Habermas on Understanding: Virtual Participation, Dialogue and the Universality of Truth

Abstract

Although the success of Habermas's theory of communicative action depends on his dialogical model of understanding in which a theorist is supposed to participate in the debate with the actors as a 'virtual participant' and seek contexttranscendent truth through the exchange of speech acts, current literature on the theory of communicative action rarely touches on the difficulties it entails. In the first part of this paper, I will examine Habermas's argument that understanding other cultural practices requires the interpreter to virtually participate in the ''dialogue'' with the actors as to the rationality of their cultural practice and discuss why, according to Habermas,such dialogue leads to the ''context-transcendent truth''. In the second part, by using a concrete historical example, I will reconstruct a ''virtual dialogue'' between Habermas and Michael Polanyi as to the rationality of scientific practice and indicate why Habermas's dialogical model of understanding based on the methodology of virtual participation cannot achieve what it professes to do.

Beyond Justification: Habermas, Rorty and the Politics of Cultural Change

“…However, in many places in his writings, Habermas makes it explicit that the universal communicative competence extracted from the wide variety of context-dependent language use should be regarded as one of many scientific hypotheses and, as such, should be subject to an empirical test. In his 1983 paper, for example, Habermas argues that the rational reconstruction of the subjective know-how of actors in terms of basic, universal communicative competence is, like any other scientific hypothesis, open to 'revision' in accordance with empirical observation (1983: 261; for more details, see Kim, 2002Kim, , 2005Kim, , 2011. 3.…”

Social Performance as Cultural Critique: Critical Theory beyond Bourdieu and Habermas

“…In a series of papers and book (see Kim, 2002Kim, , 2011Kim, , 2014Kim, , 2016, I used concrete, real-world examples to show why the communicative action model of ideology critique, like the psychoanalytic model, fails to distinguish between truth and ideology. Here I will briefly discuss only one of those examples to indicate the deficiency of Habermas's communicative model of ideology critique (see Kim, 2011 for more details). In 1950, astronomers rejected Immanuel Velikovsky's highly unorthodox theoretical interpretations of the behavior of Venus even without reading his publications.…”

“…123–4). This is indeed the core of Habermas's dialogical model of understanding through virtual participation (Kim, ).…”

“…Rather, they would say that they have done their best to remain within the discourse and eventually decline Habermas's request to continue the dialogue. If Habermas () charges them for “performative self‐contradiction” and asks them to return to the conversation, they would reply either that they don't understand what the performative self‐contradiction is or, even in case they understand, they would decline Habermas's urge to continue the dialogue, saying that they are no more interested in such discourse (Kim, ).…”

“…Thus, Habermas's distinction between rational consensus and ideology remains patently ambiguous and abstract. In a series of papers and book (see Kim, , , , ), I used concrete, real‐world examples to show why the communicative action model of ideology critique, like the psychoanalytic model, fails to distinguish between truth and ideology. Here I will briefly discuss only one of those examples to indicate the deficiency of Habermas's communicative model of ideology critique (see Kim, 2011 for more details).…”