Tag: Sociology

Habermas on Disenchantment

Again we come to the difficult topic of modernity. In company with the pragmatists Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom, Jürgen Habermas speaks of modernization as a progressive rationalization, carrying forward the spirit of the Enlightenment. But in this area Habermas principally draws on the great early 20th century neo-Kantian founding father of sociology Max Weber, who further analyzed this as a “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of (our understanding of) the world. Literally, the German means something like “de-magicking”.

Neither Weber nor Habermas sees the rationalization associated with modernity in terms of a simple global opposition between science and religion. Following Weber, Habermas treats rationalization as a development within the world’s religious traditions, in which religion itself moves progressively away from magical thinking and supernaturalism, and toward universalizing ethics. This is at the same time a movement away from particularism, toward greater degrees of universalism. However, I don’t think Habermas adequately recognizes the extent to which such an approach is already anticipated by Hegel.

I would not want to lose sight of the poetic and artistic kinds of “enchantment” that in no way depend on irrational belief in the supernatural. Such artistic, musical, or dramatic expression may itself be of high spiritual import. As Habermas also points out, while it is appropriate to condemn superstition and prejudice, the metaphorical and indeed spiritual “magic” associated with poetry, music, and other artistic creativity need be in no way contrary to reason.

As background for his development in Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas briefly surveys some of the more influential 20th-century accounts of modernity. He holds that the most thorough and well-rounded investigations are still those conducted a century ago by Max Weber. In distinction from cultural anthropology, sociology defined itself as an account of specifically modern society.

“Among the classical figures of sociology, Max Weber is the only one who broke with both the premises of the philosophy of history and the basic assumptions of evolutionism and who nonetheless wanted to conceive of the modernization of old-European society as the result of a universal-historical process of rationalization. He opened up rationalization processes to an encompassing empirical investigation without reinterpreting them in an empiricist manner so that precisely the aspects of rationality of societal learning processes would disappear” (Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 143).

That empirical investigations need not be conducted in a narrowly empiricist manner strikes me as very true. One hint of where he is going with this is his interest in applying the expansive outlook of the developmental cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget on children’s learning to the understanding of social processes of rationalization. Brandom has similarly highlighted the social importance of an account of learning from our errors.

I don’t believe most of the stories about so-called Western rationalism. It is just too vague a category, an uncritical joining together of disparate things. It is highly unhistorical to assume a direct cultural continuity from classical Greece to Western Europe. In Roman times, Greece was considered part of the East. Greek learning was introduced to Europe only in the high middle ages. I maintain that the birth of ethical reason and the extraordinary flowering of culture in classical Greece are not the unique heritage of the West, but a part of the heritage of humanity. That said, I still think Habermas makes a good case for the seriousness of Weber’s approach to this “historiographical” question.

“Weber analyzes the process of disenchantment in the history of religion, which is said to have fulfilled the necessary internal conditions for the appearance of Occidental rationalism; in doing so he employs a complex, but largely unclarified concept of rationality. On the other hand, in his analysis of societal rationalization as it makes its way in the modern period, he allows himself to be guided by the restrictive idea of purposive rationality [Zweckrationalität]” (ibid, emphasis in original).

The history of such disenchantment has been widely interpreted as a global, polar conflict and inverse proportionality between “reason” and “religion”. This makes both reason and religion way too monolithic.

In comparison with this unfortunate state of affairs, Habermas’s account, grounded in Weber, is highly valuable for its relatively less monolithic character. He treats “disenchantment” as part of a progressive development of world religions themselves. (In his recent Also a History of Philosophy, he adopts Karl Jaspers’s notion of the “axial age” — the thesis that in several disparate parts of the world, around roughly 500 BCE, religions simultaneously became less oriented to myth, magic, and ritual, and more oriented toward ethics and something resembling metaphysics. Habermas thinks that recognizing this positive role of the great world religions on a long time scale is important as a counterweight to eurocentrism.)

“According to Marx, the rationalization of society takes place directly in the development of productive forces, that is, in the expansion of empirical knowledge, the improvement of production techniques, and the increasingly effective mobilization, qualification, and organization of socially useful labor power. On the other hand, relations of production, the institutions that express the distribution of social power and regulate a differential access to the means of production, are revolutionized only under the pressure of rationalization of productive forces. Max Weber views the institutional framework of the capitalist economy and the modern state in a different way — not as relations of production that fetter the potential for rationalization, but as subsystems of purposive-rational action in which Occidental rationalism develops at a societal level. Of course, he is afraid that bureaucratization will lead to a reification of social relationships, which will stifle motivational incentives to a rational conduct of life. Horkheimer and Adorno, and later Marcuse, interpret Marx in this Weberian perspective” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 144).

“On the one hand, Marx, Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno identify societal rationalization with expansion of the instrumental and strategic rationality of action contexts; on the other hand, they all have a vague notion of an encompassing societal rationality — whether in the concept of an association of free producers, in the historical model of an ethically rational conduct of life, or in the idea of fraternal relations with a resurrected nature — and it is against this that they measure the relative position of empirically described processes of rationalization…. The action concepts that Marx, Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno take as basic are not complex enough to capture all those aspects of social actions to which societal rationalization can attach…. The rationalization of action orientations is not the same as the expansion of the ‘rationality’, that is, complexity of action systems” (pp. 144-145).

“However, I would like to make clear at the start that Weber took up the rationality theme in a scientific context that had already discharged the mortgages from philosophy of history and the nineteenth-century evolutionism encumbered by it” (p. 145).

“As sociology developed in the wakes of Scottish moral philosophy …, it found the theme of societal rationalization already at hand” (ibid).

“The most important motifs of the philosophy of history are contained in Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind of 1794. The model of rationality is provided by the mathematical sciences of nature. Their core is Newtonian physics; it has discovered the ‘true method of studying nature’…. It becomes a paradigm for knowledge in general because it follows a method that raises the knowledge of nature above the scholastic debates of philosophers and reduces all previous philosophy to the status of mere opinion” (ibid).

“Condorcet wants to conceive the history of mankind on the model of the history of modern science, that is, as a process of rationalization…. The advances of the human mind are not limited by a telos inherent in it…. The human mind owes its advances not to approaching a telos, but to the unimpeded operation of its intelligence, that is, to a learning mechanism…. The concept of knowledge developed on the model of the natural sciences devalues, as if with one blow, inherited religious, philosophical, moral, and political opinions” (p. 146).

For me, the telos of a rational being is not a predefined limit or fixed configuration, but an endlessly branching source of alternatives that have some focus, but always have a hypothetical character.

Here we see Habermas’s usual negative view of teleology. For the most part, he only considers the false, non-Aristotelian kind of teleology that was so eloquently denounced by Spinoza. There is one passage later on that I previously quoted, where he does give the word telos a positive sense, in speaking of shared understanding as the inherent telos of human speech. The ambitious norm to which he gives voice is the idea that mature humans learn to think for themselves, and furthermore naturally collaborate in so doing.

“In the battle against the traditional powers of church and state, enlightenment requires the courage to make use of one’s own reason, that is, autonomy or maturity” (p. 147).

Here we are on the ground of Kantian autonomy. Habermas uses his summary of Condorcet to develop the social implications of rationalization.

“Like Kant, Condorcet sees the progress of civilization along the lines of a republic that guarantees civil liberties, an international order that establishes a perpetual peace, a society that accelerates economic growth and technical progress and does away with or compensates for social inequalities. Among other things, he expects ‘the complete annihilation of the prejudices that have brought about an inequality of rights between the sexes’; he expects the elimination of criminality and degeneration, the conquest of misery and sickness” (p. 148).

“This conception is representative of eighteenth-century philosophy of history, even if it could only reach such a pointed formulation from a contemporary of the French Revolution. Precisely this radical quality makes the cracks in the type of thinking characteristic of the philosophy of history stand out” (ibid).

“Victorian theories of social evolution can be characterized in a simplified manner as follows: They questioned neither the rationalism nor the universalism of the Enlightenment and were thus not yet sensitive to the dangers of Eurocentrism; they repeated the naturalistic fallacies of the philosophy of history, albeit less blatantly…. From the standpoint of the history of science, the situation in which Max Weber took up the rationalization thematic again and turned it into a problem that could be dealt with sociologically was defined by the critique of these nineteenth-century theories of evolution” (pp. 152-153).

