Date: 	Fri, 13 Mar 1998 12:35:23 -0500
Subject: Re: HAB: Ideally discursive learning


On Thu, 12 Mar 1998 22:09:45 -0500, Ken wrote:

>This person then recommends a procedure to
>follow (P2).  In order for P2 itself to be valid a procedure must
>be followed (P1).  So in order for P2 to be take place P1 must
>already have taken place.  But starting at P1 requires a leap of
>faith - that it will get everyone where everyone wants to go.  In
>other words the validity of P1 depends upon the goodwill of
>the participants.... But the  acceptance of the validity of P1 still
>depends on a kind of faith - a specific vision of the good life and
>is already shared or becomes shared.

P1 here would refer to the rules of discourse. Habermas thinks that a
certain sort of practice, viz. argumentation, is what permits the
development of propositionally-differentiated speech. (A view that he picks
up from Dummett, but which has been articulated more forcefully in recent
times by Robert Brandom.) This is because the rules of inference
(pragmatically conceived) are what provide the compositional principles
that allow you to construct and understand new, arbitrarily complex
sentences. This means that in order to use language, you must have mastered
the practice whose rules are articulated as the set of procedures P1.

One way of approaching the logic of this position is to see it as a
consequence of semantic holism. The holist thinks that the meaning of a
particular utterance is given by the role it plays in a broader practice of
language use -- its connections to other utterances. But what kind of
"connections" are these? The must plausible suggestion so far has been:
inferential. This means that understanding an utterance correctly will only
be possible if one is able to situate it in the correct set of
justificatory relations to other utterances. But as a result, it will only
be possible to understand someone's utterances if one shares the same
concept of what constitutes an acceptable justificatory relation. As a
result, there must be a shared practice of argumentation, governed by a set
of discursive procedures that all parties accept. If one relaxes this
constraint, and assumes that persons may differ over what constitute
correct justificatory procedures, then you suddenly lose all ability to
distinguish between better and worse interpretations of their speech. (This
a version of Davidson's view, except that he formulates it with respect to
truth, rather than justification. In his terms, if you permit a distinction
between true-for-us and true-for-them, then the principle of charity no
longer picks out a unique interpretation.)

But if this view of language is correct, it means that accepting P1 is no
big leap. Rejecting the rules in P1 would render one's speech
unintelligible. For instance, if I were to announce one day that I no
longer intended to make true statements, unless I happened to feel like it,
it would certainly prompt others to disregard my utterances. However (this
is Davidson's point), it would also, technically, make my speech
unintelligible, because there would no longer be any basis for
distinguishing between better and worse interpretations of what I "really"
meant by some utterance. Habermas's point is in a similar vein, except that
in his case what would mess things up would be a refusal to make
justifiable utterances.

In any case, accepting P1 most emphatically does not involve endorsing a
particular vision of the good life, since the latter would presumably need
to be linguistically formulated (as it would need to refer to possible
states of affairs). The fact that we consider, for instance, lying to be
morally wrong does not mean that the norm of truth-telling that governs
assertoric discourse reflects merely a particular moral vision. Since
languages would be unlearnable if that norm was not generally respected, it
must already be in place in order for us to be capable of articulating and
debating rivals visions of the good life. Not everything can be up for
grabs at the same time, and since the intelligibility of linguistic
interactions depends upon certain sorts of practices being in place, those
practices cannot be up for grabs while we are engaged in linguistic
interaction. This means that should we care to disrupt them, we would need
to use non-linguistic (i.e. instrumental) means. Which is of course
precisely what happens.

In any case, it seems to me that the reason all of this debate over
performative contradiction seems to go nowhere is that the argument doesn't
really do any work in Habermas's view. He goes through the argument out of
deference to Apel, then announces they they provide no justification for
anything, but simply provide a guide to help make explicit the rules that
implicitly govern our practices of argumentation (MCCA 95). The real work
gets done by the theory of meaning, and in particular, the appropriation of
Dummett (in TCA and Postmetaphysical Thinking), because this is what
establishes the "quasi-transcendental" status of the rules of discourse.

Best,
Joe



******************
Professor Joseph Heath
Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto
215 Huron St.
Toronto, ON, Canada
M5S 1A1




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