Abstract

The aim of this dissertation was to explore in what sense rationality secures the ground for the possibility of cross-cultural understanding and to question what kind of understanding, if any, can be valid across cultures. My goal is not to directly answer these questions; rather it is to show why it is meaningful to raise them. My project explores the relativist challenges posed by recent upheavals in post-analytical philosophy. In this respect, I discuss the arguments of Wittgenstein, Winch, Quine, Davidson, Hollis and Habermas regarding the possibility of understanding other cultures and to see how they treat the nature and the relevance of rationality for such understanding. This is a debated issue in the tug of war of adversary claims arguing over the relevance and meaning of problems that arise in the clash of cultures in multicultural societies, though we may notice that these disputes repeat battles fought long ago. In the light of the contemporary distrust of a unique and self-sustaining rationality, postmodernist tenets, which are inclined toward a persuasive relativism, give up hopes of establishing the universal premises of understanding over cultural divides and securing the validity of a single language of the mind from skeptical doubt, as once Descartes too ambitiously dreamt. And yet, since the idea of cross-cultural understanding bears on the ability to achieve a rational consensus among people with different cultural identities, this issue has far-reaching practical implications in the context of splitting differences and conflicts between interest groups we witness today. ;After a comparative scrutiny of different attempts to move between the radical alternatives of rationalism and relativism, I stand close to Habermas's view of communicative rationality. By exploring the context transcendent power of the rational potential of language-use oriented toward communication, he gives up the monological and one-sided positions and moves over a wide spectrum from language theory to sociology to develop better conceptual weapons than the other participants in relativity debate I have discussed so far. Habermas's idea of understanding is tied to the validity claims redeemed and vindicated in any speech act and bears on critical assessment of arguments which provides for the intelligibility and the possibility of dialogue between different linguistic and cultural frameworks. On the basis of the critical thrust of communicative rationality, he points to a diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity accounting for systematically distorted communication, and provides "a yardstick" for the assessment of the disturbances bearing on understanding. Nevertheless, several critical objections to Habermas's project reveal gaps and ambiguities in his sometimes shifting view. In thinking about these problems I believe that a three-tier reconstruction of rationality may be an appropriate approach of the three-fold structure of reason on the analytically distinct levels of phenomenological, scientific-theoretical and normative discourses. However, the convincing story about the promise yielded by this project remains yet to be told