From: "Howard Engelskirchen" <howarde-AT-twcny.rr.com> Subject: BHA: Re: Realism after the Linguistic Turn (Habermas) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 11:51:12 -0500 There is a new collection of essays out by Habermas in English dealing with realism, metaphysics and epistemology that list members will find interesting. The title is Truth and Justification and the collection is edited and translated by Barbara Fultner who provides a helpful introduction. Habermas's first essay is called "Realism after the Linguistic Turn." I'll copy out some of the points from the translator's introduction in this post and then from habermas's first essay in a subsequent post. I have the following questions about the material summarized below: (1) what of the distinction between objective validity and normative validity? Habermas argues that truth as warranted assertability works for normative validity because moral and ethical norms are up to us; it doesn't work for the mind independent objective world that is the site of our practice because what is the case is not up to us. As I understand the Bhaskar of PON and also Marx, we are confronted with all kinds of social structures that are "not up to us." We can change them, but we do so the same way we change the world of nature -- by understanding what the structures are and the ways they tend to behave and then intervening as causal beings accordingly. Semio-causal beings in the case of social structures and socialized material structures. Isn't the idea of "ought implying facts" right in the sense that the norms are generated by the reproduction of social structures? "Don't steal," can be said to be a norm that is true, not just normatively valid, about any social formation grounded in private property because without some such moral norm private property cannot be reproduced. (2) does the idea that truth is not an epistemic notion challenge Ruth's arguments in our recent discussion? "[O]bjective validity is a matter of what is, in fact, true, not of what we take to be true . . ." If we say that truth is a property of our propositions, and epistemological, have we lost its connection with what is in fact true? (3) Habermas argues that truth is not the only validity claim -- in addition there are the claims of sincerity and normative rightness. But don't these all reduce to truth in the sense that sincerity just is a form of truth and normative rightness is, if my argument above is right, derivative of an objective process of social reproduction? The summary -- Habermas here endorses realist views about truth and maintains that there is a mind-and language-independent objective world (xix); he embraces epistemological realism (xviii). He takes it, for example, that the presupposition that there is a single objective world that is the same for everyone is a pragmatic presupposition governing our epistemic practices: "This presupposition lies at the core of our ability to refer to objects in the world at all and, as such, underlies the representational function of language." (xiii) But he is critical of analytical philosophy's overemphasis on representation which he considers leads to "a reductive objectivism that fails to do justice to the participant perspective of agents in interaction." (ix). But on the other hand he is also critical of the competing exaggeration of the linguistic turn that leads to linguistic determinism and cultural and epistemological relativism: "Language does not (fully) determine what we can know of the world or what the world is for us. Rather, we learn from experience, and this empirical knowledge can lead us to revise the meanings of the terms we use." (xiii). The revision comes from our "coping with the world" insofar as it offers resistance to us and is a source of frustration -- 'the way the world is' is simply not "up to us." (xiv): "Not only does language make possible our access to reality, but our coping with the world in turn has the power to lead us to revise our linguistic practices." (xiii). So the key to knowledge acquisition is problem solving. (xiv). Habermas abandons the idea of truth as "ideal warranted assertability" -- at least for the mind independent objective world -- rejects the correspondence theory of truth (which he seems to understand only in a version which assumes unmediated access to reality) and coherence theory of truth and uses instead a pragmatic conception of truth: "the unconditionality of truth is most evident in practical contexts of ordinary coping. There, we presuppose certain truths, practical certainties, as unconditionally valid. As Habermas succinctly puts it, "we do not walk onto any bridge whose stability we doubt" (p. 39). This unconditional acceptance is the pragmatic corollary of a realist conception of truth." (xviii). Habermas considers truth only one of three validity claims, however: truth, normative rightness and sincerity are equiprimordal. Thus he draws a sharp distinction between claims of objective and normative validity, and criticizes Putnam's assertion that there are "ought-implying facts." "Norms must not be assimilated to facts, for the facts are not 'up to us' in the way that moral or ethical norms are." (xix-xx). Thus, "the validity of the [moral judgments and norms] is exhausted by ideal warranted assertability: A moral claim is normatively right if and only if all those affected would agree to it under approximately ideal conditions of discourse. There are no facts independent of the (ideal) community of those affected to which normative rightness claims purport to refer. But talk of truth, in contrast to that of normative rightness, has certain specific ontological connotations: It prsupposes reference to a single objective world that exists independently of our descriptions and is the same for all of us." That is, the discursive or consensus theory of truth is abandoned with respect to claims of objective validity because "the discursive or consensus theory of truth misleadingly suggests that we take a proposition to be true because it is or can be agreed to by all those concerned, whereas in fact, we ought to agree to a proposition because it is true, not the other way around." (xvi). But this in turn leads him to deny that truth, in contrast to normative rightness, is an epistemic notion: "objective validity is a matter of what is, in fact, true, not of what we take to be true." (xv). --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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