" in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976], 66).

30. The term 'prejudice', as Gadamer uses it, comprehends three characteristics: (1) that which is handed down via tradition, (2) that which is constitutive of what one is at any given moment and of that which one is in the process of becoming, and (3) that which is always anticipatory, i.e., open to future testing and transformation. See Truth and Method, 235ff., especially 239; Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 127-31.

31. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 146; Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 125-31.

32. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 235ff, especially 248; Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 128-31.

33. Clearly, the crucial question here is how one distinguishes between those prejudices that are "enabling" from those that are "blind." Bernstein responds, "For Gadamer [against Descartes], it is in and through the encounter with . . . what is generally handed down to us through tradition that we discover which of our prejudices are blind and which are enabling. In opposition to Descartes' monological notion of purely rational self-reflection by which we can achieve transparent self-knowledge, Gadamer tells us that it is only through the dialogical encounter with what is at once alien to us, makes a claim upon us, and has an affinity with what we are that we can open ourselves to risking and testing our prejudices" (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 128-29).

34. Ibid., 139.

35. Against the Wittgenstenian notion of language as a tool, Gadamer understands language as the medium of all understanding and tradition, i.e., the medium in which Dasein lives. See n. 13 above.

36. See Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics for the manner in which Aristotle distinguishes practical knowledge, phronésis, from theoretical knowledge, epistéme, and from technical or productive knowledge, techné.

37. The hermeneutical element of application is developed in Gadamer's "Hermeneutics and Social Science," Cultural Hermeneutics 2 (1975): 307-16; and "Practical Philosophy as a Model of the Human Sciences," Research in Phenomenology 9 (1980): 74-85.

38. As Bernstein indicates, for Gadamer "the appropriation of the classical concepts of praxis and phronésis enables us to gain a critical perspective on our own historical situation, in which there is the constant threat and danger of the domination of society by technology based on science, a false idolatry of the expert, a manipulation of public opinion by powerful techniques, a loss of moral and political orientation, and an undermining of the type of practical and political reason required for citizens to make responsible decisions" (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 174-75).

39. Ibid., 150-65.

40. Ibid., 154.

41. Ibid., 155.

42. Ibid., 156 & 158 respectively.

43. This consists in "a softening up of the old Cartesian dilemma by denying that there could ever be anything like a pure objectivism" (Hanna, 112, see n. 1 above). Once the claim to ultimate foundations is relinquished, the force of the relativist counterargument becomes discredited since the point of its critique depends upon and is directed against rigid, uncompromising foundationalist proposals.

44. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 225.

45. Bernstein then proceeds to consider, notwithstanding differences, the "common ground"--the practical-moral concern--illuminating the views of Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt and Richard Rorty so as to show how each contributes to the movement beyond objectivism and relativism. With respect to Habermas, Bernstein notes how his focus on the systemic features of contemporary society that undermine, distort, or prevent the realization of communicative action provides Gadamer with a critical apparatus for examining contemporary social practices and institutions. Insofar as Hannah Arendt is concerned, Bernstein calls attention to her persistent reminder that praxis is a permanent human possibility capable of orienting communal action in the interests of public freedom. And, lastly, from Rorty, Bernstein discovers a neopragmaticism that, beyond his deconstructionist pursuits, fosters a vision of community in which the "Socratic virtues" are realized. When focusing on the deep moral-practical concern of all four voices, Bernstein indicates that he is "not confronted with a babble of 'incommensurable' languages but with a coherent conversation that has direction" (ibid., 225).

46. Ibid., 231.

47. Jürgen Habermas, "Questions and Counterquestions" in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 193.

48. It should be recalled that Rorty is also especially critical of the a priorism typical of the transcendental/foundationalist positions of the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian legacy: "It is the notion that human activity (and inquiry, the search for knowledge, in particular) takes place within a framework which can be isolated prior to the conclusion of inquiry--a set of presuppositions discoverable a priori--which links contemporary philosophy to the Descartes-Locke-Kant tradition. For the notion that there is such a framework only makes sense if we think of this framework as imposed by the nature of the knowing subject, by the nature of his faculties or by the nature of the medium within which he works. The very idea of 'philosophy' as something distinct from 'science' would make little sense without the Cartesian claim that by turning inward we could find ineluctable truth, and the Kantian claim that this truth imposes limits on the possible results of empirical inquiry. The notion that there could be such a thing as "foundations of knowledge" (all knowledge in every field, past, present, and future) or a "theory of representation" (all representation, in familiar vocabularies and those not yet dreamed of) depends on the assumption that there is some such a priori constraint" (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 8-9 [italics mine]).

49. In this respect Jürgen Habermas has been characterized as "his generation's personification of the Frankfurt School and the German philosophical legacy insofar as he has encompassed the full range of Western thought and humane concern" (Habermas, Critical Debates, eds. John B. Thompson and David Held [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982], backcover; henceforth Critical Debates). Thomas McCarthy expressed the moral-political vision that imbues Habermas's work in these terms: "Jürgen Habermas is the dominant figure on the intellectual scene in Germany today, as he has been for the past decade. There is scarcely an area of the humanities or social sciences that has not felt the influence of his thought; he is master, in breadth and depth alike, of a wide range of specialized literatures. But his contributions to philosophy and psychology, political science and sociology, the history of ideas and social theory are distinguished not only by their scope but by the unity of perspective that informs them . . . ., a vision that draws its power as much from the moral-political intention that animates it as from the systematic form in which it is articulated" (Preface, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978], ix; henceforth Critical Theory). In Bernstein's own idiom: "One might epitomize Habermas's entire intellectual project and his fundamental stance as writing a new Dialectic of Enlightenment--one which does full justice to the dark side of the Enlightenment legacy, explains its causes but nevertheless redeems and justifies the hope of freedom, justice, and happiness which still stubbornly speaks to us" (Introduction, Habermas and Modernity, 31).

50. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, "What is Universal Pragmatics?," Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 21-25; McCarthy, Critical Theory, 277.

51. The term philosophy of emancipation is used within the context of this paper to refer in a technical sense not only to Habermas's more recent work on the theory of communicative action but also to his earlier work on the theory of human or cognitive interests.

52. When treating the specific difference between Gadamer's and Habermas's view, McCarthy explains, "While he agreed with Gadamer on the necessity for a sinnverstehenden access to social reality, he insisted nevertheless that the interpretation of meaningful phenomena need not, indeed could not, be restricted to the type of dialogic understanding characteristic of the hermeneutic approach. He held out instead the possibility of a theoretically grounded analysis of symbolically structured objects and events which, by drawing on systematically generalised empirical knowledge, would reduce the context-dependency of understanding and leave room for both quasi-causal explanation and critique" ("Rationality and Relativism: Habermas's 'Overcoming' of Hermeneutics," Habermas, Critical Debates, eds. John B. Thompson and David Held [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982], 57; henceforth "Rationality and Relativism").

53. It would be a gross misunderstanding of Habermas's intentions if one would take this as meaning that Habermas is proposing one more objectivist position. Habermas envisions his program as a hypothetical undertaking within the general rubric of the reconstructive versus nomological sciences as the ensuing paragraphs will make clear.

54. What follows will be limited to a succinct presentation of the main lines of Habermas's proposal for the purpose of better indicating Habermas's alternative response to the objectivist/relativist dichotomy. The theory of universal pragmatics will be developed in detail within the context of the third chapter.

55. Jürgen Habermas, "Appendix: Knowledge and Human Interest: A General Perspective," Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 317; henceforth, Appendix. By means of the theory of communicative action, Habermas endeavors to avoid the theoretical impasse maintained by both Marx and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School insofar as the relation of reason to freedom is concerned. Marx envisioned that the delimitation of freedom imposed by the need to produce for the satisfaction of individual and communal needs would be greatly facilitated by a progressive process of rationalization generative of technological breakthroughs. Max Weber, however, countered that the process of rationality and technology in fact leads to a process of reification wherein the most efficient means for achieving predefined goals leads to greater calculability, control and systematic planning, bureaucracy, economic and administrative efficiency. Weber understood rationalization as a progressive process of depersonalization and desacralization of the natural and social world. The Frankfurt School, following Weber, abandoned reason in favor of a negative dialectics which espoused that conceptual reason (instrumental reason) turn against itself and its reifying tendencies in the direction of art as a form of non-reified thinking. Yet, given that art is better understood as a medium for transcending experience rather than as a model of dialogical relationships needed for reconciliation, Habermas proposes a view of critical theory that argues for a more fundamental sense of reason: viz., that instrumental reason itself depends on communicative reason. Habermas purports then by means of his theory of communicative action to provide the normative context for social critique. For the relationship between Marx, the Frankfurt School and Habermas, see "Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment" in Habermas and Modernity, 35-66. For a reconstruction of the philosophical argument of critical theory which places the work of Habermas in the tradition of metacritique, see Garbis Kortian, Metacritique: The Philosophical Argument of Jürgen Habermas, trans. John Raffan (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

56. Cf. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 182.

57. Habermas, "Questions and Counterquestions," 195.

58. Herbert Schnädelbach in Kommunikation und Reflexion, ed. W. Kuhlmann and D. Böhler (Frankfurt, 1983), 361; as quoted in Habermas, "Questions and Counterquestions," 195.

