TOPIC 2 (2.3.

)
Transcendental pragmatics: paradigmatic turn from the philosophy of
consciousness to the philosophy of communication.

Argumentation, discourse as social dimensions of the mind in the light of

the communicative-theoretical turn.

2.3. Argumentation theory investigates the practices and standards of using

arguments. Argumentation is understood as a communicative activity of producing and
exchanging reasons in the context of doubt or disagreement.
Aristotle postulated three argumentative appeals: logical, ethical, and emotional.
Strong arguments have a balance of all of three, though logical (logos) is essential for a
strong, valid argument. Appeals, however, can also be misused, creating arguments that
are not credible.
In modern communicative philosophy Habermas is the one who has developed so-
called  Habermas's Discourse Theory widely known around the world of philosophy
and sociology.

2.3.1. The Early Development of Habermas's Interest In The Public Sphere And
Reason

Born outside Düsseldorf in 1929, Habermas came of age in postwar Germany. The
Nuremberg Trials were a key formative moment that brought home to him the depth of
Germany's moral and political failure under National Socialism. This experience was
later reinforced when, as a graduate student interested in Heidegger's existentialism, he
read the latter's reissued Introduction to Metaphysics, in which Heidegger had retained
(or more accurately, reintroduced) an allusion to the “inner truth and greatness” of
National Socialism (Heidegger 1959, 199). When Habermas (1953) publicly called for
an explanation from Heidegger, the latter's silence confirmed Habermas's conviction
that the German philosophical tradition had failed in its moment of reckoning, providing
intellectuals with the resources neither to understand nor to criticize National Socialism.
This negative experience of the relation between philosophy and politics subsequently
motivated his search for conceptual resources from Anglo-American thought,
particularly its pragmatic and democratic traditions. In moving outside the German
tradition, Habermas joined a number of young postwar intellectuals such as Karl-Otto
Apel.
Nowdays Jürgen Habermas ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in
the world who combined continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought.
 His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory
to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have
significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology,
communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology
and theology.
In the period between Knowledge and Human Interests and The Theory of
Communicative Action, Habermas began to develop a distinctive method for elaborating
the relationship between a theoretical social science of modern societies, on the one
hand, and the normative and philosophical basis for critique, on the other.

2.3.2. The Theory of Communicative Action

To understand Habermas's mature positions, we must start with his Theory of
Communicative Action (TCA), a two-volume critical study of the theories of rationality
Starting with Marx's historical materialism, large-scale macrosociological and
historical theories have long been held to be the most appropriate explanatory basis for
critical social science. However, such theories have drawbacks for the critical project.
To achieve these theoretical and methodological ends, Habermas begins this task
with a discussion of theories of rationality and offers his own distinctive definition of
rationality, one that is epistemic, practical, and intersubjective. For Habermas,
rationality consists not so much in the possession of particular knowledge, but rather in
“how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (TCA). 
The fundamental form of coordination through language, according to Habermas,
requires speakers to adopt a practical stance oriented toward “reaching understanding.”
 When actors address one another with this sort of practical attitude, they engage in
what Habermas calls “communicative action,” which he distinguishes from strategic
forms of social action.
In communicative action, or what Habermas later came to call “strong
communicative action” in “Some Further Clarifications of the Concept of
Communicative Rationality” (1998) speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of
individual (or joint) goals on the basis of a shared understanding that the goals are
inherently reasonable or merit-worthy. Whereas strategic action succeeds insofar as the
actors achieve their individual goals, communicative action succeeds insofar as the
actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative
behavior. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social
coordination in which actors “mobilize the potential for rationality” given with ordinary
language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.

