Habermas

1
Habermas

• defender of the ideals of modernism /
  Enlightenment
• but critical of de facto modernity
• in order to show pathology of modernity, has to
• extend idea of reason
• rationally ground normative principles

2
Habermas approach

• critical social science / immanent critique
• widely read
• German philosophy
• American pragmatism
• analytical philosophy
• developmental psychology
• social theory

3
Frankfurt School

• emancipatory power of reason - Marx
• scepticism in Frankfurt School
• history
• Max Weber
• Zweckrationalität (means-ends rationality)
• Iron cage of bureaucracy
• Adorno and Horkheimers Dialectic of
  Enlightenment

4
Knowledge and Human Interests

• critique of positivism
• technical knowledge not the only form of
  knowledge
• knowledge determined by quasi-transcendental
  cognitive interests

5
Knowledge and Human Interests

• empirical-analytical sciences - technical
  cognitive interest
• historical-hermeneutic sciences -practical
  cognitive interest
• critically oriented sciences - emancipatory
  cognitive interest
• weakness - reliance on philosophy of subject -
  need for linguistic turn

6
Communicative Action

• Communication and the Evolution of Society (CES),
  published 1976
• Theory of Communicative Action (TCA, 2 vols),
  published 1981

7
CES Chapter 1 - Universal Pragmatics

• reconstruct universal rules underlying
  communicative competence
• Wants to distinguish
• strategic action (oriented to success,
  purposive-rational)
• communicative action (oriented to reaching
  understanding

8
CES Chapter 1 - Universal Pragmatics

• Model of communication that embeds utterances in
  three different pragmatic relations to reality
• representing facts (the world of external
  nature)
• establishing legitimate interpersonal relations
  (our world of society)
• expressing ones own subjectivity (my world of
  internal nature)

9
CES Chapter 1 - Universal Pragmatics

• These make corresponding validity claims
• truth
• rightness
• truthfulness

10
CES Chapter 1 - Universal Pragmatics

• Other forms of rationality as lesser
• strategic action suspends validity claim of
  truthfulness
• symbolic action suspends validity claim of truth
• So it gives him his immanent principles for
  critique - distorted communication

11
CES Chapter 2 - Moral Development

• preconventional level, reward and punishment
• stage 1 (punishment/obedience)
• stage 2 (instrumental hedonism)
• conventional level, social recognition, shame
• stage 3 (good boy orientation)
• stage 4 (law and order orientation)
• post-conventional level, impersonal moral
  principles, conscience, guilt
• stage 5 (social-contractual legalism)
• stage 6 (ethical-principled orientation)

12
CES Chapter 3 - Societal Development

• rationalisation in instrumental rationality
  (economy, technology)
• rationalisation in communicative rationality
  (reason, law, morality)
• links ontogenesis (personal development) with
  social development

13
System and lifeworld (TCA)

• system - impersonal institutions of bureaucracy
  and markets - coordinated through strategic
  rationality
• lifeworld - world of shared human meanings, -
  coordinated through communicative rationality
• system colonises lifeworld and threatens
  communicative action

14
Social movements

• Social movements as defence of lifeworld and
  communicative rationality
• Distinguishes
• emancipatory movements (e.g. women's movement)
• resistance movements
• defending interests (e.g. NIMBY)
• resistance to commercial and bureaucratic power
  (e.g. green mvts)

15
Discourse ethics

• Kantian ethics
• formal / procedural,
• universal
• made social - dialogical, not monological
• made historical - social evolution

16
Discourse ethics

• oriented towards understanding and consensus
• possibility of unforced consensus and
  coordination of actions
• not negotiation of private interests but
  deliberation about public good
• ideal speech situation

17

• Fonte
• http//domino.lancs.ac.uk/ieppp/IEP422.nsf/0/81a62
  fdc26dc8bc180256c6a005a6815/Body/M3/Habermas.ppt?O
  penElement