59. Habermas, "Questions and Counterquestions," 196.

60. Ibid., 194.

61. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 390; cf. Habermas, "Questions and Counterquestions," 195.

62. Habermas, "Questions and Counterquestions," 196.

63. Ibid., 196. Habermas's theory of communicative action involves a three-tier research program: (1) a general theory of communication, which Habermas calls "universal pragmatics," that concerns itself with the rational reconstruction in universal terms of the happening of understanding; (2) a general theory of socialization, i.e., a theory of the acquisition of communicative action in accordance to hierarchically-arranged developmental stages that correspond to a developmental logic; and (3) a theory of social evolution, consisting in a reconstruction of historical materialism (i.e., a critique of capitalist society) with the end in view of developing an historically oriented analysis of contemporary society with a practical intent.

64. Although a consideration of Habermas's critique of deconstructionism is beyond the scope of this present study, from what has been said thus far concerning Habermas's conception of the role of philosophy, a conception to be developed in greater detail in subsequent chapters, it is nonetheless possible to indicate the fundamental thrust of Habermas's position with respect to this contemporary challenge to reason. In this respect Habermas argues that Foucault's radical historization of the idea of reason in function of an archaeological and genealogical history of the human sciences presupposes an undeveloped notion of validity that will always have to go beyond local context in order to be effective. This inconsistency entails Foucault, Habermas contends, in the paradox of a performative self-contradiction. For a discussion of this paradox, see ch. IV, sec. A. On the other hand, Habermas argues that Derrida's method of dissemination or deconstruction ultimately is enmeshed in the paradoxes of philosophies relying on subjectivity. Derrida's extreme aesthetic contextualism fails to take account of social learning processes by which social subjects attain an improved understanding of both natural and social reality. For Habermas these learning processes are rooted in the validity claims serving as the communicative dimension in terms of which truth and normative claims may be rationally adjudicated. David Couzen Hoy points out that Derrida's over-emphasis on texts was equally criticized by Foucault: "Foucault also accuses Derrida of being overly preoccupied with texts and ignoring their social context. Foucault suspects that Derrida's method tacitly claims authority for itself as a result of the authority and primacy it grants to the text. Furthermore, Foucault believes that a text is not autonomous from the social practices to which it is tied both in its own time and in the time of its later interpretation" ("Splitting the Difference: Habermas's Critique of Derrida," Praxis International 8 [January 1989]: 453). For Habermas's critique of Foucault, see "The Critique of Reason as an Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Michel Foucault," and "Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). For his critique of Derrida, see "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism" also in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Also in this volume, see "The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point." For recent discussions on Habermas's critique of Foucault, see Dieter Freundlieb, "Rationalism v. Irrationalism? Habermas's Response to Foucault," Inquiry 31 (June 1988): 171-92; and Thomas R. Flynn, "Foucault and the Politics of Postmodernity," Nous 23 (April 1989): 187-198. For a discussion on Habermas's critique of Derrida, see David Couzens Hoy's article (cited above); Christopher Norris, "Deconstruction, Postmodernism and Philosophy: Habermas on Derrida," Praxis International 8 (January 1989): 426-46; and Charles Scott, "Postmodernism and Rationality," The Journal of Philosophy 85 (October 1988): 528-38. See also Thomas McCarthy, "The Politics of the Ineffable: Derrida's Deconstructionism," The Philosophical Forum vol. XXI, Nos. 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1989-90): 146-68; and Richard J. Bernstein, "Dallmayr's Critique of Habermas," Political Theory 16 (Nov. 1988): 580-93. For an excellent critique of deconstructionist themes in light of Habermas's proposal, see Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); henceforth Ideals and Illusions. For a discussion of deconstruction as a disguised metaphysics, see Gillian Rose, The Dialectic of Materialism: Post-Structuralism and Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), ch. 8.

65. Anthony Giddens, "Reason Without Revolution?" Habermas's Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns" in Habermas and Modernity, 113-14.

66. Habermas, "What is Universal Pragmatics?," 8-20; and McCarthy, Critical Theory, 274-79.

67. Other reconstructive sciences include Noam Chomsky's work in linguistics, where he undertakes to reconstruct the system of rules that permits potential speakers to acquire competence in producing and understanding grammatical sentences (see his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax [Cambridge, Mass., 1965]); Jean Piaget's studies in developmental psychology, where he endeavors to unravel the processes involved in cognition (see his The Moral Judgment of the Child [New York, 1965], and Biology and Knowledge [Chicago, 1971]); and Lawrence Kolhberg's work in ethics, where he seeks to articulate the complex stages of moral development (see his "Stage and Sequence" in Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, ed. D. Goslin [Chicago, 1969]; and "From Is to Ought" in Cognitive Development and Epistemology, ed. Theodore Mischel [New York: Academic Press, 1971]).

68. Habermas, "What is Universal Pragmatics?," 24-25; and McCarthy, Critical Theory, 279.

69. Jürgen Habermas, "A Reply to my Critics" in Critical Debates, 234. Thomas McCarthy adds, "Rational reconstructions of universal competencies cannot make the strong a prioristic claims of the Kantian project. They are advanced in a hypothetical attitude and must be checked and revised in the light of the data, which are gathered a posteriori from the actual performances and considered appraisals of competent subjects. Any proposal must meet the empirical condition of conforming in a mass of crucial and clear cases to the intuitions of competent subjects, which function ultimately as the standard of accuracy" ("Rationality and Relativism," 60). Habermas nonetheless generates confusion when he distances himself from Kantian transcendentalism while using expressions such as "the general and unavoidable presuppositions of achieving understanding of language," "what must be presupposed," what is "unavoidable," and what is "necessary." After the publication of his first systematic work, Knowledge and Human Interests (trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, [Boston: Beacon Press, 1971]), Habermas has qualified his project to disassociate himself from this strong transcendental strain; see Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 184-85.

70. Hesse, "Science and Objectivity" in Critical Debates, 110-11; and McCarthy, Critical Theory, 58.

71. Habermas, "What is Universal Pragmatics?," 16.

72. Jürgen Habermas, "A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests," trans. C. Lenhardt, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 3 (1973): 180; henceforth "Postscript." Hesse clarifies that Habermas's position "must be distinguished carefully from a realism which presupposes that the aim of science is to derive true statements corresponding to an antecedently given 'real' domain of objects, and which issues in the possibility of technical control only as an incidental spin-off. On the contrary, Habermas believes . . . that there is no antecedently given domain of objects which are the direct referents of true statements. Empirical objects and 'empirical reality', in general, are constituents of human commerce with the natural world, constituted in the course of human pursuit of those technical interests which are continuous with the need of all animal species to survive in their natural environment" ("Science and Objectivity," 99). Notwithstanding Habermas's position here, in response to criticism from Hesse, he recognizes his: "obligation . . . to explain how empirical limitations operate in the process of justifying truth-claims connected with descriptive statements." Indeed Habermas readily "admit[s] that the 'evidential dimension' of the concept of truth is badly in need of further clarification" ("A Reply to My Critics," 275).

73. It will be the object of the next three chapters to develop Habermas's model of communicating subjects within the context of his philosophy of emancipation.

74. See Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 192-94; Hesse, "Science and Objectivity," 109-14; Steven Lukes, "Of Gods and Demons: Habermas and Practical Reason," Habermas, Critical Debates, eds. John B. Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 139-45 and 147; and Fred Alford, "Is Jürgen Habermas' Reconstructive Science Really Science?," Theory and Society 14 (1985): 331-35; also see following note.