2.3.3. Habermas's Discourse Theory

Habermas's theory of communicative action rests on the idea that social order
ultimately depends on the capacity of actors to recognize the intersubjective validity of
the different claims on which social cooperation depends. In conceiving cooperation in
relation to validity claims, Habermas highlights its rational and cognitive character: to
recognize the validity of such claims is to presume that good reasons could be given to
justify them in the face of criticism. TCA thus points to and depends on an account of
such justification—that is, on a theory of argumentation or discourse, which Habermas
calls the “reflective form” of communicative action.
Habermas's Discourse Theory is based on two main interesting analyses:
the pragmatic analysis of argumentation in general and the differentiation of
argumentative discourses.
The pragmatic analysis of argumentation in general. Habermas's discourse theory
assumes that the specific type of validity claim one aims to justify—the cognitive goal
or topic of argumentation—determines the specific argumentative practices appropriate
for such justification. Discourse theory thus calls for a pragmatic analysis of
argumentation as a social practice.
 The differentiation of argumentative discourses. If the different validity claims
require different types of argumentation, then the relevant differences must emerge
through a closer analysis of the ways the above aspects of argumentative practice adjust
to different sorts of content, that is, the different validity claims at issue.
Having differentiated types of discourse, Habermas must say something about how
they interrelate. Clearly, some discourses depend on other types: most obviously, moral
and ethical discourses partly depend on empirical claims, and thus depend on the
outcome of empirical discourses about the circumstances and consequences of
behavioral rules and the collective pursuit of the good life. The question of
interrelationship becomes especially urgent in the political sphere, where different
discourses intertwine and lead to competing conclusions, or when issues arise in which
discourse types cannot be cleanly separated, so that the standards of cogency become
obscure or deeply contested (McCarthy 1991, chap. 7; 1998). Because Habermas (1996)
rejects the idea of a metadiscourse that sorts out these boundary issues, he must answer
this challenge in his democratic theory.
So, Habermas's Theory of Truth and Knowledge as well as Habermas's
Discourse Theory of Morality, Politics, and Law are also very interesting and worth
checking out. Due to the time limitation I have to ask you to do this indepentedly.
You’ll manage this easily using the following link:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/

TASKS:
1. Read the article “Transcendental pragmatics. A historical perspective on the late
Frankfurt School (Habermas, Apel, Wellmer)” and prepare a short brief of it.
https://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/
transcendental_pragmatics._a_historical_perspective_on_late_frankfurt_s
2. Habermas: a brief review of the biography.
Jürgen Habermas, (born June 18, 1929, Düsseldorf, Germany), the most
important German philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. A highly
influential social and political thinker, Habermas was generally identified with the
critical social theory developed from the 1920s by the Institute for Social Research in
Frankfurt am Main, Germany, also known as the Frankfurt School. He belonged to
the second generation of the Frankfurt Institute, following first-generation and
founding figures such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.
Habermas was prominent both outside academic circles for his influential
contributions to social criticism and public debate and within them for his
voluminous treatises and essays in which he fashioned a comprehensive vision of
modern society and the possibility of freedom within it. His work powerfully
influenced many disciplines, including communication studies, cultural studies, moral
theory, law, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, political science, religious
studies, theology, sociology, and democratic theory.
As a prominent voice within West Germany’s postwar “skeptical generation,”
Habermas participated in the major intellectual debates within the country in the
second half of the 20th century and beyond. In 1953 he confronted Martin Heidegger
over the latter’s rediscovered Nazi sympathies in a review of Heidegger’s Einführung
Introduction to Metaphysics. In the late 1950s and again in the early 1980s Habermas
engaged with European-wide antinuclear movements, and in the 1960s he was one of
the leading theorists of the student movement in Germany—though he effectively
broke with the radical core of the movement in 1967, when he warned against the
possibility of a “left fascism.” In 1977 he protested against curbs on civil liberties in
domestic antiterrorist legislation, and in 1985–87 he participated in the so-called
“historians’ debate” on the nature and extent of German war guilt by denouncing
what he regarded as historical revisionism of Germany’s Nazi past; he also warned of
the dangers of German nationalism posed by Germany’s reunification in 1989–90.He
also promoted the creation of a constitutional supranational democracy in the
European Union, opposed human cloning, and warned against the reaction of
religious fundamentalists of all kinds, both within and outside the West.

3. Habermas: a brief review of his works.

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas showed how
modern European salons, cafés, and literary groups contain the resources for
democratizing the public sphere. In his 1965 inaugural lecture at Frankfurt University
“Knowledge and Human Interests”, and in the book of the same title published three
years later, Habermas set forth the foundations of a normative version of critical
social theory, the Marxist social theory developed by Horkheimer, Adorno, and other
members of the Frankfurt Institute from the 1920s onward. He did this on the basis of
 a general theory of human interests, according to which different areas of human
knowledge and inquiry—e.g., the physical, biological, and social sciences—are
expressions of distinct, but equally basic, human interests. These basic interests are in
turn unified by reason’s overarching pursuit of its own freedom, which is expressed
in scholarly disciplines that are critical of unfree modes of social life. In his
rethinking of the foundations of early critical social theory, Habermas sought to unite
the philosophical traditions of Karl Marx and German idealism with the
psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the pragmatism of the American logician and
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
Among Habermas’s most lasting preoccupations were existential questions of
religion, rationality, and “postsecular constellations,” a term that refers to the
continued coexistence in the present age of secular and religious, cosmopolitan and
ethnic, and Enlightenment and traditional worldviews. From the postwar years
onward, Habermas engaged with a variety of thinkers who were preoccupied with the
theme of hope against hope: existentialists such as Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul
Sartre, Christian political theologians such as Johann Baptist Metz and Jürgen
Moltmann, and Jewish thinkers Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse.
Habermas returned to such issues in the early 21st century in ''The Future of Human
Nature'', “Faith and Knowledge”, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God,
and Modernity, and other works.

