Date: Sat, 14 Mar 1998 16:27:48 -0800
Subject: HAB: Differentiations of understanding


Joe,

I agree almost totally with your view of Ken’s dilemma, to the effect
that “this debate over performative contradiction seems to go nowhere
[because] the argument doesn't really do any work in Habermas's view.
[Habermas] goes through the argument out of deference to Apel...” (<HAB:
Ideally...>, 3/13). The “project of justification,” as Ken calls it, is
not a procedural-logical project but a *philosophical*
(“quasi-transcendental”) project, while Ken (and others) project an
essentialist preoccupation that is not in Habermas’ text.

The main issue is that the presuppositions of argumentation are the
developmental lifeworld conditions of communicative action (which can be
reconstructively investigated), not more-discursively abstract rules of
justification. I think that this theme is evident in your discussion.
But I want to emphasize this, while also indicating a confusion between
justification and understanding that is also evident in your
discussion--a confusion which plays into Ken’s dilemma (as if Ken had
gotten his dilemma from you in the first place? Certainly not due to
Thomas McCarthy).

As your discussion proceeds, it stands definitely in the domain of
lifeworld communicative action, albeit in terms of Analytical philosophy
of language. But your beginning point *fosters* a dilemma such as Ken’s
by misrepresenting the relationship between propositionally
differentiated speech and argument.

You write: “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,...).” On the contrary, Habermas thinks that the childhood
development of propositionally-differentiated speech (in social
evolution and through cognitive development) permits, *eventually*, an
adult practice of argumentation.

Cognitive *”field-independence” (“MD&EI,” _Com.&Evol. of Soc._ , _TCA_
on cog. dev. and soc. evol.) permits the role distance and role-reversal
(approaching the formal-operational stage of cognitive development),
which is the condition for the possibility of an hypothetical attitude,
which is necessary for *maturely* formulating truth conditions, in the
sense that Dummett (addressing an Analytical audience) associates
meaning with truth conditions.

In the meantime, meaning has the character of the developmental stage of
the understanding of truth conditions: Children think something’s true
because Mommy says it is, then because “I” think it is, then because “we
believe that...,” then because “the rules say,” then because “you have
to believe,” then because “it’s  logical,” then because “I argue
that...,” and finally because “the best argument is....” Though one
could model a child’s compulsion to offer “becauses” as fidelity to
governances or rule-conformance, such is more appropriate a stage of
reflection than to the prototypical basis of understanding altogether, I
think. Belonging in a family, neighborhood, and rule-defined orders are
not themselves rule-constrained relations (except abusively). Such
belongings are *partially reconstructable* as governances (and
attachments), but actual reconstructions of human development are not
obviously--what, structuralist?

Granted, I’m sketching in very broad strokes here, to make a kind of
point about the developmentality of meaning as truth conditions. But
this is the kind of approach that Habermas takes, I contend, though he
is not arguing genealogically *at* the point of arguing the
*philosophical* (historically discursive) conditions of justification.
Also, his brief mentions of Dummett in _TCA1_ and _PMT_ have nothing to
do with claims about a relationship between propositionally
differentiated speech (illocutionary and locutionary aspect) and
argument, but rather Dummett’s *corroborative* view of truth and meaning
which Habermas developed from Wittgenstein, Apel, Peirce, and
Austin-Searle, prior to 1980 (as McCarthy makes clear in _CT of JH_,
1979).

Immediately following your contention, quoted above, you then say that
“the rules of inference (pragmatically conceived) are what provide the
compositional principles that allow you to construct and understand new,
arbitrarily complex sentences.” Rather than “compositional,” is it not
*analytical*?

Next, your contrary view of speech vis-a-vis argument causes the
misleading (and invalid ) contention that “in order to use language, you
must have mastered the practice whose rules are articulated as the set
of procedures.” “Practice,” yes, but practices are not basically--no
instilled as--procedure sets, just as linguistic competence is not
reducible to a grammar (argues linguist George Lakoff & company, on
cognitive senses of holism).

I like the notion of “semantic holism,” though. But being a holist
myself (as far as this goes--in Hubert Dreyfus’ sense of “hermeneutical
holism,” which Searle has, in effect, accepted), I want to take issue
with your characterization that “[t]he 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.” I
would distinguish role-play in the usual sense from *having a place*
(comportment, embodiment, and “play” in Gadamer’s hermeneutical sense),
which is nearer to Habermas’ sense of lifeworld understanding. Having a
place in a practice is not like having a role in a well-formed play (or
rule in a language game). The developmental conditions of the embodiment
of sense--lifeworld contextuality--is not like a strategical (and
hypothesis-testing) point of view; rather the former is the condition of
the latter--the latter is an ontogenic outcome of the former.

But what kind of "connections" are these?,” you ask. “The must plausible
suggestion so far has been: inferential.” I disagree. A more plausible
suggestion is perceptual, in the embodied sense of cognitive holism
(see, for example, Howard Gardner, _Frames of Mind_, Basic Books 1993;
and _The Embodied Mind: cognitive science and human experience_, F.J.
Varela, E. Thompson, and E. Rosch, MIT 1991). The basic cognitive
relations of representation (selective encoding) and association
(selective combination and comparison) cannot be understood as processes
of inference; rather inference (a performative component of
intelligence) presupposes mental representation. I believe (see Robert
J. Sternberg [Yale], _Metaphors of Mind_, Cambridge UP, 1990, pp.
268-282).

One might also distinguish between (i) understanding an utterance
satisfactorily in everyday action and (ii) understanding an utterance
correctly. Though sufficient understanding of meaning implies a tacit
stand on correctness of meaning, the assumptive form world (to use
Schutz’ phrase) allows one to remain largely unchallenged on what one’s
commitments to correctness tacitly “are”; thus, *what* correctness is
implicated remains nebulous, within the equilibrational and satisficial
mirrorplays of daily interaction. Though  *articulating* one’s practical
understanding--thematizing it, in a redemption of a contested assumption
will, in your words, “only be possible if one is able to situate it in
the correct set of justificatory relations to other utterances,” a
temporally “sedimented” (Merleau-Ponty) understanding that is brought to
articulation exists prior to a genealogy (reconstruction) of its
formation.

*In* reconstruction, things are as you say, I believe: “[I]t 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 is so well said. And I fully agree with your succeeding
comments on P1, in terms (in short) of openness amid a minimal
normativity in human development.

I also agree--it’s obvious to me, but important to keep in mind--that
“[n]ot everything can be up for grabs at the same time...”; and “...the
intelligibility of linguistic interactions depends upon certain sorts of
practices being in place....” But I don’t agree that “...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.” The sorts of cognitive &
cultural practices in place already *are* more than linguistic
(intelligence cannot be reduced to speech). Such practices--and
linguistic practices can be the content of linguistic reflections. Of
course, a given reflective practice cannot be the content of itself, but
a token of a given type of reflective practice can be the content of the
same type of practice as belongs to the token. In more ordinary terms:
We can do linguistics and cognitive science!

Consequently, it’s not true that a presumption of practices “means that
should we care to disrupt them, we would need to use non-linguistic
(i.e. instrumental) means.” And, within science, instrumentalism is not
a very  good way to understand inquiry.

“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.”

Gary



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