Habermas points out a positive role of neo-Kantianism, particularly its perspective that a seriously scientific orientation does not require the abnegation of all serious value judgment.

“Weber himself stands in the tradition of Southwest German Neo-Kantianism…. Beyond its dualistic philosophy of science, Neo-Kantianism gained special significance for the critique of evolutionist approaches in the social sciences because of its theory of value. It brought to bear at the methodological level a distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, between statements of fact and judgments of value, and in practical philosophy it emphatically criticized all varieties of ethical naturalism. This is the background to Weber’s position in the controversy over value judgments in social science. He is critical of concepts of progress and evolution precisely when they play an implicitly normative role in social science” (p. 154).

“Max Weber adopted in this controversy a cautiously universalist position…. He mistrusts the rationalization processes set loose and detached from ethical value orientations — so much so that in his theory of rationalization, science and technology forfeit their paradigmatic status. Weber’s research is focused on the moral-practical bases of the institutionalization of purposive-rational action” (p. 155).

This is an interesting variant. The “purposive” rationality associated with means-ends calculations is here circumscribed by a “moral-practical” layer. This falls short of the full view that ethics is the one self-bootstrapping discipline, and still gives an elevated role to efficient causality. But it puts important qualifications on any claim that efficient causality comes unconditionally first.

“Weber regards not only science but autonomous art as a form of manifestation of cultural rationalization…. Aesthetically imbued counterculture belongs, together with science and technology on the one hand, and with modern legal and moral representations on the other, to the whole of rationalized culture. The complex that is taken to be central to the rise of modern society is, however, this ethical and juridical rationalism” (pp. 161-162, emphasis in original).

“This ethic is distinguished, from a formal point of view, in that it is based on principles and is universalistic. The soteriological religiosity of congregations grounds an abstract ethic of brotherliness that, with ‘one’s neighbor’ as a point of reference, supersedes the separation between in-group and out-group morality…. From the perspective of a formal ethic based on general principles, legal norms (as well as the creation and application of laws) that appeal to magic, sacred traditions, revelation, and the like are devalued” (p. 162, emphasis in original).

“Weber sees in this ‘a very general, and for the history of religion very important consequence of the development of innerworldly and otherworldly values toward rationality, towards conscious endeavor, and towards sublimation by knowledge‘” (p. 164, emphasis in original).

“Weber starts with a broad concept of ‘technique’ [Technik] in order to make clear that the aspect of regulated employment of means, in a very abstract sense, is relevant to the rationality of behavior…. Every rule or system of rules that permits reliably reproducible action, whether methodical or customary, that can be predicted by participants in interaction and calculated from the perspective of the observer, is a technique in this sense. ‘Thus there are techniques for every conceivable type of action: techniques of prayer, of asceticism, of thought and research, of memorizing, of education, of exercising political or hierocratic domination, of administration, of making love, of making war, of musical performances, of sculpture and painting, of arriving at legal decisions. And all of these are capable of the widest variation in degree of rationality” (p. 169).

Again we have an ambivalence. Technique clearly has a relation to efficient causality, but Weber greatly broadens its meaning.

“We can speak of techniques in this sense whenever the ends that can be causally realized with their help are conceived as elements of the objective world…. To the conditions of purposive action there belongs not only an instrumental rationality of means, but a rationality of choice in setting ends selected in accord with values. From this standpoint an action can be rational only to the degree that it is not blindly controlled by affects or guided by sheer tradition…. ‘Actions are purely value-rational when the agents, regardless of foreseeable consequences, act according to their convictions of what seems to them to be required by duty, honor, beauty, a religious call, piety, or the importance of some “cause”‘,” (pp.170-171, emphasis in original).

Habermas speaks of the historical advent on a world scale of what he calls “religions of conviction” (as opposed to a primacy of myth, magic, and ritual) as providing the basis for what he calls an “ethics of conviction” (as opposed to an ethics of obedience). He clearly sympathizes with the neo-Kantian critique of “enlightened self-interest” as an adequate basis for ethics.

“Interest positions change, whereas generalizable values are always valid for more than merely one type of situation. Utilitarianism does not take into account this categorical difference worked out by the neo-Kantians; it makes a vain attempt to reinterpret interest positions into ethical principles, to hypostasize purposive rationality itself as a value” (p. 172).

“Weber differentiates the concept of practical rationality from the three perspectives of employing means, setting ends, and being oriented to values. The instrumental rationality of an action is measured by effective planning of the application of means for given ends; the rationality of choice of an action is measured by the correctness of the calculation of ends in the light of precisely conceived values, available means, and boundary conditions; and the normative rationality of an action is measured by the unifying, systematizing power and penetration of the value standards and the principles that underlie action preferences” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This “rationality of choice” as an alternative to a sole focus on instrumental reasoning is a step in the right direction. I think, though, that ethical deliberation involves interpretive judgment, and not just “calculation in light of precisely conceived values”.

“When persons and groups generalize this type over time and across social spheres, Weber speaks of a methodical-rational conduct of life. And he sees the first historical approximation to this ideal type in the Protestant vocational asceticism of Calvinism and the early Puritan sects” (pp. 172-173, emphasis in original).

“The complex concept of practical rationality, which Weber introduces as an ideal type in connection with the methodical conduct of life in Protestant sects, is still partial” (p. 174).

Weber famously correlates capitalist economic rationality to Calvinist ethics. But he also sees the world history of religions in terms of a larger development toward reason and enlightenment. I will dwell more on the latter than on the former.

“On the one side, rationalized worldviews satisfy to a greater degree the requirements of formal-operational thought…. On the other side, however, rationalized worldviews also satisfy to a greater degree the requirements of a modern understanding of the world, which categorically presupposes the disenchantment of the world. Weber investigates this aspect of rationalization primarily in connection with the ‘ethical rationalization’ of religions of salvation. With regard to ‘all kinds of practical ethics that are systematically and unambiguously oriented to fixed goals of salvation’, Weber applies the term ‘rational’ (in the sense of a categorially disenchanted world) to ‘the differentiation between the normatively “valid” and the empirically given’. He sees in the overcoming of magical beliefs the essential achievement of the great world religions as regards rationalization” (p. 175).

Habermas has a rather high estimate of what formalism can achieve. He highlights Weber’s interesting suggestion that rationality has to do with distinguishing between normative validity and empirical givenness.

“We would fail from the start to grasp Weber’s theory of rationalization if we did not explain the sociological concept of an order of life [Lebensordnung] with the help of the philosophical concept of the actualization of value [Wertverwirklichung]” (p. 186).

Neither Weber nor Habermas is a fan of Hegel, but here we nonetheless meet one of the most important Hegelian concepts, that of processes of actualization.

“Weber could not have put forth a theory of rationalization had he not been convinced as a neo-Kantian that he could view processes of value actualization from the outside and from the inside simultaneously, that that he could investigate them both as empirical processes and as objectivations of knowledge, that he could tie together the aspects of reality and validity. The disenchantment of religious-metaphysical worldviews calls for an analysis of just this kind” (p. 187).

This seems to lay the ground for a happy convergence between this neo-Kantian view of value both from the outside and from the inside and a Hegelian view of processes of actualization.

“Weber speaks of normative validity and legitimacy when an order is subjectively recognized as binding. This recognition rests directly on ideas that harbor a potential for grounding and justification, and not on self-interest” (p. 189, emphasis in original).

Habermas directs our attention to questions of grounding and justification, and our handling and pursuit of them. This, he argues, will yield better sociological interpretation than the appeals to interests that are standard in the tradition derived from utilitarianism. He points out how Weber applies the standard neo-Kantian distinction between facts and norms to criticize different manifestations of ethical naturalism.

“In his exchange with Stammler, Weber, in the tradition of neo-Kantianism, stresses two differentiations: the difference between de facto regularities of behavior and normative regulations of conduct and the difference between the meaning of a validity claim and the fact of its actual recognition. Weber then criticizes the confusion of descriptive statements about accepted standards of evaluation and established norms with statements that recommend, express, or justify norms” (p. 191).

Next he returns to Austin’s notion of performativity, or doing things in language. When we do things in language, we are implicitly taking what I would call a second-person attitude. Habermas contrasts this with an “objectivating third-person attitude”. What we call facts are implicitly third-person expressions; by analogy, I want to suggest, interpretations are implicitly second-person expressions.