4. The Theory of Communicative Action.

Habermas took a linguistic-communicative turn in The Theory of
Communicative Action. Drawing on the work of analytic (Anglo-American)
philosophers (Wittgenstein and Austin), Continental philosophers (Adorno, Husserl,
Alfred Schutz), pragmatists (Peirce and G.H. Mead), and sociologists, he argued that
human interaction in one of its fundamental forms is “communicative” rather than
“strategic” in nature, insofar as it is aimed at mutual understanding and agreement
rather than at the achievement of the self-interested goals of individuals. Such
understanding and agreement, however, are possible only to the extent that the
communicative interaction in which individuals take part resists all forms of nonrational
coercion. The notion of an “ideal communication community” functions as a guide that
can be formally applied both to regulate and to critique concrete speech situations.
Using this regulative and critical ideal, individuals would be able to raise, accept, or
reject each other’s claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity solely on the basis of the
“unforced force” of the better argument—i.e., on the basis of reason and evidence—and
all participants would be motivated solely by the desire to obtain mutual understanding.
Although the ideal communication community is never perfectly realized
(which is why Habermas appeals to it as a regulative or critical ideal rather than as a
concrete historical community), the projected horizon of unconstrained communicative
action within it can serve as a model of free and open public discussion within liberal-
democratic societies. Likewise, this type of regulative and critical ideal can serve as a
justification of deliberative liberal-democratic political institutions, because it is only
within such institutions that unconstrained communicative action is possible.
5. Habermas's Discourse Theory.
The ethical notions of right and wrong also admit of rational adjudication,
according to Habermas. His theory of “discourse ethics” attempted to identify the
counterfactual conditions or presuppositions of uncoerced agreement. Toward this end,
he reformulated Kant’s categorical imperative in “discourse theoretical” terms: an
agreement is fair or uncoerced when all parties concerned have been afforded a
maximum opportunity to give reasons or to state arguments before a final decision is
reached. This practical ideal provides a means of conferring a kind of truth or validity
on the ethical principles to which it may be applied. As Habermas observes in
“Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Justification” (1990): “Only those norms can
claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their
capacity as participants in a practical discourse.” Thus, whereas Kant’s ethics was
confined to the standpoint of independently reasoning subjects, Habermas’s perspective
was intersubjective and practical—it stressed the powers of reconciliation inherent in
real, practical discourse. And whereas Kant emphasized what each person can will
without contradiction to be a general law, Habermas stressed what all people can will in
agreement to be a universal norm. In later work, such as Between Facts and Norms:
Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1992), Habermas
explored the role that discourse ethics could play in justifying the ethical principles that
underlay contemporary liberal democracy.
6. Habermas's Theory of Truth and Knowledge.
Beginning in the 1970s the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas developed a
sophisticated alternative to the skepticism of the post-structuralists. As a philosophical
descendant of the Frankfurt School—a movement of Marxist social analysis and
criticism associated from the 1920s with the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social
Research—Habermas was familiar with the notion of truth as a mask of power, which
was, after all, one of the central tenets of Marx’s critique of culture and ideology. This
notion, however, presupposes that, beyond the purely partisan interests and perspectives
of economic classes, there exist genuinely nonpartisan interests and truly general
perspectives. It is this assumption, along with the possibility of distinguishing between
“true consciousness” (a defense of generalizable norms) and “false consciousness,” that
post-structuralism had abandoned. Accordingly, Habermas maintained that the concepts
of truth and knowledge, properly understood, were more complex and durable than the
post-structuralists had allowed. In the same vein, he insisted that post-structuralist
criticisms of the historical role of reason in the perpetuation of injustice and oppression
did nothing to show that reason itself must be abandoned. Rather, he firmly believed in
the maxim that the hand that inflicted the wound should cure the disease.
Habermas accepted the post-structuralists’ rejection of the traditional concept
of truth as “absolute”—i.e., universal, unchanging, and eternal. In its place, he
attempted to develop an understanding of truth rooted in a theory of the conditions of
successful communication. Drawing on the tradition of American pragmatism and the
speech-act theory of J.L. Austin and his American student John Searle (born 1932), he
contended that communication aims at reaching agreement and mutual understanding
rather than at successfully manipulating the physical world. Such understanding,
however, is the result of a series of assumptions that must take for granted the “truth” or
“validity” (in some sense of those terms) of most of the utterances they interpret. If this
were not the case, the everyday capacity to coordinate action would be impossible.
7. Habermas's Discourse Theory of Morality, Politics, and Law.