I had expected to skip further ahead, but Habermas’s second chapter is also of great interest. He is digging deeper into the concept of criticizable validity claims in ordinary social situations, and what conditions they presuppose. In a way he is reaching for something like what I used to imagine a sociology of knowledge could be, but he connects it with linguistic pragmatics, speech act theory, argumentation theory, and linguistic philosophy in general, in a way that is quite original.

“The concept of propositional truth is in fact too narrow to cover everything for which participants in argument claim validity in the logical sense. For this reason the theory of argumentation must be equipped with a more comprehensive concept of validity that is not restricted to validity in the sense of truth. But it does not at all follow from this that we have to renounce concepts of validity analogous to truth, to expunge every counterfactual moment from the concept of validity and to equate validity with context-dependent acceptability” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 30).

Habermas wants to allow neither absolutism nor relativism, as is entirely appropriate. (Everything interesting is in between.)

In the early 20th century, Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge had a similar goal. Mannheim’s work was also based on an analysis of processes of modernization, but got caught up in allegations of relativism. Habermas aims to do better on this score. And at least in general terms, due in large measure to his inclusion of considerations from linguistic philosophy, I think he succeeds.

“We try to support a claim with good grounds or reasons; the quality of the reasons and their relevance can be called into question by the other side; we meet objections and are in some cases forced to modify our original position” (ibid).

To me, this is an articulation of what could be considered the fundamental principle of Socratic, Platonic, or ethical dialogue. It is also fundamental to Brandom’s enterprise. (In the near future, I’ll add a post on Brandom’s interesting discussion of Habermas.)

“The rationality of worldviews is not measured in terms of logical and semantic properties but in terms of the formal-pragmatic basic concepts they place at the disposal of individuals for interpreting the world” (p. 45).

Here, like Brandom, he is arguing that pragmatics comes before semantics in the order of explanation. But Habermas also has a substantial engagement with sociological and cultural-anthropological theory. He has lengthy discussions of Max Weber, but also substantially addresses Durkheim, George Herbert Mead, and Talcott Parsons. I put the same caveats on “formal-pragmatic” as I did on “formal concepts” above.

“From Durkheim to Lévi-Strauss, anthropologists have repeatedly pointed out the peculiar confusion between nature and culture” (p. 48).

This observation has great relevance to ordinary life. One of the things that culture prominently does is to appear to be natural.

“Validity is confounded with empirical efficacy…. Concepts of validity such as morality and truth are amalgamated with empirical ordering concepts, such as causality and health. Thus a linguistically constituted worldview can be identified with the world-order itself to such an extent that it cannot be perceived as an interpretation of the world that is subject to error and open to criticism” (p. 50).

This is how “ideology” works.

“Validity claims are in principle open to criticism because they are based on formal world-concepts. They presuppose a world that is identical for all possible observers, or a world intersubjectively shared by members. Such claims call for the rational response of a partner in communication” (ibid).

Here we again have the programmatic ideal of open discussion that Habermas shares with Rorty and Brandom. It is not quite clear what Habermas means by “formal concepts”. I am not sure why he specifies that the concepts must be “formal”, and I think Brandom would definitely dispute that they should be called that. But I have the sense that when he says “formal”, Habermas may just mean “subject to the give and take of reasons”. Habermas does not seem to share Brandom’s emphasis on material inference, so he may think of reasoning in general as “formal”.

“By contrast, mythical worldviews prevent us from categorially uncoupling nature and culture, not only through conceptually mixing the objective and social worlds but also through reifying the linguistic worldview. As a result the concept of the world is dogmatically invested with a specific content that is withdrawn from rational discussion and thus from criticism” (p. 51).

Habermas offers a more specific analysis of how what Brandom calls “traditional” normativity emerges.

“But an analogous mixing of domains of reality can be shown as well for the relationship of culture and internal nature or the subjective world…. Only against the background of a normative reality that has become autonomous, and measured against the criticizable claim to normative rightness, can intentions, wishes, attitudes, feelings appear as illegitimate or merely idiosyncratic, as nongeneralizable and merely subjective. To the degree that mythical worldviews hold sway over cognition and orientations for action, a clear demarcation of a domain of subjectivity is apparently not possible. Intentions and motives are just as little separated from actions and their consequences as feelings are from their normatively fixed, stereotyped expressions” (ibid, emphasis in original).