“Questions regarding the ideal validity of norms, whether for the theoretician or for those involved themselves, can be posed only in the performative attitude of an actor (or of a participant in discourse), whereas questions concerning the social ‘validity’ or currency of norms, questions of whether norms and values are or are not actually recognized within a group, have to be dealt with in the objectivating attitude of a third person. Corresponding to this at the semantic level is the distinction between value judgments and judgments of fact. Weber rightly insists that statements of the one type cannot be inferred from statements of the other type” (ibid).

In Habermas’s terminology, “social validity” is expressly defined as having an empirical, factual reference. But he also recognizes “ideal validity”, which applies to questions of value, and is linked to performative, second-person, doing-in-language.

“In this rational reconstruction of processes of cultural (and societal) rationalization, the social scientist can not confine himself to describing de facto views; he can understand the empirical power of convincing new ideas, and the devaluation, the loss of power to convince, of old ideas only to the degree that he becomes aware of the reasons or grounds with which the new ideas established themselves” (p. 192, emphasis in original).

We should seek not a history of ideas, but a history of reasons.

“In the analysis of the development of religious and metaphysical worldview, it is especially important to separate constellations of validity from constellations of causality” (p. 195).

The investigation of validity has to do with reasons, and is different from the investigation of causality. He looks beyond what Weber achieved.

“What first strikes one is that Weber limits the rationalization of worldview to the standpoint of ethical rationalization [Ethisierung]; he traces the development of a religiously grounded ethic of conviction — more generally, the development of posttraditional legal and moral representations…. But the rationalization of worldviews could have been traced equally well in two additional dimensions: Weber could also have investigated the transformation of cognitive and expressive elements looking back from the perspective of modern science and autonomous art” (p. 197).

From the point of view of debates about the furtherance of enlightenment, it is interesting that Weber does not follow the cliché that Habermas illustrated in referring to Condorcet above. Where Newtonian physics serves as role model and driver of enlightenment for Condorcet, Weber apparently applies instead a somewhat empirical variant of the Kantian primacy of practical reason.

“Rationalization is tied to a theme that is common to all world religions: the question of justifying the unequal distribution of life’s goods…. What is new is the idea that individual misfortune can be undeserved and that the individual may cherish the religious hope of being delivered from all evil, from sickness, need, poverty, even from death” (p. 201).

The unequal distribution of life’s goods is a serious ethical matter. I would however not at all call it a cornerstone of the world’s religions, though it is true that institutionalized religion has often played a less than admirable role in relation to matters of economic justice.

“The revaluation of individual suffering and the appearance of individual needs for salvation — which made the question of the ethical meaning of what is meaningless the point of departure for a religious thought pushing beyond local myths — did not fall from heaven. They are the result of learning processes that set in as the ideas of justice established in tribal societies clashed with the new reality of class societies” (ibid).

I have grave doubts about the trope of individual salvation, and about an “ethical meaning of what is meaningless”. I am doubtful about the applicability of Piagetian learning processes to transitions from tribal societies to class societies..

“The question of the justification of manifest injustices is not, however, treated as a purely ethical question; it is part of the theological, cosmological, metaphysical question concerning the constitution of the world as a whole. This world order is so conceived that ontic and normative questions are blended together” (p. 202).

I must be blunt here. On behalf of the universe, let me just say that there is no justification of manifest injustices. But I assume Habermas does not really mean that there is such justification, only that many or some people have come to believe that there is. I am surprised that he is not more clear about it though.

He mentions theodicy in this context, with very little detail. The Theodicy of Leibniz is actually a quite interesting work, in the tradition of the arguments of Proclus on the goodness of the world. To say that the world is good, and to say that particular manifest injustices are justified, are two entirely different things. Proper theodicy in the sense of Proclus and Leibniz is concerned with the former, and not with the latter.

Nonetheless I think Habermas is onto something important with this, when he says above that the justification of injustices is not treated as a purely ethical question, and that ontic and normative questions are blended together in the constitution of the world as a whole. Ideology falsely ontologizes contestable value judgments.

Neo-Kantianism often seems to work by developing contrasts. Habermas follows Weber’s development of what I would call a rather lame schematic contrast between Eastern and Western religion, although it was relatively enlightened for its time. Its limits are noticeable for example when in passing he repeats Weber’s summary judgment, without any explanation, that the practice of yoga is irrational.

“Weber contrasts above all the two basic conceptual strategies: one, the Occidental, employs the conception of a transcendent, personal Lord of Creation; the other strategy, widespread in the Orient, starts from the idea of an impersonal, noncreated cosmos. Weber also refers to these as transcendent and immanent conceptions of God…. In the one case, the believer seeks to win God’s favor, in the other to participate in the divine” (ibid).

This very coarse schematism can only be fitted to the case of Greek philosophy by classifying Greek philosophy as Eastern rather than Western. In the Roman world, Greece was in fact considered part of the East. With Aristotle and Plotinus, I too consider that the participatory view is rational and ethical, while the favor-seeking one is not.

“The religious foundation of ethics is also different in the two traditions; the hope for divine grace stands in contrast to the idea of self-deliverance through knowledge in Asiatic religiosity” (ibid).

This also is too simple. Speaking at this very shallow level, Buddhism classically denies the reality of the substantial self whose divinity Hinduism classically aims to recover. The notion of an (implicitly active) self-deliverance does not fit well with Taoism either. Some translations literally have the Tao Te Ching advocating “non-action”. In any case, the Tao seems closer to a notion of grace, even if its workings are impersonal.

“A negative attitude to the world first became possible through the dualism characteristic of the radical religions of salvation” (p. 203).

Following Weber, Habermas seems to consider a negative attitude toward the world to be an essential dimension of the rationalization that led to modernity. That is because Weber’s model for the origin of modernity is the ethical severity of Calvinism and Puritanism, which is taken to represent a negative attitude toward the world. By contrast, I would hold that there is nothing inherently progressive or ethical about a negative attitude toward the world, or dualism, or an emphasis on individual salvation.

“To be sure, Weber is inclined to assume that a world-affirming attitude can be maintained only where magical thought has not been radically overcome and where the stage of a dualistic (in the strict sense) interpretation of the world has not been reached. But he could have tested whether or not this was the case only through a comparison of Confucianism and Taoism with Greek philosophy; such a comparison could have determined whether radical disenchantment, a dualistic worldview structure, and affirmation of the world might not also go together. World rejection would then depend more on a radicalization of the thought of salvation, which led in religions of conviction to an accentuation of the dualism found in all world religions” (pp. 203-204).

“A negative attitude toward the world resulting from an orientation to a sacred value that transcends the world or is hidden in its innermost recesses is not, however, per se conducive to the ethical rationalization of life-conduct. World rejection leads to an objectivation of the world under ethical aspect only when it is connected with an active mode of life turned toward the world and does not lead to a passive turning away from the world” (p. 207).

Here we see Habermas is to an extent at least tentatively trying out possibilities. I appreciate his acknowledgement that a negative attitude toward the world is not a requirement. I also appreciate the explanatory role he gives to practical reason in a Kantian sense. On Hegelian grounds though, I am doubtful about the positive role he assigns to “objectivation of the world”.

“The essentials of a rationalizable worldview are as little lacking in Confucianism and Taoism as they are in Greek philosophy” (p. 210).

I would tend to agree, at least as far as Confucianism is concerned. Taoism is a more difficult case. Habermas sincerely wants to be both universal and definite, and to avoid a “Western” ethnocentrism. I think he deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt on that. But there are still real limits to what can be achieved with formal analysis of historical material at this level of generality.

Next in this series: Illocution

Understanding Social Actions

The concluding section of the introduction to Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action is again very rich with insights. Several different notions of what rationality is are in play.

“With a formal world-concept an actor becomes involved in suppositions of commonality that, from his perspective, point beyond the circle of those immediately involved and claim to be valid for outside observers as well. This connection can easily be made clear in the case of teleological [sic] action. The concept of the objective world — in which the actor can intervene in a goal-directed manner — which is presupposed with this model of action must hold in the same way for the actor himself and for any other interpreter of his actions” (p. 102).