75. McCarthy, "Rationality and Relativism," 62.

76. Though McCarthy speaks, for instance, of the various realms of reality about which one can come to an understanding as unavoidable "idealizing suppositions," it would appear that their unavoidability stems from what is known of each of these realms as a fact of human experience. McCarthy states, "The idealizing suppositions we cannot avoid making when attempting to arrive at mutual understanding‑‑suppositions, for instance, of the intersubjective availability of an objectively real world, of the rational accountability of interaction partners, and of the context transcendence of claims to truth and moral rightness‑‑are actually effective in organizing communication . . ." (Ideals and Illusions), 2-3.

77. Jürgen Habermas, "Interpretive Social Science vs. Hermeneuticism" in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. Norma Haan et. al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 261.

78. Cf. Stephen K. White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice and Modernity (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 129-30; henceforth Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas.

79. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 194-95; quote from McCarthy, Critical Theory, ixf.

80. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 190-91 (italics mine).

81. Habermas, "A Reply to my Critics," 233.

82. Bernstein's articulation of the "primordial intuition" deserves careful attention: "The recent celebration of relativistic doctrines and the enthusiasm for an endless playfulness of interpretation that knows no limits has already elicited a strong reaction. It has been argued that regardless of the many errors of those who have been wedded to the concept of representation, the correspondence theory of truth, the doctrine that the function of the mind is to mirror nature, we cannot avoid the 'primordial intuition' that there is a world that is independent of our beliefs and fancies that forces itself upon us willy-nilly and constrains what we can think, say, and do" (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 4).

83. George F. McLean makes this suggestion when he states: ". . . how can the interest in emancipation be kept alive? . . . . It can be done by drawing upon our heritage in the manner suggested by Heidegger" ("Hermeneutics, Cultural Heritage and Social Critique," Reading Philosophy for the XXIst Century [Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy and University Press of America, 1989], 53).

84. Indeed Aristotle considered not the question of the meaning of Being but rather the question of what a being is, and Aquinas the question that a being is. Whereas the What-question has led to numerous studies concerning the nature or essence of being, the That-question has resulted in studies concerning the character of existence. For Heidegger the problem with this traditional distinction is that it leads to two different senses for the common term 'to be', a distinction that may lie in Being itself or in the human effort to think it. Cf. Manfred S. Frings, Introduction, Heidegger and the Quest for Truth, ed. M. S. Frings (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 13.

85. Joseph J. Kockelmans, "The Founders of Phenomenology and Personalism" in Reading Philosophy for the XXIst Century, ed. George F. McLean (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy and University Press of America, 1989), 191-93.

86. Heidegger, Being and Time, 32.

87. This concern with the meaning of Being is of course reflected in all of the great human enterprises, be they religious, philosophical, artistic, or scientific.

88. This state may be understood as reflected in humanity's perpetual concern with the great questions: Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?

89. Heidegger, Being and Time, 487.

90. The Heideggerian fundamental ontology proceeds not from the point of view of an extra-mundane transcendental ego, as Husserl's does, but from the point of view of an historically situated mundane ego. As Kockelmans elucidates, "Though the world must be explained in its transcendental constitution by the human subjectivity, this must be taken not as a transcendental world-less ego, but as this concrete man in the world. For this reason, the first task of philosophy consists in explaining that this being indeed is different from all other beings" ("The Founders of Phenomenology and Personalism," 194).

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

1. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).

2. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society and vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: The Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and 1987 respectively); henceforth Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1 or vol. 2.

3. Bernstein, Introduction, Habermas and Modernity, 17. The term "foundations" as used here by Bernstein is to be understood in function of Habermas's hermeneutic sensitivity, i.e., as referring to empirical rather than to ahistoric, transcendental proposals that, as such, are susceptible to empirical justification. Henceforth, whenever the term "foundations" is used in connection with the work of Habermas, it is this restricted sense that will be intended.

4. Habermas makes it clear that his own program should not be construed as a return to a modernist-foundationalism of a transcendentalist sort: "An investigation of this kind, which uses the concept of communicative reason without blushing, is today suspect of having fallen into the snares of foundationalism. But the alleged similarities of the formal-pragmatic approach to classical transcendental philosophy lead one down the wrong trail. I would recommend that the reader who harbors this suspicion read the conclusion first. We would not be able to ascertain the rational internal structure of action oriented to reaching understanding if we did not already have before us--in a fragmentary and distorted form, to be sure--the existing forms of a reason that has to rely on being symbolically embodied and historically situated" (Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, xli).

5. Bernstein puts it in these terms: "Habermas no longer speaks of 'quasi-transcendental' cognitive interests. This has led some to think that he has simply abandoned the major systematic theses of Knowledge and Human Interests. It is true he has sought to purge his thinking of the vestiges of the philosophy of consciousness and the philosophy of the subject. But the insights contained in his original trichotomy of human interests are conceptually transformed in a new register within the context of his theory of communicative action. . . . This distinction is not abandoned in Habermas's universal pragmatics. On the contrary, it is refined and developed in far more detail than in his earlier work. Furthermore, from the perspective of the theory of communicative action, we gain a clearer perspective of the theory of communicative action, we gain a clear understanding of the conceptual space and foundations for what Habermas called the practical and emancipatory cognitive interests." (Introduction, Habermas and Modernity, 17).

6. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 196-97.

7. When considering the nature of the Habermasian theory of interests, the subject of Knowledge and Human Interests, Henning Ottmann states: "Human interests are not 'transcendental' in a simple (i.e. Kantian) sense of the word, because they do not fit into the framework of a sharp division between transcendental constitution on the one hand and the 'empirical' as constituted on the other" ("Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection: The status and systematic connection of the cognitive interest in Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests," Habermas, Critical Debates, eds. John B. Thompson and David Held [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982], 82; henceforth "Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection").

8. The emancipatory interest will be developed in the second and third sections of this chapter.

9. Ottmann, "Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection," 82. David Held adds: "Habermas understands knowledge in light of the problems man encounters in his efforts 'to produce his existence and reproduce his species being'. The conditions of the constitution of knowledge which determines 'the structure of objects of possible experience' are historical material conditions in which the development of the species has occurred" (Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980], 255; henceforth Introduction to Critical Theory).

10. Ottmann, "Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection," 82. As Held also notes, "Cognitive interests, which are the transcendental conditions of knowledge, are themselves materialistically grounded'." Held clarifies, "That is, the rule systems governing the activities of the species 'have a transcendental function but arise from actual structures of human life'"(Introduction to Critical Theory, 255).

11. This work appeared as an appendix to Knowledge and Human Interests under the title "Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective," Knowledge and Human Interests, 301-17; henceforth Appendix.

12. Ibid., 303.

13. Ibid., 301.

14. Ibid., 304.

15. Ibid., 311.

16. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 196-97.

17. The objectivist illusion, according to Habermas, "prevents consciousness of the interlocking of knowledge with interests from the life-world" (Appendix, 305-06).

18. Habermas, "Postscript," 178.

19. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 196.

20. Habermas states, "For knowledge is neither a mere instrument of an organism's adaptation to a changing environment nor the act of a pure rational being removed from the context of life in contemplation" (Knowledge and Human Interests, 197). Habermas's characterization of interests as both transcending and reflecting the natural genesis and cultural history of humankind has been the object of intense critical discussion. On the one hand, idealists like Günter Rohrmoser accuse Habermas of an unreflected empiricism or naturalism; Fred Dallmayr puts it this way: "Habermas's attitude toward science involves not so much an amendment as a deterioration of critical theory; the recognition of science merely implies a more intimate embrace by the tentacles of empiricism and historical relativism" (Beyond Dogma and Despair: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Politics [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981], 249; henceforth Beyond Dogma and Despair; see Rohrmoser, Das Elend der kritischen Theorie, 2nd ed. [Freiburg: Rombach, 1970], 89). On the other hand, positivists such as Hans Albert attack Habermas's work, as Dallmayr indicates, "as baseless speculation and as a transgression of the limits of empirical knowledge" (Beyond Dogma and Despair, 249); see Albert, Pläydoyer für kritischen Ratinoalismus [Munich: Piper, 1971], 54-55). Such critics fail to comprehend that Habermas is avoiding a simplistic dichotomy that would attempt either to isolate the knowing subject from its relation to external nature or to rivet attention on external nature at the cost of the knowing subject; Habermas's notion of cognitive interests attempts to render more fluid the relations and connections between the subject and external nature.

