In texts such as “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn” Jürgen Habermas defends a theory that associates, on the one hand, the truth-claim raised by a speaker for a proposition p with, on the other hand, the requirement that p be “defendable on the basis of good reasons […] at any time and against anybody”. This, as is known, has been the target of criticisms by Rorty, who−in spite of agreeing with Habermas on the central tenet that the way of evaluating our (...) beliefs must be argumentative practice−declares that the only “ideal presupposed by discourse” is “that of being able to justify your beliefs to a competent audience”. We will consider two texts from 1971, -surprisingly neglected in most approaches to the debate-, in which Habermas did include such a “competence condition” to elucidate the notion of truth. We will discuss whether there are good reasons to relinquish such a condition and to refer, instead, only to the formal or procedural properties of argumentative exchanges, as Habermas does in presenting the notion of “ideal speech situation”. As we will try to argue, there are no such good reasons. (shrink)

This article rejects the received view that Post-Truth is a new, unprecedented political phenomenon. By showing that Truth and Post-Truth share the same genesis, this article will submit the idea of a Consensus Theory of Post-Truth. Part 1 looks at the difference between Post-Truth, lies and bullshit. Part 2 suggests reasons behind the current preoccupation with Post-Truth. Part 3 focuses on Habermas’s influential consensus theory of truth to suggest that truth and Post-Truth have more in common than is generally assumed. (...) Part 4 puts forward the Consensus Theory of Post-Truth. Part 5 suggests three ways to emasculate the potentially destructive effect of Post-Truth on democratic society. (shrink)

semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism.

In this dissertation I argue that reason is nothing more than the term we give to thinking taken to be legitimate. It has no a priori content. Because of this, there is no objective thing called reason which could be accepted or rejected. I argue that Nietzsche's most important contribution to the critique of the Enlightenment is his exposing of reason as a socially constructed discourse of desire. This puts him above the fray of the debates over the acceptance or (...) rejection of reason, and onto what I claim is the more productive terrain of looking at reason as problematic but unavoidable. Irigaray develops this Nietzschian approach to reason in a way that exposes the tendencies of philosophical notions of reason to prevent women from being able to articulate their interests in discourses taken to be legitimate. Through this example of the marginalization of the interests of women, she is also able to help us see just how it is that reason can operate hegemonically. This epistemological perspective lends a certain plausability to Habermas' claim that in the absence of a transcendental ground for a notion of rationality, what we should call rational is a judgment that all participants in a discussion agree is correct. Where Habermas' position becomes problematic is in his insistence that a rational consensus can be distinguished philosophically from a non rational one. It is here that Habermas' position operates to reinforce dominant exclusionary mechanisms. I draw out the implications of this position for looking at feminist in an international context, and argue that we do not need universal notions of what counts as women's liberation to be able to make cross-cultural critical judgments. Rather, what we need to be able to do this is an open ear to the self articulation of the concerns of real women. I argue that critique can be rational if we do not suppose that we can ever have a fixed notion of what counts as rational, but rather if we accept that rationality is a place holder concept for the discourses which we take to be legitimate. From this it follows that the rational is the site of inevitable struggles over legitimation. (shrink)

Jurgen Habermas is a second-generation social philosopher of the Frankfurt school, the birthplace of critical theory. He suggests that modernity is a project of substituting rationality for religion. In his analysis, such a succession is the result of a process of social evolution, in which each developmental stage has its basic concepts and modes of understanding subjective, objective, and social worlds. For him, the salient feature of rationality consists of differentiation between various validity claims of truth, truthfulness, and sincerity which (...) are indistinguishable in religious language. The rationalization of religion, hence, progresses in terms of a differentiation between validity claims, a decentration of human understanding, the disenchantment of the world, and the linguistification of the sacred. Habermas proposes a universal pragmatics in which two modes of language use are separated: instrumental-strategic, and communicative. He thinks that the failure of the enlightenment movement to replace religion with reason stems from its preoccupation with instrumental reason and language use, dispensing with communicative rationality; and the remedy lies in communicative rationality. (shrink)