There is a kind of objectivity associated with utilitarian concerns.

“In the case of objectively purposive-rational action, the description of an action … has at the same time explanatory power in the sense of an explanation of intentions. To be sure, even if the objective purposive-rationality of an action is established, this does not at all mean that the agent must also have behaved subjectively in a purposive-rational manner; on the other hand, a subjectively purposive-rational action can of course prove to be less than optimal when judged objectively” (p. 103).

He recognizes a gap between “subjective” and “objective” views of utility.

“In advancing what Weber calls a rational interpretation, the interpreter himself takes a position on the claim with which purposive-rational actions appear; he relinquishes the attitude of a third person for the performative attitude of a participant who is examining a problematic validity claim and, if need be, criticizing it” (ibid).

Like Brandom, Habermas argues for the constitutive priority of the second person, and of I-Thou relationships.

“An actor’s behavior is subjectively ‘right’ (in the sense of normative rightness) if he sincerely believes himself to be following an existing norm of action; his behavior is objectively right if the norm in question is in fact regarded as justified among those to whom it applies…. [But the actor] challenges the interpreter to examine not only the actual norm-conformity of his action, or the de facto currency of the norm in question, but the rightness of this norm itself” (p. 104, emphasis added).

Unlike Brandom, who is wary of “regulism”, Habermas seems to identify norms with precisely identifiable rules and instituted law. This does not prevent him from saying many similar things about how normativity works. In particular, they both uphold a Kantian notion of normativity as independent of causal explanation. They both uphold an essentially intersubjective view of normativity. Brandom acknowledges Habermas as a significant influence.

“If the interpreter adopts … a skeptical standpoint, he will explain, with the help of a noncognitive variety of ethics, that the actor is deceiving himself in regard to the possibility of justifying norms, and that instead of reasons he could at best adduce empirical motives for the recognition of norms. Whoever argues in this way has to regard the concept of normatively regulated action as theoretically unsuitable; he will try to replace a description initially drawn in concepts of normatively regulated action with another one given, for example, in causal-behavioristic terms. On the other hand, if the interpreter is convinced of the theoretical fruitfulness of the normative model of action, he has to get involved in the suppositions of commonality that are accepted … and allow the possibility of testing the worthiness to be recognized of a norm held by an actor to be right ” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Normativity is not to be reduced to anything else. The rightness of norms can always be questioned.

“A similar consequence follows from the dramaturgical model of action…. Again, the formal world-concept provides a basis for judgment that is shared by the agent and his interpreter…. The interpreter can, furthermore, uncover the systematically distorted character of processes of understanding by showing how the participants express themselves in a subjectively truthful manner and yet objectively say something other than what they (also) mean (unbeknownst to themselves)” (p. 105).

Habermas carefully distinguishes sincerity from objective truthfulness. It is possible to be sincere and wrong.

“The procedures of rational interpretation enjoy a questionable status in the social sciences…. In my view these objections are themselves based on empiricist assumptions that are open to question” (ibid).

He defends and builds on Max Weber’s interpretive Verstehen method for the social sciences.

“In communicative action, the very outcome of interaction is even made to depend on whether the participants can come to an agreement among themselves on an intersubjectively valid appraisal of their relations to the world…. Unlike those immediately involved, the interpreter is not striving for an interpretation on which there can be a consensus…. But perhaps the interpretive accomplishments of observer and participant differ only in their functions and not in their structure” (p. 106, emphasis in original).

Validity in communicative action is always intersubjective or shareable.

“Sociology must seek a verstehenden, or interpretive, access to its object domain, because it already finds there processes of reaching understanding through which and in which the object domain is antecedently constituted (that is, before any theoretical grasp of it)” (p. 107).

Underlying explicitly theoretical interpretation is a kind of pre-theoretical interpretation, in which we are always already engaged. Interpretation of one sort or another plays a constitutive role in every activity that is distinctively human. Human uptake of culture is in large measure a preconscious uptake of shared interpretive principles.

“The object domain of the social sciences encompasses everything that falls under the description ‘element of a lifeworld’. What this expression means can be clarified intuitively by reference to those symbolic objects that we produce in speaking and acting, beginning with immediate expressions (such as speech acts, purposive activities, and cooperative actions, through the sedimentations of these expressions (such as texts, traditions, documents, works of art, theories, objects of material culture, goods, techniques, and so on, to the indirectly generated configurations that are self-stabilizing and susceptible of organization (such as institutions, social systems, and personality structures)” (p. 108).

The core of a lifeworld can be understood as a set of interpretive principles, an ethos.

“The problem of Verstehen is of methodological importance in the humanities and social sciences primarily because the scientist cannot gain access to a symbolically prestructured reality through observation alone, and because understanding meaning [Sinnsverstehen] cannot be methodically brought under control in the same way as can observation in the course of experimentation. The social scientist basically has no other access to the lifeworld than the social-scientific layman does…. As we shall see, this circumstance prohibits the interpreter from separating questions of meaning and questions of validity” (ibid).

Scientists are people too. All recognition of validity and invalidity depends upon shareable interpretive principles. For Habermas, meaning is inseparable from justification.

“Historicism (Dilthey, Misch) and Neo-Kantianism (Windelband, Rickert) constructed a dualism for the natural and human sciences at the level of the contrast between explanation and understanding. This ‘first round’ of the explanation/understanding controversy is no longer alive today. With the reception of phenomenological, language-analytic, and hermeneutic approaches in sociology, however, a discussion has arisen in connection with Husserl and Schutz, Wittgenstein and Winch, and Heidegger and Gadamer” (ibid).

“Opposed to this case, the empiricist theory of science has defended the concept of the unity of scientific method that was already developed in the Neo-Positivism of Vienna. This discussion can be regarded as over. The critics … misunderstood Verstehen as empathy, as a mysterious act of transposing oneself into the mental states of another subject” (p. 109).

“The next phase of the discussion was introduced with the post-empiricist turn of the analytic theory of science…. In [Mary Hesse’s] view, the debate concerning the history of modern physics that was touched off by Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, and Feyerabend has shown: first, that the data against which theories are tested cannot be described independently of the theory language in question; and second, that theories are constructed not according to the principles of falsificationism but in dependence on paradigms that … relate to one another in a manner similar to particular forms of life…. Hesse infers from this that theory formation in the natural sciences is no less dependent on interpretations than it is in the social sciences” (ibid).

“Giddens speaks of a ‘double’ hermeneutic because in the social sciences problems of interpretive understanding come into play not only through the theory-dependency of data description and the paradigm-dependency of theory languages; there is already a problem of understanding below the threshold of theory construction, namely in obtaining the data and not first in theoretically describing them” (p. 110).

“This is, of course, not a new insight; it is precisely the thesis that the critics of the unity of scientific method had always put forward. It has merely been placed in a new light because the analytic theory of science has, with its recent postempiricist turn, rediscovered in its own way the critical insight that was held up to it by the Verstehen theorists (and that was to be found in any case along the path of the pragmatist logic of science from Pierce to Dewey)” (pp. 110-111).

This is significant. Habermas joins Weber’s Verstehen method for social science with an explicitly pragmatist view of how science works, opposing both to empiricism.

“One who, in the role of a third person, observes something in the world or makes a statement about something in the world adopts an objectivating attitude. By contrast, one who takes part in a communication and, in the role of the first person (ego), enters into an intersubjective relation with a second person (who, as the alter ego, behaves to ego in turn as to a second person) adopts a non-objectivating, or as we would now say, a performative attitude” (p. 111).

Like Brandom, Habermas emphasizes a constitutive role for second-person forms over the first and third person. Again we see the importance of dialogue. Although by their respective avowals Brandom has a much more positive view of Hegel, they both adopt a Hegel-like critique of objectification and a Kantian/Hegelian critique of the supposed givenness of objects.

“Meanings — whether embodied in actions, institutions, products of labor, words, networks of cooperation — can be made accessible only from the inside…. The lifeworld is open only to subjects who make use of their competence to speak and act” (p. 112).

Meanings are immanently constituted, but the field of their immanence is the world or a shareable lifeworld, not someone’s private consciousness. There is no meaning without interpretation. Interpretation does not just play a supporting role in what Habermas calls communicative action, but is fundamental to it. Conversely, interpretation in its first instance is communicative. Monologue and private thought are derivative; dialogue is primary.

