File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2001/habermas.0102, message 93


From: "matthew piscioneri" <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: HAB: Habermas & Meaning
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 22:27:24 


Dear Gary,

Thanks for your reply. I want to preface my response with three quotes, 
which I hope will assist us in this process of seeking to reach an 
understanding. I am a little hamstrung by the fact that our library has 
suspended my borrowing rights, and so I have to limit my sourcing of 
*examples* to the _TCA_. And to quickly clear one thing up; I take on board 
your comments about cutting & pasting slices of Habermas from across texts. 
It is a bad habit of mine, and is unmindful of the continuous development of 
his work.



Nominalists see language as just human beings using marks and noises to get 
what they want. One of the things we want to do with language is to get 
food, another is to get sex, another is to understand the origins of the 
universe. Another is to enhance our sense of human solidarity, and still 
another may be to create oneself by developing one’s own private, 
autonomous, philosophical language. It is possible that a single vocabulary 
might serve two or more of these aims, but there is no reason to think that 
there is any great big meta-vocabulary which will somehow get at the least 
common denominator of all the various uses of all the various marks and 
noises which we use for all these various purposes. So there is no reason to 
lump these uses together into something big called ‘Language’, and then look 
for its ‘condition of possibility’, any more than to lump all our beliefs 
about the spatio-temporal world together into something called ‘experience’ 
and then look, as Kant did, for its ‘condition of possibility’. (Rorty in 
_Derrida: A Critical Reader_)


Transcendental ideas have their own good, proper and therefore immanent use, 
although, when their meaning is misunderstood, and they are taken for 
concepts of real things, they become transcendent in their application and 
for that very reason can be delusive. (Kant in _Critique of Pure Reason_ )

1. The Antipodeans
	Far away, on the other side of the galaxy, there was a planet on which 
lived beings like ourselves - featherless bipeds who built houses and bombs, 
and wrote poems and computer programs. These beings did not know that they 
had minds. They had notions like ‘wanting to’ and ‘intending to’ and 
‘believing that’ and ‘feeling terrible’ and ‘feeling marvelous’. But they 
had no notion that these signified mental states - states of a peculiar and 
distinct sort - quite different from ‘sitting down’, ‘having a cold’ and 
‘being sexually aroused’. (Rorty in _Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature_)

OK. What’s first? These things called meanings.

[Gary] If you will give an example of "JH's continual talk of meaning as ...
ontological space," this would be useful for understanding (If his
space-talk is continual, there should be difficulty finding multiple
examples).

[MattP] I should have to backpedal furiously if my concerns were primarily 
with Habermas’s reification of linguistic meanings into positivisable 
entities which had a unique ontological status i.e a space-time coordinate. 
In the _TCA_ he does talk mainly of ‘the theory of meaning’ (further grist 
the mill of JH as memeticist !).

However, my main focus was on this sort of statement, which is fairly 
endemic to JH’s work in the _TCA_:

Someone who rejects a comprehensible speech act is taking issue with at 
least one of these validity claims (_TCA_ 1995, Polity Press 1.308)

or

The basic modes of these utterances are determined according to the validity 
claims implicitly raised with them, claims to truth, rightness, 
appropriateness or comprehensibility ( or well-formedness). (_TCA_ 1.39)

Now, implicit or not, I think it is worthwhile to query the ontological 
status of these ‘things’ which get raised by human speech acts. The other 
big item which gets reified by JH is *communicative rationality *, but this 
may have to wait to another post.

Going back to your post Gary, you use the verb ‘to presume’ (n.b Antipodeans 
above).

[Gary] So, you see, you are unavoidably presuming acceptable stances of
validity in your one statement about worries, which is presumably an
acceptable statement to make.

[MattP] I take verbs to be action signifiers. That is, something gets done, 
in plain language. So, how does the making of a noise (being a good 
nominalist) raise anything like a validity claim? Because something gets 
presumed. What exactly is the act of presumption? I think (!) that some 
stuff gets moved around in my brain. I sort of HOPE you do too :-).

There appear to me to be two ways in which JH could move. Firstly, the 
noises and marks human animals make *trigger* a hardwired universal 
competency/genetically constituted propensity. If this is what a validity 
claim and the process by which it is raised is to be understood then I am 
happy. This approach seems to fairly solve Hobbes’ problem of social order, 
in line with contemporary genetically-based theories of social cooperation 
(eg. Ridley, Cziko). One of the issues we get left with is the idea of 
universality. If this propensity is genetically hardwired, then why do some 
people screw other people? It’s a Pandora’s Box from here on in. All the 
issues of the distribution of a rational gene emerge; as do questions about 
*competing* instinctual urges/genetic properties, and EVEN questions about 
hegemonic social relations. The Ancients told stories of gods and goddesses 
on top of Mt. Olympus, us Moderns tell stories of universal competences, 
systematically-distorted communication practices and validity claims.

Secondly, we could invest the noises and marks we animals make with a kind 
of magic. Cultural magic. Rational forms of life now become imaginable. The 
cultural reproduction of the human species could be made equiprimordial with 
its material reproduction, although a reading of JH -AT- pp342-43 of Volume 2 
of the _TCA_ I think shows that JH hesitates here:

‘Marx was right to assign an evolutionary primacy to the economy in such 
societies [developed capitalist societies]: the problems in this subsystem 
determine the path of development of the society as a whole.’

What is *culture* ? I take it from your comments Gary, it is something which 
humans uniquely make.

[Gary] Instinctuality or inherent adaptability is a common attribute of
nature, yet human intelligence provides for a culturality that is
acquired over many years through intentional preferences (in
principle, at least); and we can each act deliberately and be highly
deliberative. So, it's obvious that we *are* already always in some
ways discontinuous with a naturalistic sense of nature. *Human*
nature is significantly human in respects that don't pertain to
nature generally. On the one hand, then, we *should* appreciate the
discontinuity that is real, to whatever extent is valid.


[MattP] Leaving to one side tautological justifications of human culture’s 
uniqueness; again it is worth asking after the contents of culture. I 
realize this questioning looks like a latter-day campaign of inquisition set 
out to root out any remaining remnants of platonism in our postmetaphysical 
philosophical age. But I am not the only one playing this particular 
language-game. Rorty plays in _Consequences of Pragmatism_ as does JH in 
_MCCA_ .

In _MCCA_ JH explicitly distances himself from Popper’s platonistic guff 
about third worldly objects (most concisely expressed in _Objective 
Knowledge_ ). The point I am painfully trying to make is that critical 
theory’s investment in the cultural sphere - and perhaps especially in the 
emancipatory potentials offered by social re-education, for example 
political correctness programs - runs the risk of falling foul of the point 
made above by Kant about the delusory potentials of transcendental schema.

Failure to pay heed to the implications of  Rorty’s nominalism about the 
contents of culture to my mind makes it obvious why a critical social 
program which thinks all you have to do is change the dominant memetic 
paradigms of a society in order to effect emancipatory outcomes, and which 
doesn’t want to build some recognition of human nature into their 
emancipatory equation … doesn’t work !

I apologize for the convoluted trains of thought presented here. What I DO 
presume in the foreground of this communicative interaction of ours, is a 
competency-context. This is socio-linguistics I guess, and although it may 
be covered by JH’s normative validity claims I think there is something else 
about the *presumption* of a competency-context which sets it apart from 
either normativity or the background Lifeworld.

Thanks & I apologise for my less than complete response. BTW, I am gathering 
my thoughts on the structure/content issue! Probably drawing more on 
Davidson's third dogma of empiricism as much as on Sellars and the myth of 
the given.

All the best

MattP

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