21. In this sense McCarthy states, "Although the sciences must preserve their objectivity in the face of particular interests, the conditions of possibility of the very objectivity that they seek to preserve include fundamental cognitive interests" (Critical Theory, 58).

22. Jürgen Habermas, "Some Difficulties in the Attempt to Link Theory and Praxis," Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 8-9.

23. Habermas, Appendix, 308.

24. Ibid., 311.

25. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 255-56. It should be noted that though Held uses the language of transcendental philosophy, "the mode in which reality is disclosed, constituted and acted upon," he comments that while "the rule systems governing the activities of the species 'have a transcendental function . . . [they] arise from actual structures of human life'" (ibid., 255). The point here is to underscore once again that mitigated transcendentalist framework from which Habermas conducts his own investigations.

26. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 197-98.

27. Habermas himself views Knowledge and Human Interests as an "investigation [that] cannot claim more than the role of a prolegomenon" (vii). In "Some Difficulties in the Attempt to Link Theory and Praxis," Habermas again makes mention of the "fragmentary and provisional character of these considerations" (14). The developmental character of both his theory of cognitive interests and theory of communicative action lends itself to further exploration and development.

28. At the time Habermas wrote Knowledge and Human Interests, the German edition was published as Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968), the very possibility of grounding critical theory in a manner that escapes the charge of arbitrariness and relativism demanded that the positivist delimitation of knowledge as referring exclusively to nomological science be adequately challenged. A major aim of this work then consisted in the refutation of the positivist presupposition of value-neutral knowledge by developing an epistemological framework that uncovers the relation between knowledge and interests.

29. Habermas, "The Crisis of the Critique of Knowledge," (chs. 1-3), 1-63.

30. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, vii.

31. Habermas, "Postscript," 164.

32. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 19.

33. Ibid., 24; more explicitly Habermas states, "When philosophy asserts itself as authentic science, the relation of philosophy and science completely disappears from discussion. It is with Hegel that a fatal misunderstanding aries: the idea that the claim asserted by philosophical reason against the abstract thought of mere understanding is equivalent to the usurpation of the legitimacy of independent sciences by a philosophy claiming to retain its position as universal scientific knowledge. But the actual fact of scientific progress independent of philosophy had to unmask this claim, however misunderstood, as bare fiction. It was this that served as the foundation-stone of positivism. Only Marx could have contested its victory. For he pursued Hegel's critique of Kant without sharing the basic assumption of the philosophy of identity that hindered Hegel from unambiguously radicalizing the critique of knowledge" (ibid.).

34. See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, ch. 2.

35. Cf. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 296-300.

36. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, vii.

37. Ibid., 71-81.

38. Ibid., 89.

39. Ibid.; as quoted in Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 302.

40. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 83.

41. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 302; quote from Karl-Otto Apel, "The a priori of Communication and the Foundation of the Humanities," Man and World, no. 5 (February 1972): 10.

42. Held clarifies this point via Apel, "In a position parallel to Habermas, Apel argues that the fundamental shortcomings of positivism spring from a lack of reflection 'upon the fact that all cognition of objects presupposes understanding as a means of intersubjective communication'. Science, he contends, is unintelligible qua human activity, if one cannot understand the implicit and explicit conventions and rules, or more general, the communication community or language game, which it presupposes. On his account, even tacit conventions about the use of words--'not to mention explicit conventions about definitions, theoretical frameworks, or statements of facts in empirical science'--imply 'an intersubjective consensus about situational meanings and aims of practical life'. Science, in its adoption of procedural conventions, goes beyond the 'scientific rationality of operations which could be performed in a repeatable way by exchangeable human subjects . . . and passes into the realm of a . . . pre- and meta-scientific rationality of intersubjective discourse mediated by explication of concepts and interpretations of intentions'" (Introduction to Critical Theory, 303; quote from Apel, "The a priori of communication," 26, 7, and 8 respectively).

43. It is on the basis of Habermas's examination of the logic of this meta-scientific realm that will lead to his proposal of a technical interest as constituting the central aim of the scientific enterprise.

44. See bottom of n. 42 above.

45. See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, ch. 5. For articles dealing with Habermas's views on the philosophy of science, see "The Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics," and "A Positivistically Bisected Rationalism," in T. Adorno, et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann 1969); McCarthy, Critical Theory, 40-52.

46. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 304.

47. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 91.

48. Dallmayr understands Karl-Otto Apel as holding a similar contention: "Countering the pretensions of neopositivism and especially the 'unified science movement', Apel argued that scientific inquiry itself was inconceivable without the infrastructure of semiotic interpretation in a community of investigators--as Peirce had shown" (Beyond Dogma and Despair, 231).

49. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 304; cf. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 124.

50. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 62.

51. For Habermas the "Empirical-analytic sciences disclose reality insofar as it appears within the behavioral system of instrumental action. In accordance with their immanent meaning, nomological statements about this object domain are thus designed for a specific context in which they can be applied--that is, they grasp reality with regard to technical control that, under specified conditions, is possible everywhere at all times" (Knowledge and Human Interests, 195).

52. Ibid., 191.

53. Ibid., 124.

54. Habermas states, "In the empirical-analytic sciences the frame of reference that prejudges the meaning of possible statements establishes rules both for the construction of theories and for theoretical testing. Theories compromise hypothetico-deductive connections of propositions, which permit the deduction of lawlike hypotheses with empirical content. The latter can be interpreted as statements about the covariance of observable events; given a set of initial conditions, they make predictions possible. Empirical-analytic knowledge is thus possible predictive knowledge. However, the meaning of such predictions, that is their technical exploitability, is established only by the rules according to which we apply theories to reality" (ibid., 308).

55. Ibid., 192.

56. Ibid., 308; as quoted in Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 305.

57. Habermas is not arguing for a strict instrumentalism; rather his argument is that the knowledge generated by the empirical-analytic sciences typically, i.e., for the most part, are concerned with technical control over the natural processes so objectified.

58. Habermas elaborates: "In controlled observation, which often takes the form of an experiment, we generate initial conditions and measure the results of operations carried out under these conditions. . . . These observations are supposed to be reliable in providing immediate evidence without the admixture of subjectivity. In reality basic statements are not simple representations of facts in themselves, but express the success or failure of operations. We can say that facts and the relations between them are apprehended descriptively. But this way of talking must not conceal that as such the facts relevant to the empirical sciences are first constituted through an a priori organization of our experience in the behavioral system of instrumental action" (Appendix, 308-09).

59. Habermas, "A Positivistically Bisected Rationalism," 209; as quoted and amended by Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 306.

60. Habermas, Appendix, 309.

61. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 62.

62. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 35.

63. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 62.

64. On this point McCarthy is illuminating: "The communication structures presupposed by the community of natural sciences cannot themselves be grasped within the framework of empirical-analytic science. The dimension in which concepts, methods, theories, and so forth are discussed and agreed upon, in which the framework of shared meanings, norms, values and so on is grounded, is the dimension of symbolic interaction that is neither identical with nor reducible to instrumental action. The rationality of discourse about the appropriateness of conventions or the meaning of concepts is not the rationality of operations on objectified processes; it involves the interpretation of intentions and meanings, goals, values, and reasons. Thus the objective knowledge produced by empirical-analytic inquiry is not possible without knowledge in the form of intersubjective understanding. This availability of an intersubjectively valid pre- and meta-scientific language, of a framework of shared meanings and values, is taken for granted in the natural sciences. The cultural life-context (Lebenszusammenhang), of which scientific communication is only one element, belongs instead to the domain of the cultural sciences" (ibid., 69).

65. Though Habermas does not consider the work of Gadamer in Knowledge and Human Interests, in his later writings he does critically draw on his insights.

66. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 308.

67. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 148. Cf. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 308-09.

68. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 309; see Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 154-58.

69. Ibid., 156; as quoted in McCarthy, Critical Theory, 71.

70. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 180ff.

71. Ibid., 176.

72. Ibid.

73. Habermas states, "In the context of communicative action, language and experience are not subject to the transcendental conditions of action itself. Here the role of the transcendental framework is taken instead by the grammar of ordinary language, which simultaneously governs the non-verbal elements of a habitual mode of life conduct or practice" (ibid., 192).