I found this eye-opening. He seems to be suggesting that normative reality becomes autonomous (i.e., subject to critical discussion) as a result of the same complex historical processes of economic/technical/instrumental rationalization that we elsewhere decry for their alienating effects. This raises the stakes quite a bit.

I also appreciate the three-way distinction between subjective, objective, and intersubjective.

“Mythical worldviews are not understood by members as interpretive systems that are attached to cultural traditions, constituted by internal interrelations of meaning, symbolically related to reality, and connected with validity claims — and thus exposed to criticism and open to revision…. Of course, this does not yet prove that the supposed rationality expressed in our understanding of the world is more than a reflection of the particular features of a culture stamped by science, that it may rightfully raise a claim to universality” (pp. 52-53).

Habermas notes that discussions of modernity and rationality are often taken to involve a Eurocentric prejudice, and clearly wants to avoid this.

“Worldviews store the cultural knowledge with the help of which a language community interprets the world” (pp. 56-57).

With my Platonic scruples, I would not call this kind of acculturation “knowledge”. It seems closer to the notion of Aristotelian ethos.

“Inasmuch as worldviews refer to totalities, we cannot get behind them as articulations of an understanding of the world, even if they can be revised. In this respect they are like a portrait that claims to represent a person as a whole. A portrait is neither a mapping that can be exact or inexact, nor a rendering of facts in the sense of a proposition that can be true or false. A portrait offers rather an angle of vision from which the person represented appears in a certain way. Thus there can be numerous portraits of the same person; they can make the character appear in quite different aspects, and yet they can all be experienced as accurate, authentic, or adequate…. Worldviews can no more be true or false than can portraits” (p. 58).

“On the other hand, worldviews differ from portraits in that they in turn make possible utterances that admit of truth…. Owing to their reference to totality, worldviews are indeed removed from the dimension in which a judgment of them according to criteria of truth makes sense; even the choice of criteria according to which the truth of statements is to be judged may depend on the basic conceptual context of a worldview. But this does not mean that the idea of truth might itself be understood in a particularistic way. Whatever language system we choose, we always start intuitively from the presupposition that truth is a universal validity claim. If a statement is true, it merits universal assent, no matter in which language it is formulated. The adequacy of a linguistically articulated worldview is a function of the true statements that are possible in this language system” (pp. 58-59).

Here he articulates a moral ideal of universality. While we must constantly be wary of premature claims to universality, really effective universality just is the valid generalization of shared understanding. If shared understanding is a good thing, then more or deeper shared understanding is a better thing.

“Worldviews are comparable only in respect to their potency for conferring meaning…. They open equally primordial possibilities of ‘making sense of human life’. They thereby structure forms of life that are incommensurable in their value. The rationality of forms of life cannot be reduced to the cognitive adequacy of the worldviews underlying them” (p. 59, emphasis in original).

“However, worldviews are constitutive not only for processes of reaching understanding but for the social integration and socialization of individuals as well…. This identity-securing knowledge becomes more and more formal along the path from closed to open worldviews” (p. 64, emphasis in original).

Again, I would not call it knowledge, but the point still stands. The way he uses “formal” here, in explicit association with openness, influences my reading of “formal” in the other passages.

“In discussing Weber’s sociology of religion in the next chapter, I shall attempt to make the development of religious worldviews comprehensible from the aspect of a development of formal world-concepts, that is, as a learning process. In doing so I shall be making tacit use of a concept of learning that Piaget expounded for the ontogenesis of structures of consciousness” (p. 67).

This ambitious goal of treating historical development as a learning process applies as well to Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom. Habermas more specifically connects it to Piaget’s work in developmental cognitive psychology and the concept of open systems, both of which broadly speaking are empirical rather than philosophical. Here some balance is needed. If taken too far or in the wrong way, belief in progress can turn into an apologetic for the status quo.

“The growing child works out for himself, equiprimordially, the concepts of the external and internal worlds in dealing practically with objects and with himself. Piaget also draws a distinction between dealing with physical objects and dealing with social objects, that is, ‘reciprocal action between a subject and objects and reciprocal action between a subject and other subjects’ (p. 68).

“Thus for Piaget there is cognitive development in a wider sense, which is not understood solely as the construction of an external universe but also as the construction of a reference system for the simultaneous demarcation of the objective and social worlds from the subjective world. Cognitive development signifies in general the decentration of an egocentric understanding of the world” (p. 69, emphasis in original).