“Skjervheim draws our attention here to the interesting fact that the performative attitude of a first person in relation to a second means at the same time an orientation to validity claims” (p. 113).

The notion of performativity in language was introduced in Austin’s work on speech acts, for kinds of action that find their consummation in language. A performative attitude is involved in a promise or commitment. It is a social act. These are kinds of more full-blooded doing in language that are distinct from mere representation or logical assertion.

“Thus the interpreter cannot become clear about the semantic content of an expression independently of the action contexts in which participants react to the expression in question with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ or an abstention. And he does not understand these yes/no positions if he cannot make clear to himself the implicit reasons to take the positions they do. For agreement and disagreement, insofar as they are judged in light of reciprocally raised validity claims and not merely caused by external factors, are based on reasons that participants supposedly or actually have at their disposal” (p. 115).

The “content” of meaning or assertion depends essentially and not just accidentally on the context in which it is embedded. This context has the shape of reasons and a space of reasons, though I haven’t yet seen Habermas use the latter term.

“These (most often implicit) reasons form the axis around which processes of reaching understanding evolve. But if, in order to understand an expression, the interpreter must bring to mind the reasons with which a speaker would if necessary and under suitable conditions defend its validity, he is himself drawn into the process of assessing validity claims. For reasons are of such a nature that they cannot be described in the attitude of a third person, that is, without reactions of affirmation or negation or abstention. The interpreter would not have understood what a ‘reason’ is if he did not reconstruct it with its claim to provide grounds” (pp. 115-116, emphasis in original).

There could be no “value-free science” of meaning. Interpretation is not separable from evaluation.

“One can understand reasons only to the extent that one understands why they are or are not sound…. An interpreter cannot, therefore, interpret expressions connected through criticizable validity claims … without taking a position on them” (p. 116, emphasis in original).

Evaluation is a matter of reasons and the goodness of reasons.

“We thereby expose our interpretation in principle to the same critique to which communicative agents must mutually expose their interpretations. But this means that the distinction between descriptive and rational interpretations becomes meaningless at this level…. Or better: that interpretation that is rational in conception is here the only way to gain access to the de facto course of communicative action ” (p. 119).

For Habermas, the social scientist and the philosopher in doing their characteristic work of interpretation themselves engage essentially in communicative action that is not fundamentally different in kind from the communicative action that the social scientist is concerned to study.

In sociology, ethnomethodology is concerned with the social construction of lifeworlds. It is commonly associated with the claim of a so-called social construction of “reality”, for which the canonical source is Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966). These nonphilosophers deny that there is any objective reality, and so fall into a relativistic subjectivism. Habermas, with his very serious concern for the justification of validity claims, strongly rejects this.

“In ethnomethodology and philosophical hermeneutics this insight has been revived and is upsetting the conventional self-understanding of sociology determined by the postulate of value-freedom…. [T]he social scientist … is moving within the same structures of possible understanding in which those immediately involved carry out their communicative actions…. These same structures also simultaneously provide the critical means to penetrate a context, to burst it open from within and to transcend it; the means, if need be, to push beyond a de facto established consensus, to revise errors, correct misunderstandings, and the like” (p. 120).

Here he explicitly rejects the empiricist notion of “value-free science”. At the same time, he stresses the liberating potential of the study of communicative action.

“Schutz makes a remark in passing that suggests the starting point for a solution: ‘Verstehen is by no means a private affair'” (p. 123).

He again cites the socially oriented phenomenologist Alfred Schutz. Schutz too agrees that Weber’s Verstehen is an essentially social kind of interpretation that is irreducible to any individual consciousness. Human subjectivity has its ground in intersubjectivity and shareable meaning, rather than in individual egos. This is not to say there is no ego, but that ego is a derivative result and not a principle.

“In everyday communication an utterance never stands alone; a semantic content accrues to it from the context the speaker presupposes that the hearer understands. The interpreter too must penetrate that context of reference as a participating partner in interaction. The exploratory moment oriented to knowledge cannot be detached from the creative, constructive moment oriented to producing consensus” (p. 125).

“The social scientist also has no privileged access to the object domain…. Ethnomethodological critique … attempts to demonstrate that the usual constructions of social science have at bottom the same status as the everyday constructions of lay members. They remain bound to the social context they are supposed to explain because they fall prey to the objectivism of ordinary consciousness” (ibid).

This “objectivism of ordinary consciousness” has the characteristics of what Kant calls dogmatism. Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning; it is never self-contained.

“Theoretical work is, like religion or art, an activity distinguished by reflexivity; the fact that it makes an explicit theme of the interpretive processes on which the researcher draws does not dissolve its situational ties” (p. 126).

Even interpretation with the greatest explicitness, objectivity, and universality remains tied in principle to some limiting context of interpretation. Definiteness implies limitation.

“Garfinkel [in his work on ethnomethodology] wants to carry out the phenomenological program of grasping the general structures of lifeworlds as such by searching out in the interpretive activities of everyday routine action the practices through which individuals renew the objective appearance of social order” (p. 127).

“Garfinkel treats as mere phenomena the validity claims, on whose intersubjective recognition every communicatively achieved agreement does indeed rest — however occasional, feeble, and fragmentary consensus formation may be. He does not distinguish between a valid consensus for which participants could if necessary provide reasons, and an agreement without validity — that is, one that is established de facto on the basis of the threat of sanctions, rhetorical onslaught, calculation, desperation, or resignation…. The ethnomethodologically enlightened sociologist regards validity claims that point beyond local, temporal, and cultural boundaries as something that participants merely take to be universal” (pp. 128-129).

Habermas rejects Garfinkel’s conclusion that no genuinely objective reality emerges from social construction.

“But if Garfinkel is serious about this recommendation, he has to reserve for the ethnomethodologist the privileged position of a ‘disinterested’ observer” (p. 129).

“In thematizing what participants merely presuppose and assuming a reflective attitude to the interpretandum, one does not place oneself outside the communication context under investigation; one deepens and radicalizes it in a way that is in principle open to all participants” (p. 130, emphasis in original).

This openness to all participants is very important.

“The ethnomethodologist is interested in the interactive competence of adult speakers because he wants to investigate how actions are coordinated through cooperative processes of interpretation. He is concerned with interpretation as an ongoing accomplishment of participants in interaction, that is, with the microprocesses of interpreting situations and securing consensus, which are highly complex even when the participants can effortlessly begin with a customary interpretation of the situation in a stable context of action; under the microscope every understanding proves to be occasional and fragile” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics … is concerned with interpretation as an exceptional accomplishment, which becomes necessary only when relevant segments of the lifeworld become problematic, when the certainties of a culturally stable background break down and the normal means of reaching understanding fail; under the ‘macroscope’ understanding appears to be endangered only in the extreme cases of penetrating a foreign language, an unfamiliar culture, a distant epoch or, all the more so, pathologically deformed areas of life” (pp. 130-131).

When Habermas speaks of hermeneutics, he primarily has the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer in mind. Gadamer is another figure I need to write about in the future.

“The paradigm case for hermeneutics is the interpretation of a traditional text. The interpreter appears at first to understand the sentences of the author; in going on, he has the unsettling experience that he does not really understand the text so well that he could, if need be, respond to the questions of the author. The interpreter takes this to be a sign that he is wrongly embedding in the text a context other than the author himself did, that he is starting with other questions” (p. 131).

“The interpreter … seeks to understand why the author — in the belief that certain states of affairs obtain, that certain values and norms are valid, that certain experiences can be attributed to certain subjects…. Only to the extent that the interpreter grasps the reasons that allow the author’s utterances to be considered rational does he understand what the author could have meant…. The interpreter cannot understand the semantic content of a text if he is not in a position to present to himself the reasons that the author might have been able to adduce in defense of his utterances under suitable conditions. And because it is not the same thing for reasons to be sound as for them to be taken to be sound … the interpreter absolutely cannot present reasons to himself without judging them, without taking a positive or negative position on them” (pp. 131-132).

“If the interpreter would not so much as pose questions of validity, one might rightfully ask him whether he is interpreting at all” (p. 133).

“We credit all subjects with rationality who are oriented to reaching understanding and thereby to universal validity claims, who base their interpretive accomplishments on an intersubjectively valid reference system of worlds, let us say, on a decentered understanding of the world” (p. 134).

