3.6 - Vogel, Steven - Habermas and Science (en)

7/30/2019 3.6 - Vogel, Steven - Habermas and Science (en)

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Habermas and Science

Habermas and Science

by Steven Vogel

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 3 / 1988, pages: 329-349, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=03554d8d-bd83-4e93-9862-8c5f16fb4d72http://www.ceeol.com/


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Marx's first thesis on Feuerbach suggests that idealism was right in assertinghat the "objective" world cannot be seen as something merely external andindependent of us, but rather must be viewed as something we have a hand inproducing - but then goes on obscurely to claim that in contradistinction to idealismthis "production" has to be understood "materialistically." There is indeed fromthevery beginning a tension in Marxism between the heritageofa Gennan idealismthat insists on the irreducible contribution of an active, world-constituting subjectto what is called "objectivity" and a claim to materialism that wants to find, asit were behind the constituting subject, a "real" natural world that makes boththe subject and the act of constitution possible, and that itself can be investigatedby science.'There is a prima facie contradiction here - as there is between any sort of Hegelianepistemology and the claims ofmaterialism. If knowledge changes the object, thenthe latter is neither independent of us nor straightforwardly' 'material. " TypicallyWesternMarxism has tried to resolve this by asserting a dualism between naturalscience and social theory: the insight that knowledge is active, and that subjectand object are not separable, is said to hold only for knowledge of society, sincethis is indeed something we have made and can be said to "constitute." Capitalismmakes the social realm seem independent and immutable, like nature - which iswhy the error of investigating it by using the objective methods of natural scienceis such a tempting one. When it comes to investigating (real) nature, on the otherhand, such methods are straightforwardly appropriate, since nature is independentof us. In such a dualism, both sides of the dilemma find a place: materialism issafeguarded by the objectivity of natural science, while what Marx called the,'active" side is preserved in a dialectical social theory which employs very differentmethods.The locus classicus here is Georg Lukacs' s History and Class Consciousness,

the work which signalled the beginning of theWestern Marxist tradition. "Whenthe epistemological ideal of natural science is applied to nature," Lukacs writes,"it simply furthers the progress of science. But when it is applied to society itturns out to be an ideological weapon of the bourgeoisie. "2 Marxism requires adifferent' 'epistemological ideal," one which recognizes the interdependence ofsubject and object when society is being discussed. Yet Lukacs's account is markedby an ambiguity: in particular, his attacks on the epistemological errors underlying


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330 Praxis Internationalcategory," as he writes;' and hence that natural science's methods, which treatnature as something independent of the social, are unacceptable even in their ownrealm. But Lukacs is unable to assert this explicitly, because to do so would seemto entail that nature too is "constituted," and hence to put into question thefundamental assumption of material ism. Instead, he simply leaves the claim thatthe methods of natural science are valid for investigating nature undefended. Noreal account of natural science's epistemological basis is offered; instead it seemsto be assumed that the standard (positivist) ones are fine. The result is an uneasymarriage between a Hegelian account of social theory and an implicitly positivistview of science - based, it is worth noting, on a dualism that neither Hegel northe positivists would find remotely plausible.Lukacs never acknowledges the problem, and as a result bequeathes it as a seriousdilemma to later Western Marxist thought." It was Jurgen Habermas, in the late1960s, who made the most significant and interesting attempt to resolve it - tooffer, that is, a dualist account of natural science and social theory in which bothsides find their justification, combining the Hegelian insight that knowledge is active(and social) with the materialist claim that nature is independent of us in a waythat does violence to neither. It is this attempt, most clearly developed in Habermas's1969 Knowledge and Human Interests? that I want to examime in this essay. Ichoose to focus on Habermas because I think his work is the most sophisticatedand convincing defense of Western Marxism's dualism to date - and becausenonetheless I think it fails. I think the tension between a social, "activist" accountof knowledge and materialism is too strong, and therefore that no such dualismwill succeed. Habermas's best efforts (and they are impressive ones), I will argue,do not prevent fundamental and unresolvable difficulties from re-emerging in histheory at crucial points.I will begin by briefly summarizing Habermas's position, and then will examinetwo significant problems it faces - one about the status of nature in his account,and the other about the way he draws the distinction between natural science andsocial theory. I will argue that these two problems are connected, and indeed thatthey derive precisely from the tensionbetweenmaterialism and a view of knowledgeas active which I have already outlined. I will end by trying to suggest why thistension cannot be resolved, and why therefore I think the attempt at developinga consistent dualism sharply distinguishing natural science from social theory oughtto be abandoned.