The goal of reaching understanding is far more important than being “right” in a dispute.

Habermas has been criticized for his “cognitivist” approach to ethics. I think cognitivism in this sense boils down to the position that what is good cannot be determined in complete abstraction from what is true. Brandom and Habermas also assert the converse: that what is true cannot be determined in complete abstraction from what is good. I don’t see anything narrow about this.

“Every action oriented to reaching understanding can be conceived as part of a cooperative process of interpretation aiming at situation definitions that are intersubjectively recognized” (pp. 69-70).

Here we have shared understanding as an overarching moral goal.

“I can introduce here the concept of the Lebenswelt or lifeworld, to begin with as the correlate of processes of reaching understanding…. In their interpretive accomplishments the members of a communication community demarcate the one objective world and their intersubjectively shared social world from the subjective worlds of individuals and (other) collectives. The world-concepts and the corresponding validity claims provide the formal scaffolding with which those acting communicatively order problematic contexts of situations, that is, those requiring agreement, in their lifeworld, which is presupposed as unproblematic” (p. 70).

“The lifeworld also stores the interpretive work of preceding generations. It is the conservative counterweight to the risk of disagreement that arises within every actual process of reaching understanding; for communicative actors can achieve an understanding only by way of taking yes/no positions on criticizable validity claims. The relation between these weights changes with the decentration of worldviews. The more the worldview that furnishes the cultural stock of knowledge is decentered, the less the need for understanding is covered in advance by an interpreted lifeworld immune from critique and the more this need has to be met by the interpretive accomplishments of the participants themselves…. The more cultural traditions predecide which validity claims, when, where, for what, from whom, and to whom must be accepted, the less the participants themselves have the possibility of making explicit and examining the potential grounds on which their yes/no positions are based” (pp. 70-71).

As he says, lifeworlds in general have a conservative aspect. They serve stability, not novelty. But more specifically, he is emphasizing that based on a more detailed view, lifeworlds can also be placed on a scale of relative openness or closedness.

Here he begins to discuss mythical worldviews. Mythical worldviews, he maintains, are inevitably closed in this sense. Conversely, this seems to be the way in which potentially alienating modern abstraction also at the same time grounds discursive openness. Modernization is then conceived as a progress along this axis, toward greater discursive openness.

“To the degree that the lifeworld of a social group is interpreted through a mythical worldview, the burden of interpretation is removed from the individual member, as well as the chance for him to bring about an agreement open to criticism. To the extent that the worldview remains sociocentric in Piaget’s sense, it does not permit differentiation between the world of existing states of affairs, valid norms and expressible subjective experiences. The linguistic worldview is reified as the world order and cannot be seen as an interpretive system open to criticism” (p. 71).

Our lifeworld comprises everything that we take to be what Sellars and Brandom call “Given” (as in “the Myth of”). Like “consciousness”, lifeworld is another more specific name for appearance. Decentered understanding works by partially negating or qualifying the givenness of the “Given”.

“If we employ Piaget’s concept of decentration as a guiding thread in this way, in order to clarify the internal connection between the structure of a worldview, the lifeworld as the context of processes of understanding, and the possibilities of a rational conduct of life, we again encounter the concept of communicative rationality. This concept relates a decentered understanding of the world to the possibility of discursively redeeming criticizable validity claims” (p. 72).

Habermas’s communicative reason, it seems to me, is an interpretive paradigm of what I would call ethical inquiry, completely independent of the instrumental reason associated with efficient causes and efficient means of doing things.

I am pleased to see the use he repeatedly makes of the notion of “decentering”.

“Perhaps we should talk instead of a balance among non-self-sufficient moments, an equilibrated interplay of the cognitive with the moral and the aesthetic-practical. But the attempt to provide an equivalent for what was once intended by the good life should not mislead us into deriving this idea from the formal concept of reason with which modernity’s decentered understanding of the world has left us” (p. 73).

This is a little ambiguous. I suspect he means both that we can no longer define the good life at all, and also more specifically that the good life cannot be derived from formal reason. I agree with the second, but I think it is still meaningful to talk about the good life, and that it has an important relation to informal practices of reason.

“A critique of this sort can indeed be based on the procedural concept of communicative rationality if it can be shown that the decentration of world understanding and the rationalization of the lifeworld are necessary conditions for an emancipated society” (p. 74).

I provisionally believe this is indeed what he aims to show.