15.3213, Review: Philosophy of Language: Habermas (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-15-3213. Tue Nov 16 2004. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 15.3213, Review: Philosophy of Language: Habermas (2004)                                                                                                                                                                 

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1)
Date: 16-Nov-2004
From: Magda Dumitru < magdalena_dumitru at yahoo.com >
Subject: Truth and Justification 
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 02:59:01
From: Magda Dumitru < magdalena_dumitru at yahoo.com >
Subject: Truth and Justification 
 

AUTHOR: Habermas, Jürgen
EDITOR: Fultner, Barbara
TITLE: Truth and Justification
PUBLISHER: MIT Press
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1489.html


Magda Dumitru, The University at Buffalo, SUNY

Written by 'the greatest philosopher alive', as many would put it, this 
volume will be particularly rewarding for specialists in Semantics and 
Pragmatics in the field of Linguistics and Philosophy of language, but 
also for those interested in less 'advertised' aspects of the philosophies 
of Kant, Hegel, and Juergen Habermas himself, among others. It is the 17th 
of his volumes Habermas sees appearing in the series "Studies in 
Contemporary German Social Thought", under the series editorship of Thomas 
McCarthy. The volume is a translation of the 1999 edition of "Wahrheit und 
Rechtfertigung" -- except for chapters 2 and 5, which have been replaced. 
The editor of "Truth and Justification" is Barbara Fultner who, apart from 
editing the Notes and Index, is doing a nice job of translating chapters 
2, 5, 6, and 7, editing earlier translations of chapters 1, 3, and 4 (by 
Hella Beiser, Maeve Cooke, and Peter Dews respectively), and writing an 
excellent "Translator's Introduction", where she confesses that great care 
had to be taken in translating the original articles, under the danger of 
creating "confusion in transposing a philosophical debate from one 
language into another, one philosophical culture into another, even 
challenging one's faith in the principle of translatability" (p. XXI).

The book includes seven chapters, preceded by the author's "Introduction: 
Realism after the Linguistic Turn", which is a welcome synopsis of the 
volume, with further implications for Habermas' philosophical thought. In 
the following, I am presenting summaries of the chapters, including 
several examples of the author's wording, followed by a short critical 
evaluation.

SUMMARY

Chapter 1 "Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy: Two Complementary Versions 
of the Linguistic Turn"

The first chapter traces the road from hermeneutics (the fief of 
continental philosophy) to formal pragmatics (Habermas's own theory). The 
linguistic turn initiated by Frege has given rise to three 'currents', 
according to Habermas. The first current, represented by the philosophies 
of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, takes the linguistic turn as a paradigm 
shift: it is true what is taken to be true. The second current, 
represented by Russel, Carnap, Quine, and Davidson, views the linguistic 
turn simply as a methodological device. The third current, represented by 
Putnam, Dummett, and Apel, sees the linguistic turn as a paradigm shift 
towards a formal pragmatics, defined as a theory of the general structures 
of action. Habermas, whose philosophy is centered around both language and 
culture, salutes the third current, since it is in discourse that 
participants challenge "the truth for propositions about things and events 
in the objective world, and rightness for propositions about normative 
expectations and interpersonal relations" (p. 79). This challenging of 
truth in discourse is made possible by a "decentering of lifeworld 
perspectives" (p. 78).

Chapter 2 "From Kant's 'Ideas' of Pure Reason to the 'Idealizing' 
Presuppositions of Communicative Action: Reflections on the 
Detranscendentalized 'Use of Reason'"

