Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 13:20:08 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: HAB: Understanding




On Mon, 2 Mar 1998 jlnich1-AT-pop.uky.edu wrote:

> >Why can't "the telos of language" also be context-dependent?  For
> >Habermas, certainly, it cannot be anything metaphysical....
> >
> 
> how is a telos context-dependent?  Doesn't the meaning of "telos" imply
> something metaphysical? Certainly it must be realized contextually- but a
> telos is more than the context dependency of something, right?

Well ... one might say that the telos of a screwdriver is to drive screws.
In a world without screws, one might say that its telos was to open paint
cans.  I'm not sure why "telos" has to imply something metaphysical; you
could just say that the telos of something is what it is *for*--and what
something is for is context-dependent.  (Perhaps for a Platonist the telos
of a screwdriver is to drive screws no matter if there are, ever were, or
ever will be any screws around to drive--but that kind of view seems to
me, uh, screwy.  I think it's plausible to throw out that idea and keep
the word).

> >I don't think that anything so complicated (or at least
> >complicated-sounding:) as a hermeneutics is required.  It doesn't take
> >much hermeneutical endeavour to understand each other in everyday
> >conversation; it doesn't/wouldn't take much hermeneutical effort for the
> >participants on this list to understand each other and engage each other
> >on shared terms; and I don't think much hermeneutical effort needs to be
> >required in the field of political discourse, either.  Understanding and
> >making yourself understood by other people is hardly ever all that
> >difficult; what *is* more difficult, ordinarily, is convincing yourself
> >that it's worth the effort, or summoning up the good will necessary to try
> >to understand and be understood.
> >
> Geez, Mathew, this is very optimistic or something, isn't it.  First, we
> all understand each other because we have similar languages and
> backgrounds.  But what about people with other histories, other ways of
> looking at the world?  All I'm say is that this comment above seems very
> dismissive of the problem of incommensurability.  And isn't
> incommensurability one of the worries of Habermas, for example in "The
> Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices"? 

Don't know.  Haven't read it.  I'll look for it, eventually (where can it 
be found, by the way?).  As to people with other histories and ways of
looking at the world--I'm sufficiently Davidsonian to think that this is
not a problem that cannot, in the fullness of time, be overcome.  I don't
think any sense can be made of the idea of radical incommensurability, and
as long as the languages we speak are not radically incommensurable,
there's nothing keeping anyone from understanding anyone else apart from
will, effort, and time.  In the case of people from different cultures, my
feeling is that the problem is one of will, not incommensurability.

Matthew

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      "That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence."
         (Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_)
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Matthew A. King  ----  Department of Philosophy  ----  McMaster University




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