74. Ibid., 172.

75. Ibid., 191.

76. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 310.

77. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 175.

78. Ibid., 176-77; as quoted by McCarthy, Critical Theory, 74.

79. For Habermas's earliest critique of Gadamer, see "A Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method," reprinted in Understanding Social Inquiry, eds. Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy (Notre Dame, Indiana: The University Press, 1977): 335-63; "Summation and Response," Continuum, vol. 8, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring and Summer, 1970): 123-33.

80. Habermas, "A Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method," 360.

81. For an excellent exposition of Habermas's critique of important contributors to hermeneutic science, including Husserl, Weber, Schutz, Wittgenstein, Winch, Garfinkel and Gadamer, see McCarthy, Critical Theory, 137-93.

82. Christopher Broniak, "What is Emancipation for Habermas?," Philosophy Today 32 (Fall 1988): 202. In this article Broniak develops several stages on the road to emancipation in Habermas: (1) from domination to exploitation, which occurs when, as a result of a failure to distinguish between instrumental and communicative rationality, human subjects become means to an end, wherein technology reduces reason to results; (2) from exploitation to alienation, which occurs when interaction between subjects is transformed from a person to person relationship to a subject versus object relationship; (3) from alienation to liberation, that refers to Kant's development of subjectivity over and above phenomena as the locus of domination. At this level, Broniak, indicates, "While liberation is a necessary part of the process of emancipation, it is not identical with it. Intuitions need thought, concepts need content: once these hypostatized axes of consciousness, viz. thinking and feeling, recognize their mutual need of one another, emancipation (in Habermas's view) is possible" (ibid., 200); (4) from liberation to emancipation, which consists in the ability of an individual or a social unit to make itself transparent so as to overcome obstacles standing in the way of realizing one's autonomous potential (ibid., 195ff).

83. Habermas, "Some Difficulties in the Attempt to Link Theory and Praxis," 22-23; as quoted and amended in Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 317. It is precisely the power of critical cognition that Habermas maintains was inadequately understood by both Peirce and Dilthey: "But neither Peirce nor Dilthey discerned what they were actually doing. Otherwise they would not have been able to preserve themselves from the experience of reflection originally developed by Hegel in the Phenomenology. I mean the experience of the emancipatory power of reflection, which the subject experiences in itself to the extent that it becomes transparent to itself in the history of its genesis. The experience of reflection articulates itself substantially in the concept of a self-formative process. Methodically, it leads to a standpoint from which the identity of reason with the will arises" (Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 197-98). "Self-reflection" aims at attaining insight leading to self-transparency, i.e., a form of Socratic self-knowledge.

84. Though Habermas connects cognition and emancipation, he does not hold that the success of action is a sufficient criterion of the truth of propositions. Habermas's position is that the "truth of a proposition is not established by means of interest gratification, but only by an argumentative redemption of the truth claim itself" ("Postscript," 179). Habermas's discourse theory of truth will be a central concern of the next chapter.

85. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 197-98. Dietrich Böhler takes issue with Habermas on the grounds that reason merely demonstrates an interest in emancipation from dogma and ignorance but does not prescribe standards for concrete activity; see "Zum Problem des 'emanzipatorischen Interesses' und seiner gescellschaftlichen Wahrnehmung," Man and World, 3 (1970): 26-53; also Dallmayr, Beyond Dogma and Despair, 258-59. This critical challenge to Habermas will be addressed in the fourth chapter as it relates to practical discourse.

86. Cf. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 318. Habermas states, ". . . we can methodologically ascertain the knowledge-constitutive interests of the natural and cultural sciences only once we have entered the dimension of self-reflection. It is in accomplishing self-reflection that reason grasps itself as interested. Therefore we come upon the fundamental connection of knowledge and interest when we purse methodology in the mode of the experience of reflection: as the critical dissolution of objectivism, that is the objectivistic self-understanding of the sciences, which suppresses the contribution of subjective activity to the preformed objects of possible knowledge" (Knowledge and Human Interests, 212); in another passage, "Indeed the category of cognitive interest is authenticated only by the interest innate in reason. The technical and practical cognitive interests can be comprehended unambiguously as knowledge-constitutive interests only in connection with the emancipatory cognitive interest of rational reflection. That is, only in this way can they be understood without being psychologized or falling prey to a new objectivism. Because Peirce and Dilthey do not comprehend their methodology as the self-reflection of science, which it is nonetheless, they miss the point where knowledge and interest are united" (ibid., 198).

87. Habermas, "Postscript," 176; as quoted in Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 318-19.

88. The third section of this chapter will maintain the primacy of the emancipatory interest insofar as it is oriented toward the dissolution of hypostatizations.

89. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 313.

90. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 319.

91. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 214; as quoted in Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 319.

92. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 217; as quoted in Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 320.

93. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 252. This review of Habermas's relation to psychoanalysis draws from Held's treatment; see Introduction to Critical Theory, 321-22.

94. Habermas's three-tier research program corresponds to each of the three levels of the psychoanalytic model; see ch. I, n. 63; cf. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 321.

95. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 258.

96. Dallmayr indicates, "By rendering transparent previously hidden or mangled layers of experience, self-reflection is able to produce a personal catharsis and transformation of character, an emancipation from the domination of past constraints" (Beyond Dogma and Despair, 259-60).

97. Ibid., 260.

98. There is nothing simplistic in Habermas's view of such therapy, as Dallmayr indicates, "In his interpretation, the Freudian model implies not so much the transfer or imposition of knowledge, but rather a complex dialogue between analyst and patient, a dialogue in which only the patient's acceptance of a diagnosis can have the emancipating effect of deepened self-awareness. The mutual relationship, he notes, is thus not technical but practical in character, and as such embedded in the contingencies of practical experience: apart from aiming at the relief of concretely identifiable pathologies, therapeutic efforts are experimental and never assured of success" (ibid., 243).

99. In this respect Freud cautions against an unreflective adoption of the psychoanalytic model into the cultural community; see Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey, (New York: Norton, 1962), 91.

100. Gadamer, "Replik," in Apel, et al., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, 283-317; as quoted in Dallmayr, Beyond Dogma and Despair, 262.

101. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 394; also see Rick Roderick, Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 68-69; henceforth Foundations of Critical Theory.

102. This view of Habermas's theory of universal pragmatics as the representing his more recent methodological framework for critical theory will be considered within the context of the ensuing chapter.

103. George F. McLean expresses this contention in these terms: "Emancipation could not be the central reality of life itself, but only a propitious state for physical survival. Habermas not only disagrees with the arbitrariness of this presupposition, but proceeds to show how the structural elements Freud cites are essentially analytic dimensions of a situation of interpersonal--if deformed--communication between psychoanalyst and patient. Their meaning is derivative, not of physical forces, but of the reality of symbolic communication and its disruptions" ("Hermeneutics, Cultural Heritage and Social Critique," 47).

104. Erich Hahn disagrees arguing that Habermas fails to take adequate account of Marx's emphasis on the dialectical relations between "force" and "relations of production" ("Die theoretischen Grundlagen der Soziologie von Jürgen Habermas," Johannes H. von Heiseler, et al., Die "Frankfurter Schule" im Lichte des Marxismus [Frankfurt-Main: Verlag Marxistische Blatter, 1970], 70-89; as quoted in Dallmayr, Beyond Dogma and Despair, 266-67). Rolf Zimmerman expresses his disagreement in these terms: "While we can accept Habermas's distinction between purposive-rational and communicative action, we cannot accept his identification of purposive-rational with labour as much since labour also includes the moment of communicative action" ("Emancipation and Rationality: Foundational Problems in the Theories of Marx and Habermas," Ratio 26, [Dec. 1984]: 158; henceforth "Problems in the Theories of Marx and Habermas"). See also Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 390ff. McLean, however, insists on a fundamental distinction between labor and interaction: "Liberation from the suppression of persons by the institutional framework of labor and rewards requires more than merely instrumental productive action, for this can respond only to external constraints. Communicative action is required in order to be aware: (a) of the moral totality of human dignity as this is reflected in the highest vision of a cultural heritage, (b) of its disruption by repressive institutional manipulation for the private interest of the class in power, and (c) of the types of changes which will be truly emancipative" ("Hermeneutics, Cultural Heritage and Social Critique," 47).

105. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 307.

106. Roderick, Foundations of Critical Theory, 54.

107. On this point Held contends, ". . . it seems apparent from post-Kuhnian philosophy of science that no straight forward separation can be made between what Habermas calls the 'empirical-analytic and the hermeneutic sciences' . . . . Hermeneutic problems are central to all attempts to comprehend lawlike regularities in natural or social phenomena. While a knowledge of regularities and a capacity for prediction seems an important constitutive element of most forms of interpretative knowledge" (Introduction to Critical Theory, 392). Though this is true Habermas's point is that the metatheoretical operations that precede nomological investigation and disclose the technical interest cannot be understood within the context of the hypothetico-deductive methodology but involves the distinctive methodology proper to hermeneutics.

108. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 208.

109. Ottmann, "Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection," 90; quotes from Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 131. On this point McCarthy comments, "This construction makes it possible to avoid some of the problematic features of Kant's thing-in-itself. For one thing, nature-in-itself is not unknowable; it is knowable but only subject to the conditions of possible objectivity. It "appears" only in relation to possibilities of instrumental action; what we "catch 'of'" it is its technical controllability" (Critical Theory, 117).

110. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 117.

111. Ibid., 117-18; quote from Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 131. Ottmann makes a similar point, see "Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection," 90.

112. See ch. I, sec. B, and ch. III, sec. B.

113. Habermas's discourse theory of truth will be considered in detail in the ensuing chapter, sec. B.

114. Though not considered by Habermas, one way to view the importance of this conception of science consists in that it does not initially discount other possible orientations to natural reality. In this respect, an explanation, for instance, of the phenomenon of miracles may or may not be ultimately susceptible to nomological scrutiny. In the latter case, the phenomenon may result from an intervention other than those accessible within the compass of nomological methodology.

115. Though sympathetic with Habermas's positions, Apel was one of the first to point out the conflation of the two senses of reflection in Knowledge and Human Interests; see Apel's study on this question in Materialien zu Habermas' 'Erkenntnis und Interesse', ed. Fred Dallmayr (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974).

116. Habermas, "Postscript," 182.

117. Habermas, "Some Difficulties in the Attempt to Link Theory and Praxis," 22-24.

118. For Habermas "Self-reflection brings to consciousness those determinants of a self-formative process of cultivation and spiritual formation [Bildung] which ideologically determine a contemporary praxis of action and the conception of the world. Analytic memory thus embraces the particulars, the specific course of self-formation of an individual subject (or of a collective held together by group identity). Rational reconstructions, in contrast, deal with anonymous rule systems, which any subjects whatsoever can comply with in so far as they have acquired the corresponding competence with respect to these rules. Reconstructions thus do not encompass subjectivity, within the horizon of which alone the experience of reflection is possible. In the philosophical tradition these two legitimate forms of self-knowledge have generally remained undifferentiated and have both been included under the term of reflection. However, a reliable criterion of distinction is available. Self-reflection leads to insight due to the fact that what has previously been unconscious is made conscious in a manner rich in practical consequences: analytic insights intervene in life, if I may borrow this dramatic phrase from Wittgenstein. A successful reconstruction also raises an 'unconsciously' functioning rule system to consciousness in a certain manner; it renders explicit the intuitive knowledge that is given with competence with respect to the rules in the form of 'know how'. But this theoretical knowledge has no practical consequences. By learning logic or linguistics I acquire theoretical knowledge, but in general I do not thereby change my previous practice of reasoning or speaking" (ibid., 22-23).

119. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 101; quotes from Habermas, "Some Difficulties in the Attempt to Link Theory and Praxis," 24.

120. Habermas, "Postscript," 184.

121. Ibid., 176

122. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 94; quote from Habermas, Appendix, 314.

1. See Rose B. Calabretta, The Intellectual Origins of the Problem of "Value-Free" Sociology (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1979).

2. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 345.

3. Habermas, Appendix, 317.

4. McCarthy, Translator's introduction, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, iv.

5. Habermas, "What is Universal Pragmatics?," 26.

6. Ibid., 61.

7. The summary presentation of universal pragmatics in the first chapter aimed at distinguishing Habermas's position from that of Gadamer's. This section will endeavor to interpret universal pragmatics as representing the methodological framework within Habermas's philosophy of emancipation.

8. See ch. I, sec. B.

9. This term is used here to denote the object of knowledge characteristic of modern and contemporary rationalist, empiricist, and transcendentalist epistemologies.

10. Habermas, "What is Universal Pragmatics?," 5-6.

11. Ibid., 41-44.

12. Ibid., 42.

13. Ibid.

14. By means of a strategic speech act an actor uses deception, threat of sanctions or the promise of reward--whether directly or indirectly--in order to influence behavior. For Habermas this mode of speech is derivative from the more basic speech act--communicative action--wherein an actor endeavors to motivate another subject rationally, i.e., by depending on the illocutionary binding force contained in the speech act. In communicative interactions the participants coordinate their actions consensually. See Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, 279-95. However, Dallmayr points out that both communicative and strategic action are teleological or goal-oriented. Both are social actions conducted within social contexts, and both consist in a means (speech) for attaining an end (doing something). Notwithstanding, the formal affinities between these two modes of action, Habermas would claim that the crucial difference between the nonstrategic and the strategic speech act consists in their respective aims: on the one hand, to bring about interpersonal understanding, and, on the other, to influence the behavior of another deceptively. Cf. Roderick, Foundations of Critical Theory, 98; and McCarthy, Critical Theory, 25.

15. For Habermas the primary per se function of a speech act consists precisely in its orientation to reaching interpersonal understanding. In this sense Habermas argues that action theory as understood by intentionalist semantics is unsatisfactory: "This nominalistic theory of meaning is not suitable for clarifying the coordinating mechanism of linguistically mediated interaction because it analyzes the act of reaching understanding on a model of action oriented to consequences" (Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, 274ff). Notwithstanding his criticism of intentionalist semantics, Habermas has yet to provide an adequate account of meaning: "It is not clear whether he accepts a Gricean-Searlean account of meaning in terms of intention, or something closer to Chomsky's account. . . . Habermas pays insufficient attention to the distinction between semantic and pragmatic levels" (Roderick, Foundations of Critical Theory, 98-99).

16. Habermas, "What is Universal Pragmatics?," 44-59.

17. Ibid., 41ff. Note that Habermas also employs the modifiers "assertoric," "interactive," and "expressive" corresponding to the speech acts constative, regulative and avowal, respectively, to indicate the mode of communication which each type of speech action effects; see ibid., 58.

18. Ibid., 59.

19. Ibid., 63.

20. Ibid., 63; cf. ibid., 53ff.

21. John B. Thompson takes issue with this point: "It seems to me implausible and misleading to contend that all four validity-claims are necessarily raised with the utterance of every speech-act. In what sense does reading a poem, telling a joke, or greeting a friend presuppose the truth of what is said? Is not sincerity characteristically suspended rather than presupposed by the participants in a process of collective bargaining, or by friends engaged in the light-hearted activity of 'taking the mickey'? In what sense, precisely, does the utterance of a sentence like 'The sky is blue this morning' raise a claim to correctness which is clearly distinguishable from its intelligibility or its truth? Habermas may be right to criticise Austin for working with an undifferentiated notion of 'objective assessment'; but Habermas in turn seems mistaken to maintain that the various claims which he discerns in this notion are necessarily raised with every speech-act, albeit in an implicit and unthematic form." ("Universal Pragmatics" in Critical Debates, 126). Habermas responds to Thompson in these terms: "I do not understand bargaining as a case of communicative action; a silent greeting is as a rule the non-linguistic equivalent of an illocutionary abbreviated speech-act, the meaning of which can be expanded with reference to the underlying norm of action; indirect speech-acts can likewise be expanded--if necessary through modifying available expressions or introducing new ones . . . . jokes, fictional representations, irony, games, . . . rest on intentionally using categorial confusions which, in the wake of the differentiation of validity-claims and corresponding modes (being/illusion, is/ought, essence/appearance), are seen through as category mistakes" ("A Reply to My Critics," 270-71).

22. Habermas, "What is Universal Pragmatics," 2-3 (italics mine).

23. Concerning Habermas's views on the inadequacy of semantic theory, see "What is Universal Pragmatics?," 32. Cf. ibid., 30-31; see also "Towards a Theory of Communicative Action," Recent Sociology, 2, ed. Hans Peter Dreitzel (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 22.