The second chapter establishes a Kantian genealogy for Habermas' formal 
pragmatics, by analyzing his idealizing presuppositions of communicative 
action: the presupposition of a common objective world is based on Kant's 
idea of the unity of the world; the rationality of accountable agents 
corresponds to Kant's idea of freedom; the unconditionality of validity 
claims raised in communicative action corresponds to the Kantian 
unconditionality of reason; rational discourse as the forum of possible 
justification echoes the Kantian idea that reason is 'the highest court of 
appeal'. The main difference between Kantian philosophy and the concept of 
communicative action is the level at which idealization operates: the 
objective world for Kant, and the social world for Habermas. The latter 
believes in an "ineluctable grounding of objectivity in linguistic 
intersubjectivity" (p. 130); intersubjectivity leads participants in 
communication to decenter their interpretive perspectives, approaching 
thus the ideal limit of complete inclusiveness of all relevant 
contributions to discourse. Truth can only be ascertained through 
discourse: the two-place relation of validity is replaced by a 3-place 
relation: a proposition is true for a certain audience.

Chapter 3 "From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom's Pragmatic Philosophy of 
Language"

The third chapter aims at presenting "the state of the art of pragmatic 
approaches in analytic philosophy of language". William Brandom's "Making 
it Explicit", a milestone in theoretical philosophy, outlines the theses 
of 'conceptual realism': there is no difference between thoughts and the 
world captured in thoughts ("facts are just true claims"); the objectivity 
of the world is not attested by sensations, but only "through the 
discoursive resistance of persistent objections" raised in discourse; 
discoursive practice generates concepts and is not "hostage to a knowledge 
of meanings inherited a priori"; the utterance of an interlocutor is taken 
to be true (has objective content) by another interlocutor if the latter 
comes to acknowledge it as correct. Habermas has several objections to 
Brandom's theory: rational norms are unduly assimilated to practical 
norms; Brandom neglects the cognitive significance of the second person 
since, as a consequence of Brandom's proposal, interlocutors do not answer 
each other and hence do not coordinate each other's action plans, but just 
inform each other about their beliefs and intentions; a consequence of 
assimilating norms to facts is a moral realism, not likely to be 
defensible.

Chapter 4 "From Kant to Hegel and Back Again: The Move toward 
Detranscendentalization"

The fourth chapter discusses the Hegelian origins of the phenomenon of 
detranscendentalizing the knowing subject. Kant introduced the 
transcendental turn; post-Hegelian philosophy is marked by the 
detranscendentalization of the knowing subject, as a result of the 
postmentalist turn introduced by Hegel. Decentering one's perspective is 
considering everyone else's perspectives. Kantian mentalist dualism can be 
overcome by assimilating the subject-object relations to intersubjective 
relations, which would presuppose, according to Habermas, that 
interlocutors assume the existence of "an independent world of objects 
that is the same for all of them" (p. 193). This is the reason why 
Habermas believes that Hegel's theory still maintains a Kantian gap, not 
between the world of appearances and the things in themselves, but between 
the social world (shared intersubjectively) and the objective world we 
must cope with. The issue becomes vital in cases where the law is enforced 
selectively, giving rise to what Habermas refers to as 'Brazilianization' 
(p. 210); the danger awaits even contemporary democratic societies, if 
there is an unbalance between globalized markets and international 
politics.

Chapter 5 "Norms and Values: On Hilary Putnam's Kantian Pragmatism"

