Some Remarks on Habermas and Consensus

1989

Habermasian pragmatics Pragmatics plays a multi-dimensional role in Jfirgen Habermas's recent reconstruction of Frankfurt School "Critical Theory". 1 In the first place, the type of pragmatic approach to language as found, for example, in Wittgen-stein, Austin, or Seade, is seen as offering a way beyond the typical objections raised by positivists to the idea that social theories can carry an evalua-tive or critical dimension with respect to their objects. In the representationalist epistemology at the centre of what he terms the modern "philosophy of consciousness", truth is conceived as correspondence between representation and independent fact. For a pragmatic approach to language however, language is no longer regarded primarily as a set of abstract propositional texts capable of corresponding to non-linguistic facts. Rather, the focus is now placed on contextually embedded social acts of linguistic communication. From this perspective, the making of assertions is regarded as a type of social practice which can be performed properly or wrongly and which can be criticized or defended. The capacity for truth conceived pragmatically must mean something like the capacity of an act of assertion to achieve a consensus among the relevant speech community, a consensus that such an assertion was warranted. With such a framework shift, the basis for many positivist criticisms of the idea of the incorporation of evaluative or critical dimensions into social theories is seriously threatened. Within a representationalist epistemology, any defence of the idea that moral utterances could be true or false had been faced with the difficulty of saying what sort of "facts" such utterances could correspond to. From a pragmatic perspective however, one only needs the idea that a sentence might achieve a consensus among competent users to put evaluative discourse back onto an equal footing with any other type of discourse. It is thus in the wake of the pragmatic approach to language that

After analysing Habermas' philosophical evolution from his theory of interests to his late pragmatic realism ((), I will focus on the problems of this last conception ((), trying to draw a plausible way out which avoids both naturalistic reductionism and a too weak form of realism ((). While doing so I will focus on the concept of objectivity, highlighting the problems that come from Habermas' approach to it. I suggest a gradual approach to objectivity and realism as a possible way out from Habermas' impasse. is is also compatible with Habermas' critical theory as it keeps for truth the role of an opening device for social and theoretical discussions.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2000

I greatly appreciate Jürgen Habermas' generous interest in and engagement with the approach to discursive practice detailed in Making It Explicit. His account of the basic methodological commitments and motivations, and of the central moves that structure the project is a masterful combination of compression and fidelity to the spirit of the enterprise. He ends his summary with an understandable expression of skepticism about the final success of the account of the objectivity of concepts (and so of the norms of speech, thought, and belief they articulate), against the background of the social practical account of language use that supplies its raw materials. The story about objectivity depends on the intricate interaction of three dimensions: the distinction of social perspective between attributing and undertaking a commitment, which is made explicit in de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes, the distinction of deontic status between commitment and entitlement, and the role of perception and action in confronting practitioners with material incompatible commitments. I think it can be shown (and is shown, in Chapter Eight of the book) that an intelligible notion of objectivity results. But there is clearly lots of room for dispute as to whether what is constructed there is enough objectivity -whether it is the right sort of objectivity, or all the objectivity we need in order to understand, say, the use of concepts in mature natural sciences. This is a topic Habermas rightly opens up, marking it for future discussion, but does not (and could not, within the compass of his essay) pursue.

1985

Intended for researchers and teachers of the small group process, decision making, and negotiation, this paper offers a review and critique of J. Habermas's theory of universal pragmatics. The firs* section of this paper retraces Habermas's theory, which seeks to free social action from false consciousness (that is, political ideologies) that systematically distort communication. The paper then articulates the eidetic and interpretive structure of dialogue and indicates a set of methodological criteria for critiquing communication. The final secion of the paper: (1) contrasts B. A. Fisher's and L. C. Hawes' interact system model of communication with a critical theory of dialogue, (2) differentiates between a critical theory of dialogue and current models of decision making and negotiation, (3) indicates how a critical theory of dialogue provides new directions for researching decision making and negotiation, and (4) provides several directives for facilitating consensual decision making. (HOD)

Reading Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung (1999) and more specifically what Jürgen Habermas writes in the "Introduction" to this book, I try to explain his answer to the epistemological problem of realism. Habermas wants to hold on to the moment of unconditionality that is part of the correspondence idea of truth, while retaining an internal relation between truth and justifiability. His aim is to work out a theory of truth that is inherently pragmatic yet retains the idea of an unconditional truth claim. In light of Habermas’s criticism, in 1996, of Richard Rorty’s pragmatic turn, his early treatment of a pragmatic theory of truth is important. What Searle tries to show in 1995, in The Construction of Social Reality, is that “external realism” is presupposed by the use of large sections of a public language: for a large class of utterances, each individual utterance requires for its intelligibility a publicly accessible reality that he characterized as representation independent. There is nothing epistemic about realism so construed. The presupposition of realism is not just one claim among others, but is, he insists, “a condition of possibility of my being able to make publicly accessible claims at all”. Metaphysical realism and conceptual relativism are then perfectly consistent.

Intercultural Pragmatics

This essay presents an array of arguments demonstrating that truth is necessarily pragmatic. Evaluations of truth derive from human experience, from the individual’s weltanschauung which molds their point of view and ideological perspective. Consequently, within any community, there exist alternative truths. Traditional takes on truth are reviewed. The fuzziness of many truths is examined. The existence within the community of alternative, sometimes contradictory, truths is explicated and shown to be fairly common in practice, even though it can occasionally lead to social dissension. The essay expatiates on the alleged incontrovertibility of logical, mathematical, and scientific truths (supposedly true in all possible worlds) showing that they are necessarily subject to specific conditions which render the assessment pragmatic. In sum, Φ is true resolves into Φ functions as true under specific conditions a 1…n . Certainly, a hegemonic group within the community will often assert a ...

New pragmatists, 2007

The pragmatist tradition, both classical and contemporary, is oddly divided on the question of the coherence of a robust conception of objective truth. Whereas both Peirce and Sellars take Peirce's conception of meaning, on which the pragmatist tradition is founded, to make an essential contribution to an adequate account of objective truth, other pragmatists (notably James, Dewey, and Rorty) take that same conception to foreclose once and for all the possibility of such an account. There is, I think, real merit to both these wings of the tradition. My aim is not, however, to defend that claim-at least not directly-but instead to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between Peirce's pragmatist maxim and the notion of objective truth by reflecting on the nature and significance of that maxim. 1

2014

Relational theories of normative language allegedly face special problems in accounting for the extent of disagreement, but this is everybody’s problem because normative sentences are relativized to different information in contexts of deliberation and advice. This paper argues that a relational theory provides a pragmatic solution that accounts for some disagreements as involving inconsistent preferences rather than beliefs. This is shown to be superior to the semantic solution offered by expressivists like Allan Gibbard, as it accounts for a wider range of disagreements, explains a puzzling asymmetry, and avoids the expressivist’s problem with negation. This pragmatic account extends to fundamental disagreements involving preferences for different ends. Three different kinds of normative disagreement are distinguished: instrumental, rational, and outright. [NOTE: this paper is based on Chapter 8 of my book Confusion of Tongues. It expands on ideas in ‘Metaethical Contextualism Defended’, 2010.]

Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action (TCA) attempts to inject rationality into the public sphere by proposing a theory of language and its implied "discourse ethics" as a mechanism for consensus formation. This paper intends to argue this consensus is crucial for modern post-secular pluralistic societies to secure normative values in order to function as a state. By building on John Searle's Speech Act Theory and Ralph Johnson's approach to informal logic, I explicate how a discourse ethic can supplant the unified traditional religious authority and socially integrate decentered liberal democracies of the West.