“Gadamer endangers his fundamental hermeneutic insight because hidden behind his preferred model of philological concern with canonical texts lies the really problematic case of the dogmatic interpretation of sacred scriptures” (p. 135).

“Our discussion of the basic concepts of action theory and of the methodology of Verstehen have shown that the rationality problematic does not come to sociology from the outside but breaks out within it…. If this rationality problematic cannot be avoided in the basic concepts of social action and of understanding meaning, how do things stand with respect to the substantial question of whether, and if so how, modernization processes can be viewed from the standpoint of rationalization?” (p. 136).

“If the understanding of meaning has to be understood as communicative experience, and if this is possible only on the performative attitude of a communicative actor, the experiential basis of an interpretive [sinnsverstehenden] sociology is compatible with its claim to objectivity only if hermeneutic procedures can be based at least intuitively on general and encompassing structures of rationality. From both points of view, the metatheoretical and the methodological, we cannot expect objectivity in social-theoretical knowledge if the corresponding concepts of communicative action and interpretation express a merely particular perspective on rationality, one interwoven with a particular cultural tradition” (p. 137).

Habermas wants to deeply investigate particulars, without falling into particularism.

“We have, by way of anticipation, characterized the rational internal structure of processes of reaching understanding in terms of (a) the three world-relations of actors and the corresponding concepts of the objective, social, and subjective worlds; (b) the validity claims of propositional truth, normative rightness, and sincerity or authenticity; (c) the concept of a rationally motivated agreement, that is, one based on the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims; and (d) the concept of reaching understanding as the cooperative negotiation of common definitions of the situation. If the requirement of objectivity is to be satisfied, this structure would have to be shown to be universally valid in a specific sense. This is a very strong requirement for someone who is operating without metaphysical support and is also no longer confident that a rigorous transcendental-pragmatic program, claiming to provide ultimate grounds, can be carried out” (ibid).

He is very honest about the challenge of making his case for an emergence of objectivity out of interpretation and dialogue.

“It is, of course, obvious that the type of action oriented to reaching understanding, whose rational internal structure we sketched above in very rough outline, is by no means everywhere and always encountered as the normal case in everyday practice…. In claiming universal validity — with, however, many qualifications — for our concept of rationality, without thereby adhering to a completely untenable belief in progress, we are taking on a sizable burden of proof. Its weight becomes completely clear when we pass from sharp and oversimplified contrasts supporting a superiority of modern thought to the less glaring oppositions disclosed by intercultural comparison of the modes of thought of the various religions and world civilizations” (p. 138).

He calls a belief in progress in history “completely untenable”. This is a sharp difference from Brandom. On the other hand, he also rejects the pessimism of Adorno. I seek to develop a middle road in this regard, which is one of the reasons for my interest in Habermas.

“I shall take up conceptual strategies, assumptions, and lines of argument from Weber to Parsons with the systematic aim of laying out the problems that can be solved by means of a theory of rationalization developed in terms of the basic concept of communicative action. What can lead us to this goal is not a history of ideas but a history of theory with systematic intent…. Thus for any social theory, linking up with the history of theory is also a kind of test; the more freely it can take up, explain, criticize, and carry on the intentions of earlier theory traditions, the more impervious it is to the danger that particular interests are being brought to bear unnoticed in its own theoretical perspective” (pp. 139-140).

This is another point I would strongly endorse. I like Hegel’s view that philosophy is inseparable from its history, as Habermas says about theory.

“I shall take the following path: Max Weber’s theory of rationalization extends, on the one side, to the structural changes in religious worldviews and the cognitive potential of the differentiated value spheres of science, morality, and art, and, on the other side, to the selective pattern of capitalist rationalization…. The aporetic course of the [“Western”] Marxist reception of Weber’s rationalization thesis from Lukacs to Horkheimer and Adorno shows the limits of approaches based on a theory of consciousness and the reasons for a change of paradigm from purposive activity to communicative action…. In this light, Mead’s foundation of the social sciences in a theory of communication and Durkheim’s sociology of religion fit together in such a way that the concept of interaction mediated by language and regulated by norms can be given an explanation in the sense of a conceptual genesis. The idea of the linguistification of the sacred … provides a perspective from which Mead’s and Durkheim’s assumptions regarding the rationalization of the lifeworld converge” (pp. 140-141).

This is a fascinating project, with much relevance to the work I’ve been pursuing here. I’m still curious for more detail on what he sees in the philosophically oriented social science of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead.

Next in this series: Habermas on Disenchantment

Popper’s Three Worlds

Habermas in the third chapter of Theory of Communicative Action quotes the noted philosopher of science Karl Popper’s 1967 address “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject”, which surprised the empiricist community by claiming that besides physical objects and states of consciousness there must also be “the world of objective contents of thought, especially of scientific and poetic thoughts and of works of art” (vol. 1 p. 76, emphasis in original). I must confess that I have deprioritized Popper, due to his horrible but influential claim in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) that Plato and Hegel sow the seeds of totalitarianism. But on the contents of thought, he is worth listening to.

According to Habermas, Popper takes up Frege and Husserl’s critique of psychologism.

“Popper is criticizing the fundamental empiricist conception of a subject that confronts the world in an immediate way…. This problem context explains why he understands his doctrine of objective mind as a critical extension of the empiricist concept and introduces both objective and subjective mind as ‘worlds’, that is, as special totalities of entities. The older theories of objective mind or spirit developed in the historicist and neo-Hegelian traditions from Dilthey… start from an active mind that expounds itself in the worlds it constitutes. By contrast, Popper holds fast to the primacy of the world in relation to mind…. The world counts as the totality of what is the case” (pp. 76-77).

The last part is a famous formulation from Wittgenstein.

What Habermas calls a historicist “active mind” seems to recall stereotypes of Hegel rather than anything in Aristotle. Habermas sides with Popper against bad Hegelianism. He does not seem to share Robert Pippin’s concern to insist on the purely active character of human understanding. I take this to be a good thing.

“Popper distinguishes between explicit semantic contents that are already embodied in phonemes and written signs, in color or stone, in machines, and so forth, on the one hand, and those implicit semantic contents that are not yet ‘discovered’, not yet objectified in carrier objects of the first world, but are simply inherent in already embodied meanings. Symbolic formations… confront subjective mind with the objectivity of a problematic, uncomprehended complex of meaning that can be opened up only through intellectual labor. The products of the human mind immediately turn against it as problems” (p. 77, emphasis in original).

I like the emphasis on problems. Meanings are never just there, or simply given. All meaning has a problematic aspect, when examined closely enough. All meaning is subject to interpretation. That is one reason why the cooperative social aspect of communication is so important.

“These problems are clearly autonomous. They are in no sense made by us; and in this sense they exist, undiscovered, before their discovery. Moreover, at least some of these problems may be insoluble” (ibid).

“[T]he moment we have produced … theories, they create new, unintended and unexpected problems, autonomous problems, problems to be discovered. This explains why the third world, which in its origin is our product, is autonomous in what may be called its ontological status. It explains why we can act upon it and add to it or help its growth, even though no one can master even a small corner of this world. All of us contribute to its growth, but almost all of our individual contributions are vanishingly small. All of us try to grasp it, and none of us could live without being in contact with it, for all of us make use of speech, without which we would hardly be human. Yet the third world has grown far beyond the grasp not only of any individual but even of all individuals (as shown by the existence of insoluble problems)” (p. 78).

Meaning also has or can have its own kind of objectivity, tied neither to physical things nor to an individual subject or community. Its objectivity and its problematic character need to be thought together.

“This entails a renunciation of two fundamental empiricist conceptions. On the one hand, the entities of the third world cannot be reduced — as forms of expression of subjective mind — to mental states, that is, to entities of the second world. On the other hand, the relations between entities of the first and second worlds cannot be conceived exclusively in terms of the causal model that holds for relations between entities of the first world themselves. Popper bars the way both to a psychologistic conception of objective mind and to a physicalistic conception of subjective mind. The autonomy of the third world guarantees instead that knowledge of, as well as intervention into, states of the objective world are mediated through discovery of the independence of internal meaning connections” (ibid, emphasis added).

Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning. It is made up of “internal connections”. Efficient causality is useful for getting things done, but is a poor fit for the understanding of human reality.

“The development of science, which Popper understands as a cumulative feedback process involving initial problems, creative formation of hypotheses, critical testing, revision, and discovery of new problems, not only serves as the model for subjective mind’s grasp of the world of objective mind; according to Popper, the third world is essentially made up of problems, theories, and arguments. He does also mention, in addition to theories and tools, social institutions and works of art as examples of entities in the third world…. Strictly speaking, the third world is the totality of Fregean Gedanken [thoughts], whether true or false, embodied or not” (p. 79, emphasis in original).

“Popper not only conceives of the third world in ontological terms as a totality of entities with a specific mode of being; within this framework he also understands it in a one-sided manner, from the conceptual perspective of the development of science” (ibid).

Otherwise said, Popper — like many of the moderns — still privileges efficient causality.

“Both aspects prove to be severe restrictions in the attempt to make Popper’s concept of the third world useful for the foundations of sociology. I.C. Jarvie starts from the phenomenological sociology of knowledge inspired by Alfred Schutz, which conceives of society as a social construction of the everyday world that issues from the interpretive processes of acting subjects and congeals into objectivity. But he analyzes the ontological status of the social life-context , which is produced by the human mind and yet preserves a relative independence from it, on the model of the third world” (ibid).

“[C]arrying Popper’s three-world theory over from epistemological to action-theoretic contexts makes the weaknesses of the construction visible” (p. 80).

“Jarvie neglects the elements of cultural tradition that cannot be reduced to Gedanken or propositions admitting of truth. He limits the objective complexes of meaning that acting subjects both produce and discover to cognitive interpretations in the narrow sense. In this respect Popper’s model of the third world is particularly implausible, for the action-orienting power of cultural values is at least as important for interactions as that of theories. Either the status of societal entities is assimilated to that of theories; or … it permits no distinction between cultural values and the institutional embodiment of values in norms” (p. 81).

Habermas criticizes both narrow cognitivism and its reduction of everything to efficient causes.

“To begin with, I would like to replace the ontological concept of ‘world’ with one derived from the phenomenological tradition and to adopt the pair of concepts ‘world’ and ‘lifeworld’…. [P]henomenologists like Alfred Schutz speak of the lifeworld as the unthematically given horizon within which participants in communication move in common when they refer thematically to something in the world” (p. 82).

“I would like to replace the one-sidedly cognitivistic interpretation of the concept ‘objective mind’ with a concept of cultural knowledge differentiated according to several validity claims…. From the perspective of action theory, the activities of the human mind are not easily limited to the cognitive-instrumental confrontation with external nature; social actions are oriented to cultural values and these do not have a truth relation” (p. 83).

Much of his first volume will be taken up with a reading of the neo-Kantian sociology of Max Weber. Habermas positions Weber’s stance as an alternative to Jarvie’s use of Popper.

“Weber understands cultural tradition in toto as a store of knowledge out of which special spheres of value and systems of knowledge are formed under different validity claims. He would thus include in the third world the evaluative and expressive components of culture as well as the cognitive-instrumental. If one adopts this alternative, one must of course explain what ‘validity’ and ‘knowledge’ can mean in regard to the noncognitive components of culture” (p. 84).

I am sympathetic to Brandom’s idea that evaluative and expressive aspects not only need to be included, but come first in the order of explanation.

“Participants in communication who are seeking to come to an understanding with one another about something do not take up a relation only to the one objective world, as is suggested by the precommunicative model dominant in empiricism. They by no means refer only to things that happen or could happen or could be made to happen in the objective world, but to things in the subjective and social worlds as well” (ibid).

With what he calls the communicative model, Habermas aims to conclusively move beyond egocentrism and physicalistic reductionism in the understanding of the human.

Next in this series: Models of Action

Communicative Action

When it appeared, Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action was called the most ambitious study in social theory in recent memory. Its scope is far larger than I will address. Here my aim is only to capture a few top-level highlights from his first chapter that are relevant in an ethical context.

Habermas aims to develop a notion of communicative action that treats meaning as inherently social, thus overcoming the modern “philosophy of consciousness” that threatens to reduce everything to individual subjectivity. At the same time, he emphasizes that every saying is a doing.

“To the goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality, we can tie neither ontological hopes for substantive theories of nature, history, society, and so forth, nor transcendental-philosophical hopes for an aprioristic reconstruction of the equipment of a nonempirical species subject, of consciousness in general. All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which the intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken down…. Theories of modern empirical science, whether along the lines of logical empiricism, critical rationalism, or constructivism, make a normative and at the same time universalistic claim that is no longer covered by fundamental assumptions of an ontological or transcendental-philosophical nature” (vol. 1, p. 2).

I’m a little more hopeful that first philosophy is still a meaningful endeavor. Correlated with this difference, Habermas seems to regard Aristotelian first philosophy as inevitably foundationalist, whereas I think that is by no means the case. But this all has to do with what we mean by first philosophy. For example, Avicenna complains that Aristotle should have put the first cause at the beginning of the Metaphysics, rather than only arriving at it at the end. That is to say, Avicenna takes a foundationalist view of the first cause as the Necessary Being (God), from which all else follows. Aristotle instead takes a hermeneutic approach, starting with the concrete while cultivating a variant of what Paul Ricoeur calls the long detour. Habermas too speaks of hermeneutics in this context.

“[R]ationality has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (p. 8).

“We can call men and women, children and adults, ministers and bus conductors ‘rational’, but not animals or lilac bushes, mountains, streets, or chairs. We can call apologies, delays, surgical interventions, declarations of war, repairs, construction plans or conference decisions ‘irrational’, but not a storm, an accident, a lottery win, or an illness” (p. 9).

One way to think of this is that rationality and irrationality (and normative properties in general) are properly said only of things that have intentional structure, which is something different from sensible form or gestalt.

Habermas examines in detail Max Weber’s early 20th century theory of modernity as an increasing, primarily economic but also scientific and technological, “rationalization” of society. He points out that Weber was actually highly critical of the effects of this rationalization. This kind of rationalization is exclusively concerned with what the Frankfurt school critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno called instrumental reason, which involves a calculating, utilitarian approach to the selection of means, while downplaying any evaluation of the goodness of ends. Horkheimer and Adorno were pessimists about modernity. In this regard, Habermas is much closer to Rorty and Brandom, in that all three are optimists about modernity.

Habermas sees a night-and-day contrast between instrumental reason and the communicative reason he is concerned to promote. In Aristotelian terms, instrumental reason treats everything in light of a degraded concept of efficient causality, as if that were the only thing that is relevant. Communicative reason on the other hand aims at shared understanding, and shared understanding implicitly tends toward universality.

“These reflections point in the direction of basing rationality of an expression on its being susceptible of criticism and grounding…. A judgment can be objective if it is undertaken on the basis of a transsubjective validity claim that has the same meaning for observers and nonparticipants as it has for the acting subject himself. Truth and efficiency are claims of this kind. Thus assertions and goal-directed actions are the more rational the better the claim (to propositional truth or to efficiency that is connected with them) can be defended against criticism” (ibid).

“This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld” (p. 10, emphasis in original).

“It is constitutive of the rationality of the utterance that the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim for the proposition p, a claim that the hearer can accept or reject for good reason…. It is constitutive of the action’s rationality that the actor bases it on a plan that implies the truth of p…. An assertion can be called rational only if the speaker satisfies the conditions necessary to achieve the illocutionary goal of reaching an understanding about something in the world with at least one other participant in communication” (p. 11).

“Behavioral reactions of an externally or internally stimulated organism, and environmentally induced changes of state in a self-regulated system can indeed be understood as quasi-actions, that is, as if they were the expressions of a subject’s capacity for action. But this is to speak of rationality only in a figurative sense, for the susceptiblity to criticism and grounding that we require of rational expressions means that the subject to whom they are attributed should, under suitable conditions, himself be able to provide reasons or grounds” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This recalls Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism argument.

To make assertions at all is to invite critical discussion. This is a very familiar point from Brandom. Brandom himself acknowledges significant influence from Habermas.

This kind of free inquiry is also exactly what Socrates was all about. Plato implicitly illustrates it time and again through abundant examples in his dialogues.