The fifth chapter is centered around Hilary Putnam's "Norms and Values", 
in order to investigate how one can be a realist epistemologist without 
being a moral realist as well. The question Habermas raises in this 
chapter is whether Hilary Putnam would not have been "better off if he 
remained a Kantian all the way", that is, if he adopted not only a Kantian 
metaphysics and epistemology, but also a Kantian practical philosophy. It 
should be reminded that Putnam maintains the core of Kant's philosophy, 
namely that "subjects are rational beings operating with reasons". Also, 
he believes, with Kant and against Quine, that there are a priori 
analythic thruths, e.g. that ethics (values) makes possible the 
epistemology (the knowledge of the world), since reason is practical. 
However, Putnam does not make a deontological distinction between 
universal norms of action and particular values, since he considers that 
the objectivity of value judgments is always indexed to particular 
communities; the universal and the ideal would result from an ever 
inclusive universe of perspectives. Putnam does not make a distinction 
between judgments of fact and judgments of value neither; he believes that 
both objective and normative validity must be justified by reasons, albeit 
of a different sort. What Habermas notices though is that the two 
validities are not identical, but similar: whereas 'rightness' is an 
epistemic concept, the meaning of true statements "cannot be reduced to 
epistemic conditions of confirmation, no matter how rigorous they might 
be: truth goes beyond idealized justification." (p. 230). The chapter ends 
with the following critique: "given a pluralism of legitimate world views, 
conflicts of justice can be resolved only if the disputing parties agree 
to create an inclusive We-perspective by mutual perspective-taking" (p. 
235); only in a horizontal We- perspective (not vertical, as Aristotle and 
Dewey -- and eventually Putnam himself -- propose) are individuals unique, 
since "only as irreplaceable and unmistakable persons do they belong to 
the moral realm." (p. 235).

Chapter 6 "Rightness versus Truth: On the Sense of Normative Validity in 
Moral Judgments and Norms"

The sixth chapter aims at distinguishing between truth and moral 
rightness. Moral knowledge is different from empirical knowledge in 
that "it says how people ought to act, and not how things are with objects 
in the world" (p. 239). However, both rightness of moral judgment and 
truth of descriptions are found through argumentation (can be justified or 
validated), as a result of the linguistic turn. Habermas proposes a 
pragmatic conception of truth, since contextualism (another consequence of 
the linguistic turn) cannot explain how a belief is true just because 
it 'hangs together' with other beliefs: "beliefs are confirmed in action 
by something different than in discourse" (p. 254). The concrete moral 
world has become procedural, as a result of giving up the simple concept 
of 'collective good' (vertical We-perspective) and assuming an 
intersubjectively shared lifeworld (horizontal We- perspective). This 
leads to a functional equivalence -- not to an assimilation - of the 
projection of the moral world to the presupposition of the objective world.

Chapter 7 "The Relationship between Theory and Practice Revisited"

The last chapter shows that a division between truth and rightness is 
advisable in the sociocultural forms of life as well. The chapter opens 
with a historical perspective on the role of philosophy in politics, 
culture, and education, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Hegel, and Marx. 
Habermas notes that, since the disastrous consequences of Marx's praxis, 
philosophy has lost its power to give direction to people's lives. Also, 
since philosophy has become an academic endeavour -- fallible by default, 
it has relinquished "the claim of holding the key to the Truth" (p. 285). 
However, philosophy continues to maintain a unique 'polyglot trait' 
through its connection to truth, law, morality, and art. What philosophy 
can do today, according to Habermas, is evaluate competing expert 
opinions, handle questions concerning ecology, medicine, and genetic 
engineering, discuss criminal political regimes and 'unmasterable pasts' 
(in terms of trial and forgetting), make individual lives 'meaningful' and 
provide the society with 'public intellectuals'. In the second part of the 
chapter, Habermas turns to the importance of the intersubjective approach 
developed in philosophy: it is only through individuation and 
socialization incorporated by an intersubjective approach, that legal 
persons become individuals; the concept of 'human rights' is thus 
translated into 'subjective rights'. Also, acknowledging that "every 
person is of equal value precisely as a person" (p. 292), which is the 
result of taking up an intersubjective approach, ensures that different 
cultures and societies agree on binding norms (reciprocal rights and 
duties). However, very importantly, the practice of argumentation insures 
that such an agreement need not and must not "require the mutual 
appreciation for one another's cultural achievements and life style" (p. 
292).

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Special credit goes for novelty; according to the author, the present 
volume is investigating a domain neglected in his previous 
writings: 'theoretical philosophy', that is, issues in epistemology, 
metaphysics, and philosophy of language. In so doing, Habermas wishes to 
reconcile the hermeneutic tradition and the analytic tradition, since he 
believes that the former is lacking a semantics (a theory of truth, after 
all), while the latter is lacking a cultural perspective (of 
the 'Zeitgeist', for instance).