24. Thompson takes issue with the various distinctions‑‑number of speech acts, realms of reality, validity claims--stating, ". . . there is a lack of clarity about the nature of the distinctions cited by Habermas and the grounds for treating these distinctions as fundamental. Without a more precise specification, it is difficult to judge whether the proposed distinctions are genuinely universal or merely extrapolated from the tradition of Western philosophy" ("Universal Pragmatics," 128). Habermas counters, "Thompson would have to show . . . that, for example, the logical arguments for assuming three validity-claims are false. If one examines the ways in which the validity of a standard utterance as a whole can be contested, one finds, in my view, precisely three aspects under which a hearer can, if need be, say no. He or she can say no to the truth of the statement asserted (or of the existential presuppositions of a mentioned propositional context), to the rightness of the utterance in relation to a normative context (or to the rightness of an underlying norm of action itself), and finally to the truthfulness or sincerity of the intention expressed by the speaker. One arrives at the same result through formal-pragmatic investigation of elementary sentences with descriptive, normative and expressive contents, and through the pragmatic logic of the corresponding (types of) argumentation specific to questions of truth, justice and self-deception. Futhermore, the decentred understanding of the world, the development of which can be found both in ontogenesis and in the changing structures of world-views, also speaks for the universality of the distinction among exactly three worlds" ("A Reply to My Critics," 271-72).

25. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 291; quote from Habermas, "Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen Kompetenz," Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie -- Was leistetdie Systemforschung? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 120.

26. All quotes from this paragraph are from McCarthy, Critical Theory, 288-89.

27. Habermas, "What is Universal Pragmatics?," 64. This is to say that an individual can only convince another of the sincerity of what he says not so much by providing reasons but by behaving in conformity to expressed intentions.

28. Ibid., 64. It should be noted that the validity claim truthfulness remains largely undeveloped in the work of Habermas. Donald Jay Rothberg proposes that this claim be understood as dealing with an individual's interiority, i.e., as properly referring to the religious/spiritual dimension of human experience. In an important article Rothberg challenges Habermas's contention that the "disenchantment of the world" brought about within the context of modernity "represents a conclusive 'overcoming' (or Aufhebung) of religious (and metaphysical) worldviews," where "the implicit and 'ungrounded' authority of the 'sacred' is generally replaced by the explicit rational authority of a 'grounded consensus'" ("Rationality and Religion in Habermas's Recent Work: Some Remarks on the Relation Between Critical Theory and the Phenomenology of Religion," Philosophy and Social Criticism 11 [Summer 1986]: 221, 223-24; see Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, 119f). Rothberg argues that while Habermas fails to present any acceptable reasons in his argument against the validity of religious claims, he also fails to consider religious experience. In this respect Rothberg states, "Habermas's critique of religion, it is clear, makes very strong claims that are at once formal, normative, and universal. Perhaps what is most striking about Habermas's argument is his radical separation of form (or structure) and content in dealing with the question of the relationship between rationality and religion. The main focus is on the extent to which different worldviews approximate the formal structures identified by the theory of universal pragmatics, and the level of the development manifest according to the criteria such as differentiation, reflexivity, and so on. Such an approach obviously differs from those contemporary inquiries into religion, such as the phenomenology and philosophy of religion, which largely take seriously the content of religious experience and claims" ("Rationality and Religion," 224-25).

29. Ibid., 63-64.

30. The main work which treats Habermas's theory of truth is found in his "Wahrheitstheorien," [Theories of truth] Wirklichkeit und Reflexion: Festschrift fur Walter Schulz, ed. H. Fahrenbach (Pfullingen, 1973), 211-265. Passages in English from this work used in this study are from McCarthy's Critical Theory; Held's Introduction to Critical Theory; Thompson's Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Roderick's The Foundations of Critical Theory. Translations of Habermas's study will be annotated by first providing the reference to the English version and then to the German original (e.g.: McCarthy, Critical Theory, 300; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 219).

31. Though Habermas uses both "discourse theory" and "consensus theory" to characterize his theory of truth, this study will prefer the former so as to distinguish it from C. S. Peirce's own consensus theory. Cf. C. S. Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878).

32. This section draws from McCarthy's lucid formulation of Habermas's discourse theory of truth and his constitution theory of objects; see Critical Theory, 291-310.

33. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 299; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 219. Alessandro Ferrara articulates the nature of Habermas's conception of truth as follows: "Habermas's consensus theory of truth represents one of the best available responses to the difficulties typical of the accounts in terms of coherence and correspondence. It fits into the post-Kuhnian discussion as a promising attempt to steer a course between two unsatisfactory alternatives, exemplified by Lakatos's renewed search for an apriori criterion of validity and by Rorty's renunciation of all normative implications of the concept of validity. These alternatives are part of the new turn taken in recent times by the philosophical confrontation, central in the development of Western thought on truth and validity, between universalism and skepticism. As it has been suggested, today the age-old opposition of universalism and skepticism has taken the form of a confrontation between objectivism and relativism. Those who continue to search for a set of meanings, rules or presuppositions capable of transcending cultural and temporal particularity have abandoned all metaphysical, or otherwise 'absolutistic' pretensions. Today, those who defend universalistic positions defend them within the framework of a fallibilistic objectivism" ("A Critique of Habermas's Consensus Theory of Truth," Philosophy and Social Criticism 13 [Fall 1987], 39; henceforth "Consensus Theory of Truth.)" Ferrara traces the four-stage development of Habermas's conception of truth: (1) "The first stage of Habermas's theory of truth lasts from 1963 to 1965. At this time Habermas takes an active role in the polemical confrontation between Adorno and Popper which goes under the name of Positivismusstreit and tries to outline a notion of scientific truth or validity in terms of an immanent critque of Popper's theses. This immanent critique is aimed at bringing out the implications of the hermeneutic presuppositions of Popper's critical rationalism and at elaborating them in a pragmatist direction." (2) "In the second stage of his theory of truth (1965-68), Habermas develops systematically the point‑‑concisely stated in "Analytische Wissenschaftstheorie und Dialektik" (1963) and in "Gegen einen positivistisch halbierten Rationalismus" (1964)‑‑that we can form a rational consensus about the validity of basic statements only insofar as we share, underneath the diversity of theoretical perspectives, a more fundamental pre-theoretic orientation. This pre-theoretic orientation concerns the necessity for our species to control natural processes in order to preserve itself and to reproduce social life. . . . This alternative theory of knowledge‑‑which takes into account the relation of knowledge to the life-world and to the interests underlying our cognitive enterprises‑‑is spelled out in Knowledge and Human Interests 1968." (3) "The third stage of Habermas's theory of truth (1969-1973) can be characterized through the attempt, made for the first time in "Wahrheitstheorien," to spell out the notion of rational consensus. In fact, in order to avoid the relativistic implications of the pragmatist and conventionalist theories of truth, Habermas needs to specify the kind of consensus which can count as rational and as such warrant the assertibility of a statment. . . . Rational consensus is any consensus formed under the conditions which define the ideal speech situation.?" (4) "In the fourth stage (1974- ) Habermas brings some internal adjustments to his theory, but adds little of strategic significance. The two most important issues that he addresses are the status of the ideal speech situation and the so-called evidential aspects of truth. The question 'How is the ideal speech situation to be understood?' has been a considerable source of concern for Habermas ever since he formulated his consensus theory of truth. In 1971 he characterized the ideal speech situtation as the prefiguration of a liberated form of life. The same formulation was used in his paper 'Wahrheitstheorien'. Most of Habermas's later remarks on the status of the ideal speech situation are devoted to retracting this infelicitous early formulation and to stressing an alternative conception, according to which the ideal speech situation is only an 'unavoidable presupposition of argumentation'" ("Consensus Theory of Truth," 40ff). Cf. discussion on ideal speech situation in section C of this chapter, and in sections B and C of chapter V.

34. The fourth statement treating the ideal speech situation, i.e. the formal canons for the argumentative vindication of truth claims, constitutes the essence of the "logic of theoretical discourse" and will be considered in the next section of this chapter.

