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 context-transcendent 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.
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Notes
In this respect, Habermas endorses Hacking’s (1999) argument that, unlike natural sciences, social sciences have “looping effects”. While natural scientific theories do not change what they are about, Hacking argues, social scientific theories circulate in and out of the practice they are about and thereby change that practice. The impossibility of maintaining the third person point of view emphasized in Habermas’s dialogical model attests to his conviction that social science is kind of “moral inquiry” that facilitates the development of the rational organization of society and culture. For a more detailed criticism of Hacking’s argument, see (Kim 2005).
Although Habermas criticizes positivists for ignoring the fact that the actors’ world of meaning can be deciphered only ‘from within’ their action-context, he nonetheless argues that it does not necessarily mean that the interpreter must give up constructing a ‘causal hypothesis’ that explains why the actors believe what they do. This is why Habermas (1983) calls his approach interpretive social “science” as opposed to mere hermeneuticism. By contrast, Polanyi’s critique of positivism aims to show that the logic of scientific practice—being embodied in the tacit skills of the scientists—cannot be ‘represented’ in a causal proposition.
For Borudieu, it is quite mistaken to ground reason, as Habermas does, in the “transhistorical” human nature (Bourdieu 1991: 21) because it fails to appreciate the fact that, rather than the “precondition” of rational consensus, reason is only the “end product” of the scientists’ selfish struggles for the monopoly of symbolic capital. It is true, Bourdieu argues, that scientific truth has universality. But such universality is made available only by virtue of the scientific field which has “historicity”. As I have argued elsewhere (Kim 2009), for Bourdieu, scientific truth is not “a disembodied or a transcendental concept but a collective thing embodied in a historically evolved social space called the scientific field”.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Stephen Tyler and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. The research for this paper has been supported by a research grant from Sogang University, grant number 201010052.01
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Kim, KM. Habermas on Understanding: Virtual Participation, Dialogue and the Universality of Truth. Hum Stud 34, 393–406 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9200-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9200-2