Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 18:33:56 -0800
From: "." <gedavis-AT-pacbell.net>
Subject: HAB: Habermas as realist


I was quite excited to discover today a new book in the MIT “...German
Thought” series which directly and extendedly confronts the problem of
antirealism in Habermas’ communicative rationality: _The Linguistic Turn
in Hermeneutic Philosophy_, by Cristina Lafont (who has been teaching
Habermas’ work recently at NWU). Iím going to quote several synoptic
paragraphs in a moment.

This is not just a translation of her 1993 book (Spanish), but is an
expansion of its argument beyond that eventual critique of Habermas (the
culminating philosopher in the German tradition Of the linguistic turn),
to a proposal for extending Habermas’ argument to account for
antirealist aspects of his work (until recently: see: “Rortyís Pragmatic
Turn,” which Dr. Lafont acknowledges).

The book is searching for a commensurability between pragmatism and
realism that preserves the insights of the linguistic turn without any
longer implying a linguistic-relativistic understanding of reality
generally. The book jacket expresses this linguistic relativism
succinctly: “The linguistic turn in German philosophy....focuses on the
world-disclosing dimension of language, emphasizing its communicative
over its cognitive function.” Though Iíve long read Habermas as
philosophically understanding emphasizing cognitive function to prevail
over communicative function (prevail: constitutive conditions for
communicative function), it’s normal to read Habermas otherwise. And so,
Dr. Lafont’s solution to the general problematic of linguistic
relativism in terms of a revision of Habermas’ own solution is a very
attractive project, even if it turns out (as I suspect it will) that
some degree of misreading of Habermas is required in order to urge her
solution AS a response to shortcomings in Habermas’ thought. (I say this
because my own “cognitivist” reading of Habermas is based on “What is
universal pragmatics?,” which of course is a quarter century old.)

Though I will do more than quote from the book jacket momentarily, the
book jacket continues: “....Cristina Lafont draws upon Hilary Putnam’s
work in particular [who has a new book out, by the way: his John Dewey
lectures, which look very interesting!] to criticize the linguistic
idealism and relativism of the German tradition, which she traces back
to the assumption that meaning determines reference....Part III [of the
book] shows how the shortcomings of German linguistic philosophy can be
avoided by developing a consistent and more defensible version of
Habermasís theory of communicative rationality.”

At the beginning of Part III, she presents an overview of that
defensible version, and toward the end of that overview, she notes: “As
already mentioned in the preface [to the book, written for the English
translation], Habermas’ approach oscillates between two distinct
strategies. The first is an antirealist strategy, constructivist through
and through. The second is one that could be called ‘internal realism’
[after Putnam]; it incorporates realist elements in a generally
pragmatist perspective.

“This oscillation [she continues] is possible owing to the peculiar
perspective from which Habermasís [formal pragmatics] is
developed...[by] reconstruct[ing]... normative presuppositions...from
the *internal* perspective of the speakers themselves. But as a
reconstruction of *communicative* presuppositions, such a
formal-pragmatic perspective does not per se predetermine a realist or
antirealist account. (That is to say [she clarifies], it excludes
metaphysical realism, but does not demand antirealism.)...[Yet,] as we
shall see, the attempt to defend the universalist core of a theory of
communicative rationality by means of an antirealist strategy [, as
Habermas has appeared to do in the past,] presents this theory with a
thorny difficulty....As I will try to show in what follows, only an
internal-realist strategy [like Putnamís] allows for a consistent
defense of the normative [cognitive] elements unavoidably contained in a
theory of communicative rationality (universalism, fallibilism,
cognitivism, etc.). Moreover, it does this from an entirely pragmatic,
postmetaphysical point of view....[Then she will] show how
an...internal-realist strategy [that is equivalent to what Habermas has
done recently to counter antirealist assumptions in his sense of truth]
could be articulated for the validity claim of ‘moral rightness.’ In
this way, the universalism and cognitivism of discourse ethics can be
defended, free of accompanying metaphysical baggage. And by the same
stroke, it can be made compatible with the pluralism characteristic of
modern societies.”

Realism with pluralism! What more can a person hope for, in an
evolutionary universe?



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