35. Strawson distinguishes between a speech episode and the asserted propositional content of an assertion: "'My statement' may be either what I say or my saying of it. My saying something is certainly an episode. What I say is not. It is the latter, not the former we declare to be true" (P. F. Strawson, "Truth," Truth, ed. G. Pitcher [Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964], 33); as quoted in McCarthy, Critical Theory, 300.

36. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 300; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 219.

37. Jürgen Habermas's Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? (Frankfurt, 1971), 206-07; as quoted in McCarthy, Critical Theory, 295.

38. Habermas, "Postscript," 180.

39. Thompson does not agree with Habermas on this point: ". . . I wish to distinguish between the justification for the assertion of a statement, and the justification for the assertion that a statement is true. There may well be cases in which these two types of justification overlap or even coincide, but it seems mistaken to assume that this must necessarily be so. One may assert, for example, that a person P is in pain, and one may justify this assertion on the basis of what P does; but the justification of the assertion that it is true that P is in pain may require an appeal to additional evidence, such as how P feels at the time in question" (Critical Hermeneutics, 207). Habermas's response to Thompson consists in emphasizing that the statements which would be the object of discursive justification would be hypothetical statements and modal statements; i.e., those which are negative and counterfactual; see "A Reply to My Critics," 275.

40. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 301; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 223.

41. Habermas, "Postscript," 170.

42. Habermas is not espousing here a correspondence theory of truth; his argument against correspondence follows.

43. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 301; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 218.

44. Habermas, "Postscript," 169; as quoted in McCarthy, Critical Theory, 301. Habermas's rationale for rejecting a simple correspondence for the expression "This ball is red" is provided by Ferrara: "In the first case, to establish the truth of 'This ball is red' appears a simple matter of comparing our words with the world only because we are taking for granted a host of assumptions about colors, matter, perception, light and what not. Yet this non-problematical quality of the validity of statements such as 'This ball is red' quickly vanishes once we move from the level of the life-world to the level of scientific inquiry. Then all tacit assumptions which allow us to simply 'look at the world' can no longer be retained and the consensual dimension of truth comes again to the fore" ("Consensus Theory of Truth," 46). Notwithstanding, Ferrara argues for the role of some non-naive form of the correspondence theory within the context of scientific inquiry; see n. 78 below.

45. Here it would probably be helpful to recall that for Habermas the constitution of objects of experience is the product of the "systematic interplay of sense reception, action and linguistic representation."

46. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 302; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 216.

47. Roderick indicates, "Habermas points out that the correspondence theory is based on the correct insight that our statements should agree with the facts and that these facts must be 'given' in perceptual experience. To escape the problems in the correspondence theory of truth in explaining the relationship between facts and the world, Habermas appeals to his theory of discourse. It is only in discourse, he claims, that 'facts' can be certified as 'facts' and this is 'always only at the time when the validity claim connected with statements becomes thematized'. In his view, both what we mean by 'facts' and what the 'facts' actually are can only be clarified by referring to discourse in which problematical validity claims are examined" (Foundations of Critical Theory, 84; quotes from Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 216-17).

48. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 302. With respect to the relation of correspondence that is said to obtain, McCarthy indicates, "The history of philosophy is replete with discarded attempts to characterize the latter in terms of picturing, mirroring, correlation, congruity, likeness, and so forth; but "how can an idea be like anything that is not an idea?" (ibid., 303).

49. Ibid.

50. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 303; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 218.

51. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 303.

52. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 303; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 219.

53. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 303; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 239.

54. See sec. C below.

55. McCarthy, Critical Theory, 304. Ferrara expresses the circularity and Habermas's response in these terms: "If the truth of a statement rests on rational consensus, and rational consensus is defined as agreement in the ideal speech situation, what grounds the validity of the claim that rational consensus is consensus achieved in the ideal speech situation? Habermas would be cornered, according to this argument, between the risk of an infinite regress and the equally undesirable necessity to adopt some strong variety of transcendental argument which could exempt the claim that only consensus reached in the ideal speech situation is rational from the need for being itself validated in ideal discourse. . . . By showing through a pragmatic analysis that whoever engages in discourse but denies the implicit presuppositions of discourse specified in the notion of the ideal speech situation commits a performative contradiction, Habermas avoids the circularity without paying the price of having to claim an a priori or strong transcendental status for these presuppositions of discourse. In fact, his reconstructive hypotheses can be empirically falsified through the production of utterances which violate the implicit rules of discourse and yet in at least one culture or historical period are not regarded as performative contradictions" ("Consensus Theory of Truth, 47).

56. Giddens, "Reason Without Revolution?," 115-16.

57. Thompson, "Universal Pragmatics," 130.

58. Ibid., 130-31; quotes from Habermas, "Postscript," 170 and 169 respectively. Ferrara agrees with Thompson: "Habermas purports to account for truth solely in terms of consensus but in fact cannot avoid implicit reference, which takes the form of tacit assumptions without which the consensual dimension of truth cannot make sense, to the notions of truth as consistency and truth as correspondence which he explicitly rejects" ("Consensus Theory of Truth," 47-48).

59. Habermas, "A Reply to My Critics," 273.

60. Ibid., 275.

61. The terminology used here to refer to the three formal criteria of discourse are the author's and not Habermas's.

62. White, Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas, 56.

63. Ferrara adds, "What is it about the ideal speech situation that guarantees that the best argument and only the best argument will prevail. No answer to these questions can be found for the simple reason that they do not represent sensible questions for Habermas's theory of truth. The ideal speech situation does not contribute to the correct selection of the best argument among several competing ones, but rather defines the one deemed the best as the argument to which it is rational to consent" (Ferrara, "Consensus Theory of Truth," 52 [italics mine]).

64. Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics, 87; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 214.

65. Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics, 87.

66. Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics, 88; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 241.

67. Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics, 89; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 243.

68. Cf. Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 97-107, specifically "The Pattern of An Argument: Data and Warrants" and "Backing and Warrants." Cf. Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics, 88f.

69. Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 223-25.

70. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar and Future of Ideology (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 144.

71. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 66-67.

72. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 396.

73. Roderick, Foundations of Critical Theory, 86.

74. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 344; Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 258.

75. This, of course, is not to discount the possibility that at one time a sort of ultimate material criterion may be articulated that may be invoked in settling questions of truth in theoretical discourse.

76. Thompson counters, ". . . it is difficult to see why subjects can be said genuinely to agree about something only when their agreement is induced by the force of the better argument, as opposed, for example, to the feeling of compassion or the commitment to a common goal" ("Universal Pragmatics," 129). On this point Habermas is especially illuminating: "The communicative practice of everyday life is immersed in a sea of cultural taken-for-grantedness, that is, of consensual certainties . . . . As soon, however, as an element of this naively known, prereflexively present background is transformed into the semantic content of an utterance, the certainties come under the conditions of criticisable knowledge; from then on disagreement concerning them can arise. Only when this disagreement is stubborn enough to provoke a discursive treatment of the matter at issue do we have a case concerning which I am claiming that a grounded agreement cannot be reached unless the participants in discourse suppose that they are convincing each other only by force of better arguments. Should one party make use of privileged access to weapons, wealth or standing, in order to wring agreement from another party through the prospect of sanctions or rewards, no one involved will be in doubt that the presuppositions of argumentation are no longer satisfied" ("A Reply to My Critics," 272-73).

77. Habermas concedes, "I readily admit that the 'evidential dimension' of the concept of truth is badly in need of further clarification" ("A Reply to My Critics," 275).

78. Ferrara, "Consensus Theory of Truth," 48.

79. Ferrara insists that Habermas's tendency to present his theory as antagonistic to correspondence approaches to truth, "creates the expectation of a theory of truth completely free of correspondence elements. Then when the inevitable reference to the correspondence aspects of truth is detected, in the form of tacit assumptions about competent participants or about the topic of discourse in the ideal speech situation, the presence of such reference appears as a flaw in Habermas's theory. No impression of inconsistency would arise, instead, if Habermas allowed for the notion of consensus to be seen as complementing, rather than replacing, the notion of the correspondence of an assertion with reality" ("Consensus Theory of Truth," 54). Ferrara's point is well taken; however, Habermas's failure to stress correspondence theories is in function of his critical understanding of theory languages; see sec. B above.

80. Ferrara, "Consensus Theory of Truth," 55; also see ch. I, sec. A.

81. Jürgen Habermas, "Legitimation Problems in the Modern State," Communication and the Evolution of Society, 186.