Truth And Justification

by Jürgen Habermas, Barbara Fultner (Translator)

Jurgen Habermas has developed the theory of communicative action primarily in the context of critical social and political theory and discourse ethics. The essays collected in this volume, however, focus on the theory's implications for epistemology and metaphysics. They address two fundamental issues that have not figured prominently in his work since the early 1970s. One is the question of How can the ineluctable normativity of the perspective of agents interacting in a linguistically structured lifeworld be reconciled with the contingency of the emergence and evolution of forms of life? The other is a key problem facing epistemological realism after the linguistic How can the assumption that there is an independently existing world be reconciled with the linguistic insight that we cannot have unmediated access to "brute" reality?Truth and Justification collects Habermas's major essays on these topics published since the mid-1990s. They offer detailed discussions of truth and objectivity as well as an account of the representational function of language in terms of the formal-pragmatic framework he has developed. In defending his post-Kantian pragmatism, Habermas draws on both the continental and analytic traditions and endorses a weak naturalism and a form of epistemological realism.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Theory

327 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, the topic of his first book entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics—particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.

Reviews

[Stan Murai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Juergen Habermas developed his theory of communicative
action and rationality as a foundation for a critical
theory of society paving the way for a discourse-theoritical
conception of morality, law and democracy. However, the
essays in this volume focus on the the implications of
his ideas on what he calls "theoretical philosophy"; that
is epistemology and metaphysics, rather than practical
philosophy that is most closely associated with his name.
As one of the few modern thinkers working on the
development of a comprehensive philosophy, Habermas
brings together the traditions of Humboldt, Hegel, and
Heidegger with those of Frege, Quine, and Davidson in an
attempt to bridge the gap between the so-called continental
and analytical philosophical approaches within his own
pragmatic perspective and philosophy of language.

Habermas embraces a "linguistic turn" in order to address
the issue of action coordination and social integration within
an 'intersubjectivist' framework that attempts to avoids the
limitations of both objectivism and subjectivism. Habermas
tries to avoid reducing social or moral issues to mere
objectively observable phenomena and instead theorizes
from the point of view of participating agents. But he has
also been critical of social and ethical theories that accord
too much authority to the subject or a contextualism that
gives up all claims to objective knowledge. And his theory
of communicative action situates rationality within everyday
communication and regards the critical power of reason to
be contained in ordinary language.

Habermas may be regarded as a Kantian pragmatist who
"detranscendentalizes" Kant. In other words, there is
for him a transition from understanding the possibility
of human experience shaped by the mind to a
Wittgensteinian conception of experience as linguistic
expressions of human activities, interests, actions, beliefs,
and concerns. Several of the essays in this volume are
devoted these themes in his own Kantian pragmatic terms.

Habermas himself says it no better: "As subjects capable
of speech and action, we already find ourselves in a
linguistically structured lifeworld. How can the normativity
that is unavoidable from the perspective of the participants
in this lifeworld be reconciled with the contingency of
sociocultural forms of life that have evolved naturally?...
How can we reconcile the assumption that there is a world
existing independently of our descriptions of it and that
is the same for all observers with the linguistic insight
we have no direct, linguistically unmediated access to
"brute" reality?..."

[David Garay · Rating 4 out of 5]

De difícil lectura (para mi, obviamente). Sin embargo, el capítulo III es de una joyita; muy interesante como logra enlazar el concepto de propio del discurso fáctico, con el de , propio del normativo; sobre todo porque en el lenguaje cotidiano se devela una equiparación ontológica.