Date: 	Fri, 20 Mar 1998 20:43:51 -0500
Subject: Re: HAB: Differentiations of understanding



Gary,

Sorry to be slow in responding. I appreciated your remarks.

A few comments:

>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.

This gets into a somewhat murky area of Habermas's thought. Strictly
speaking, the correct thing to say would be that the two arise
simultaneously (co-developmentally?). The emergence of propositionally
differentiated speech occurs in social evolution with the integration of
the three prelinguistic roots of communicative action (TCA ch. 5, =A72C).
Without getting into the details, I take the general idea to be that the
integration of these three components is what gives speech acts their
illocutionary-mode/propositional content structure, *and* what transfers
the understanding of speech acts onto the basis of criticizable validity
claims. Thus he describes his aim as one explaining how "validity claims
would have emerged from the integration of the narrower, paleosymbolically
anchored concept of moral authority with the other components of speech
acts."(72)

Since understanding validity claims involves knowing how they can be
discursively redeemed, I take it then that Habermas considers mastery of at
least the rudimentary components of argumentation to be necessary step in
the development of linguistic competence. (Putting the claim negatively
makes it seem more obvious to me: you couldn't possibly learn a language
first, then learn how to use it to argue with people. This is,
incidentally, just another way of formulating the rejection of the
analytic/synthetic distinction.) The idea that children learn inferential
relations early also does not strike me as wild (most of the time when we
answer the dreaded "why?" question, aren't we conveying an
inference-license?).

Habermas's intuition is usually formulated in something more like the
following way: In order to be using propositionally differentiated speech
(as opposed to mere signalling), you have to be able to distinguish between
the different ways in which your speech act can fail, e.g. whether the
hearer rejects it because what you said was false, or because it was
inappropriate for you to say it at a party, or whatever. Habermas claims
that in order to get this, you have to be able to put yourself in the
position of an *arguing* opponent and consider the reasons they might have
for rejecting your speech-act offer. So the different components of the
speech act are distinguished by the different kinds of validity claims they
raise, and understanding the validity claims means understanding the
reasons that could be give for or against them.


>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).

Yeah, I was editorializing somewhat. Habermas clearly *came up* with the
position that understanding speech involves knowing how its associated
validity claims could be discursively redeemed before he read Dummett, but
he didn't actually have an *argument* for this position before that time.
This is because the compositionality requirement, which is what motivates
Dummett's position, is the only thing that provides any reason to believe
that knowledge of meaning *consists of* knowledge of
justification-conditions. This is because the rules of inferences
(understood in the Toulmin sense, i.e. pragmatically) are what give you the
substitution relations that determine the contribution that words make to
the meaning of sentences in which they occur. Anyhow, that's just my little
opinion.


>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

People have all kinds of fancy theories, but the basic objection to
perceptual relations has been that they don't give you compositionality.
Inferential relations, on the other hand, do. This is what led Wittgenstein
to abandon the "picture theory of meaning" from the Tractatus, along with
the representationalist paradigm. The way the pieces of a sentence fit
together is just not the same as the way perceptual objects are configured.
I haven't come across anything to convince me otherwise, but then again, I
haven't been looking all that hard. It does seem to me, however, that if
you don't buy Habermas's inferentialism you can't really begin to play ball
with the theory. The whole thing would be just wrong. (Of course it might
be, but then where's the fun in talking about it?)


Joe





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