“The abstract concept of the world is a necessary condition if communicatively acting subjects are to reach understanding among themselves about what takes place in the world or is to be effected in it. Through this communicative practice they assure themselves at the same time of their common life-relations, of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld. This life world is bounded by the totality of interpretations presupposed by the members as background knowledge. To elucidate the concept of rationality the phenomenologist must then examine the conditions for communicatively achieved consensus” (p. 13, emphasis in original).

Husserl’s notions of intersubjectivity and lifeworld were extensively developed in the socially oriented phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, to which Habermas makes reference.

“In the context of communicative action, only those persons count as responsible who, as members of a communication-community, can orient their actions to intersubjectively recognized validity claims” (p. 14).

Intersubjectivity — genuine sharing and community — also counts as an ethical ideal. Habermas advocates “dialogical” approaches instead of “monological” ones.

“But there are obviously other types of expressions for which we can have good reasons, even though they are not tied to truth or success claims” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

“Normatively regulated actions and expressive self-presentations have, like assertions or constative speech acts, the character of meaningful expressions, understandable in their context, which are connected with criticizable validity claims. Their reference is to norms and subjective experiences rather than to facts. The agent makes the claim that his behavior is right in relation to a normative context recognized as legitimate, or that first-person utterance of an experience to which he has privileged access is truthful or sincere. Like constative speech acts, these expressions can also go wrong. The possibility of intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims is constitutive for their rationality too” (pp. 15-16, emphasis in original).

He takes very seriously the notion of argumentation, discussing at some length the work of Stephen Toulmin. This approach dwells on the validity of arguments, rather than the deduction of conclusions from assumptions.

“Thus the rationality proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible to continue communicative action with other means when disagreements can no longer be repaired with everyday routines and yet are not to be settled by the direct or strategic use of force” (pp. 17-18).

“Corresponding to the openness of rational expressions to being explained, there is, on the side of persons who behave rationally, a willingness to expose themselves to criticism and, if necessary, to participate properly in argumentation” (p. 18).

“In virtue of their criticizability, rational expressions also admit of improvement; we can correct failed attempts if we can successfully identify our mistakes. The concept of grounding is interwoven with that of learning” (ibid).

“In philosophical ethics, it is by no means agreed that the validity claims connected with norms of action, upon which commands or ‘ought’ sentences are based, can, analogously to truth claims, be redeemed discursively. In everyday life, however, no one would enter into moral argumentation if he did not start from the strong presupposition that a grounded consensus could in principle be be achieved among those involved. In my view, this follows with conceptual necessity from the meaning of normative validity claims” (p.19, emphasis in original).

“Anyone who systematically deceives himself about himself behaves irrationally. But one who is capable of letting himself be enlightened about his irrationality possesses not only the rationality of a subject who is competent to judge facts and who acts in a purposive-rational way, who is morally judicious and practically reliable, who evaluates with sensitivity and is aesthetically open-minded; he also possesses the power to behave reflectively in relation to his subjectivity and to see through the irrational limitations to which his cognitive, moral-practical, and aesthetic-practical expressions are subject. In such a process of self-reflection, reasons and grounds also play a role” (p. 20).

“One behaves irrationally if one employs one’s own symbolic means of expression in a dogmatic way. On the other hand, explicative discourse is a form of argumentation in which the comprehensibility, well-formedness, or rule-correctness is no longer naively supposed or contested but is thematized as a controversial claim” (p. 22).

“We can summarize the above as follows: Rationality is understood to be a disposition of speaking and acting subjects that is expressed in modes of behavior for which there are good reasons or grounds” (ibid).

“Argumentation makes possible behavior that counts as rational in a specific sense, namely learning from explicit mistakes” (ibid).

“But if the validity of arguments can be neither undermined in an empiricist manner nor grounded in an absolutist manner, then we are faced with precisely those questions to which the logic of argumentation is supposed to provide the answers: How can problematic validity claims be supported by good reasons? How can reasons be criticized in turn? What makes some arguments, and thus some reasons, which are related to validity claims in a certain way, stronger or weaker than other arguments?” (p. 24).

“We can distinguish three aspects of argumentative speech. First, considered as a process, we have to do with a form of communication that is improbable in that it sufficiently approximates ideal conditions. In this regard, I tried to delineate the general pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation as specifications of an ideal speech situation. This proposal may be unsatisfactory in its details; but I still view as correct my intention to reconstruct the general symmetry conditions that every competent speaker must presuppose are sufficiently satisfied insofar as he intends to enter into argumentation at all” (p. 25).

More generally, I think we can say that an ideal speech situation is characterized by dialogue under conditions of mutual recognition.

“Participants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by virtue of features that can be described in purely formal terms, excludes all force — except the force of the better argument (and thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that of a cooperative search for truth). From this perspective argumentation can be conceived as a reflective continuation, with different means, of action oriented to reaching understanding” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The fundamental intuition connected with argumentation can best be characterized from the process perspective by the intention of convincing a universal audience and gaining assent for an utterance; from the procedural perspective, by the intention of ending a dispute about hypothetical validity claims with a rationally motivated agreement; and from the product perspective by the intention of grounding or redeeming a validity claim with arguments” (p. 26).

Next in this series: Worldview, Lifeworld

Ethics of Communication

The work of Jürgen Habermas, whom I recently cited, has both significant points of commonality and significant points of contrast with that of Robert Brandom, who first opened my eyes to a sympathetic reading of Kant and Hegel. I’d like to explore how both of these can be related to the broad aims of Platonic dialogue. Eventually, I also hope to relate this all to the needs and circumstances of emotionally sensitive personal communication between individuals.

Most human sayings of things have ethical significance. Many if not most human conflicts are traceable to communication issues. Habermas is mainly interested in exploring this at a broad social and political level. At this point in my life, I mainly hope to have some positive impact on the micro level of personal relationships. But in the world, there are close connections between these, and it would be artificial to try to completely separate them.

Habermas combines a broadly Kantian, procedural and “cognitivist”, rules- and rights-oriented concept of morality with a post-Kantian concern for intersubjectivity. He combines serious attention to German and American sociology, law, and political science, with a sympathy for both American pragmatism and the social criticism of the Young Hegelians and the Frankfurt school. He has a rather old-school, negative view of Hegel, but defends the relevance and usefulness of the broader tradition of German idealism, construed in a way that is compatible with modern science.

Brandom explicitly credits Habermas as an early influence, but also finds great value and contemporary relevance in Hegel. Brandom and Habermas have each written some about the other. Like Brandom, Habermas is a strong defender of modernity, and of the core Enlightenment values of democratic freedom and equality.

Often cited as Habermas’s magnum opus is the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (German ed. 1981; English tr. 1984, 1987). Like Brandom, he regards the pragmatics (simply put, the use) of language as coming before semantics or the study of meaning. Habermas directly associates the pragmatics of language with justification and the giving of reasons.

Habermas and Brandom both connect linguistic pragmatics with American pragmatist philosophy, by recognizing that saying is a kind of doing. They both see meaning in terms of dialogue about reasons, which I think should also be strongly associated with Platonic dialogue.

The theory of communicative action is intended mainly as an explanatory theory dealing with questions of publicly addressable fact. It deliberately straddles the boundary between philosophy and social science.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas talks about a formal pragmatics, and a non-standard formal semantics (inspired by Michael Dummet’s argument that verification comes before truth, which also has affinities with constructive logic). Brandom applies a kind of Hegelian dislike of formalism in developing an account of material inference.

Habermas is also the leading promoter of what he calls discourse ethics, about which I’ll have more to say in upcoming posts. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (German ed. 1983, English tr. 1990) and Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (German ed. 1991, English tr. 1993) develop his more specific views on ethics and morality. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (German ed.1992, English tr. 1996) applies closely related principles at the level of politics and law. These are large and sophisticated developments, with many nuances that are not very amenable to haiku-like summary, but nonetheless, over the course of a few posts, I hope to capture an overview.

I see Platonic dialogue as a kind of ideal model for what Habermas calls communication, corresponding to what Hegel, Brandom, and Habermas all call mutual recognition. At the same time, the various prerequisites for good dialogue are constitutive for meta-level judgment about our practices of communication in life. This applies as much to overcoming misunderstandings between individuals in personal life, as it does to law and politics.

Next in this series: Communicative Action