Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 00:02:45 -0800 (PST)
From: Gary D <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: HAB: 'fallibilism' in _On the Pragmatics of Communication_



I've just read all of the citations under 'fallibilism' from the
Index of _On the Pragmatics...._, and I'm satisfied now about what
bothered me. 

Thinking about 'defeasibility'--which is tangiably pertinent to
rationality (an openness to invalidation or annulment of confidence
about belief)--caused me at first to consider this a  synonym for
'fallibilism', but having trouble finding a definition of
'fallibilism' (and finding only a doctrinal definition), I realized
that it possibly *isn't* clear what fallibilism is for Habermas--or I
didn't feel confident about this all of a sudden. And it turns out
that my anxiety was valid: There is an ambiguity of levels of
relevance in talk about
fallibilism-fallibility-falsifiability--concordant with an ambiguity
in the scale of validity that may be presumed; and a correlative
scale of questionability that may be expressed in a contested
validity claim or for an interest in reflection.

I find this ambiguity very clearly demonstrated (though no
thematized!) in the use of 'fallibilism' in _On the Pragmatics...._.
There is good reason to distinguish (1) fallibilism as a *general*
stance (postmetaphysical doctrine) from (2) a stipulation that
'fallibilism' means truth-functional fallibility (e.g., M. Cooke, p.
12). And there is good reason to have a distinction between (a)
openness toward criticism of *contents* ("truth") and (b) openness
toward criticism of *processes* (epistemogeny, one might call it).
This issue especially recalls the "vertical" dimension of idealized
speech, where there is a freedom or openness toward whatever *level*
of questioning that might me pertinent. Clearly in _On
Pragmaics...._, there are several levels of focus that are gathered
under one Index entry as "fallibilism". 

By the way, *who* makes indexes in books? This might be quite an
expertise, but seems mostly an afterthought in publishing (Not in the
case of _On the Pragmatics_, though). 

So, JH mentions fallibility relative to agreements (a kind of
satisficing in our finite time for consensus formation), p. 368;
fallibility of interpretation (370 top); and relates this to the
lifeworld background (243-44, 368 bottom-369 top), which is
counterposed to the hypothetical stance most exemplified by
scientific inquiry (364, 369 mid-page, 370mid, and 407 bottom). All
this, though, is a *modest* fallibilism, more or less pertaining to
the contexts of specific validity pretensions that are
straightforwardly questionable. Dummet's sense of falsifiability is
this kind of "fallibilism" (154).

But JH also expresses a strong fallibilism, when he associates
'fallibility' with discursive issues of the status of knowledge
altogether, 356, 364 (beyond the lifeworld preconventionality of
naive realism that pretends to have a certainty which
postconventional understanding gives up altogether), which is
thematized in terms of criticizability (236); this seems to be the
scope of relevance for Peirce (313). Also, though, there is the
dimension that is associated with fallibilism in a doctrinal sense,
in the Myth of truth as certainty (349), which could be read as a
discursive thematization of the preconventional lifeworld assumptive
form world. In intellectual history, this shows as an idealized
pretense of complete knowledge (365), Logos or ultimate foundations
(337 bottom, 401, 404, 412 top), where fallibilism becomes a strong
anti-ontologism, pertaining to subjects living under conditions of
postmetaphysicality (312). 

So, this has been a quite useful exercise. Thanks, Bill, for
stimulating me to follow-up further. 

Best regards,

Gary





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