Credit goes also for style; it is a pleasure to follow the 'hypertext' the 
author is constantly establishing between different philosophical 
theories, both hermeneutical and analytical, and the beauty of the 
argumentation, running in typical German style. The volume does not make 
for an easy reading though, which is the inescapable effect of 
translation; the 'shortcoming' is however largely compensated for by the 
generous introductions to the volume, mentioned above.

Much credit goes for richness; there are various issues disscussed 
throughout the volume, but perhaps the most interesting one, from a 
linguist's point of view, is Habermas's definition of truth. It is a 
formal pragmatic definition, according to which something is true if it 
comes forward as being certain. It is important to understand that, from 
this point of view, something is taken to be true prior to becoming 
certain to someone; therefore truth is not the result of consensus, as one 
could have infered from the earlier "Wahrheitstheorien". Habermas's is not 
a mere pragmatic theory (something is true if it is taken to be true), but 
a Kantian pragmatic theory, since it embraces a linguistic transcendental 
perspective, in the sense that both propositions and reality are 
considered to be already filtered by language. Once something becomes 
certainty, it becomes a symptom of truth, so to speak; further, 
certainties are beliefs that guide actions.

Less convincing is the rationale for which, after rejecting both the 
correspondence theory (something is true if it corresponds to a fact), and 
the coherence theory (something is true if it is part of a coherent set of 
beliefs), Habermas seems to favor deflationist theories (truth is 
redundant). Such theories are far from being unproblematic within the 
analytic tradition, while the author offers no detailed discussion of the 
topic.

More problematic, in the absence of a well argued definition of truth from 
the analytic perspective, are the consequences of the 'marriage' between 
the two philosophical traditions -- continental and analytical. One is 
told where truth resides -- beyond justification (the goal of 
justification is to "discover a truth that exceeds all justifications" p. 
40) - and how to access it -- by switching from discourse to action and 
thereby 'finding' certainties. The problem of reconciling the hermeneutic 
and the analytical traditions is not solved, but eliminated: a 
deflationist account of truth - 'truth is truth', so to speak -- prevents 
the hermeneutic tradition from having a 'terminus ad quem'. The issue of 
defining truth has further consequences for solving the problem of 
reference which, under the present circumstances, does not arise at all 
from an analytic point of view, although Habermas keeps a distinction 
between 'reference' and 'description', which may be a starting point for 
further analysis.

No credit goes for the black cloth used as cover - it may color your hands 
accordingly; therefore either keep the outer backcover (a green glossy 
paper, handsomly designed) when reading, or wait for the paperback -- yet, 
by all means, read the book if you are interested in issues of truth, 
reference, discourse, moral theory, political theory, and globalization!

 REFERENCES

Brandom, W. (1994) Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and 
Discursive Commitment. Cambridge Mass.

Davidson, D. (1984) Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford.

Dummett, M. (1993) The Origins of Analytical Philosophy, London.

Dummett, M. (1993) Truth and Meaning. The Seas of Language, Oxford, pp. 
147-165.

Habermas, J. (1984) Wahrheitstheorien. Vorstudien und Ergaenzungen zur 
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt, pp. 127-183.

Habermas, J. (1984/1987) Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas 
McCarthy, 2 vols, Boston.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1949) Phaenomenologie des Geistes, Leipzig. Kant, I. (1996) 
Critique of Pure Reason. trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis.

Putnam, H. (1994) Dewey's Logic. Words and Life, Cambridge Mass., p. 214.

Putnam, H. (2001) Werte und Normen. Die Oeffentlichkheit der Vernunft und 
die4 Vernunft der Oeffentlichkeit, Ed. Lutz Wingert and Klaus Guenther, 
Frankfurt am Main, pp. 280- 313. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Magda Dumitru is mostly interested in representations and reference, in 
the domains of Phonology and Semantics.




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