11Like Lukacs, Habermas wants to reject scientism without rejecting science to assert the epistemological independence of a critical social theory withoutlimiting the validity of natural science when applied within its own legitimaterealm. But unlike Lukacs, he recognizes that this will require a new and independent


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Praxis International 331hile this led some in the Western Marxist tradition (notably Marcuse) to denyb), rejecting natural science itself as ideological and suggesting a New Sciencehich would avoid the critique of objectivism, Habermas sees that the contradictionepends on the suppressed premise (c) that contemporary natural science can onlye accounted for on objectivistic grounds, and goes on to deny this premise. Theof reification only shows that objectivism is ideological, not natural science.f a non-objectivist account of natural science were possible which at the same timeintained the epistemological independence of social theory, then contemporaryatural science could be saved without falling into the contradictions of Lukacsr the romantic speculations of Marcuse.This is Habermas's project in Knowledge and Human Interests. His critique ofjectivism is straightforward, and derived from German idealism: it 11 'renouncesnquiry into the knowing subject," and so "loses sight of the constitution of theobjects of possible experience," he writes. "In Kantian terms, it ignorers] thesynthetic achievements of the knowing subject . . . . In this way the naive idea thatknowledge describes reality becomes prevalent. This is accompanied by the copyheory of truth. " 6 Habermas' s immanent critique of theories of science, fromComte and Mach to Peirce and Dilthey, is meant to dissolve this "objectivistillusion" 7 by indicating the irreducible contribution of the knowing subject to theconstitution of the objects of knowledge.Habermas introduces a theory of knowledge-constitutive interests, identifyingcertain fundamental human "interests" tied to fundamental modes of human action,and argues that to each of these interests is bound a specific form of knowledge.On the one hand, "empirical-analytical" knowledge, the knowledge of the naturalsciences, is tied to the fundamental human interest in prediction and control ofthe external environment, and associated with the form of action Habermas callsinstrumental action, or labor. On the other hand, "historical-hermeneutic" knowledge, the knowledge produced by the Geisteswissenschaften, is tied to a fundamentalinterest in the achievement ofmutual understanding, and associated with the form

of action he calls communicative action, or interaction." The two interests, andhence the two forms of action, are mutually irreducible and' 'equiprimordial."Built into the structure of the species, they function, Habermas writes, as "quasitranscendental" conditions of the objectivity of knowledge, meaning that theyhave a transcendental function but arise from actual structures of human life: fromstructures of a species that reproduces its life both through learning processes ofsocially organized labor and processes of mutual understanding in interactionsmediated in ordinary language. These basic conditions of life have an intereststructure. The meaning of the validity of statements derivable within the quasitranscendental systems of reference of processes of inquiry in the natural and culturalsciences is determined in relation to this structure. 9This represents an improvement on Lukacs in several ways. First, it grounds


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332 Praxis Internationalthe sciences of nature, while simultaneously conceding and explaining the validityof the methods of the latter within their own realm. Natural science is no longerleft epistemologically hanging. Yet at the same time, positivist accounts of naturalscience are ruled out: Habermas blocks the move to objectivism by employingthe notion of a knowledge-constitutive interest. It is not an independent realmof "external reality" that natural science tells us about, but rather an objectdomain constituted by the human species, in the behavioral system of instrumentalaction." Not natural science but its own ' "scientistic self-misunderstanding" ishere under attack: the illusion of the independence of the objects of knowledgethat Lukacs had termed "contemplation", and had brilliantly connected to Marx' saccount of fetishism.Thus with the notion of quasi-transcendental interests in the first place and thedualism of labor and interaction in the second, Habermas seems neatly to resolvethe problems with Lukacs's early Western Marxist position. Yet systematicdifficulties arise with respect to both these strategies, which raise questions as towhether Habermas has really avoided the tension between materialism and an"activist" view of knowledge that proved to be Lukacs's undoing. Let me considereach in turn.

The first problem has to do with the ambiguous status of nature within a theoryof "quasi-transcendental" interests. 11 Habermas is clearly committed to someform of Kantianism, according to which the object domains of the sciences areconstituted in the various frameworks of action outlined above. "Nature" thenhas to be seen, if not exactly as a Lukacsian "social category, " still necessarilyas phenomenal in the Kantian sense - as a constituted reality, our knowledge ofwhich is pre-structured by the behavioral framework of instrumental action. Thisis, as we have seen, precisely Habermas's answer to an objectivism that holdsto a view of nature as independent of human activity and knowledge and to a copytheory of truth.Yet nature must also play another role in the theory of interests, one which forany full-blooded Kantianism must necessarily appear incompatible with the first.

For Habermas wants his theory to be a materialist one, meaning that nature mustat the same time be seen as prior to and independent of the human. The "behavioralframework of instrumental action", on Habermas's account, is of course itselfsimply a natural characteristic of a natural species, and presumably developed inaccordance with ordinary evolutionary processes. Hence nature appears not onlyas constituted by the interests, but also as the independent physical realm whichgenerates them and so underlies the possibility of the act of constitution. Habermasasserts both:


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Praxis InternationalThis is why the interests are only quasi-transcendental.

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Since it is posited with the behavioral system of instrumental action, this framework[i.e., the conditions under which nature is constituted] cannot be conceived as thedetermination of a transcendental consciousness as such. Rather, it is dependent onthe organic constitution of a species that is compelled to reproduce its life throughpurposive-rational action. Hence the framework that establishes a priori the meaningof the validity of empirical statements is contingent as such. 13The Kantian solution to this problem, of course, is to distinguish phenomenarom noumena; and Habermas too seems forced to posit a distinction between"nature in itself, " the nature preceding human history and giving rise to the systemsf action that underlie the interests, and "nature for us," the nature disclosed tos via the medium of the behavioral system of instrumental action. 14 But whereasant keeps the two realms rigorously apart, Habermas cannot. The trouble is thathe quasi-transcendentalism here will only allow of quasi-noumena: Kant'sknowable things in themselves here become a "nature preceding human history"nd an "organic constitution of the species" which are quite explicitly the objectsf human knowledge. The "contingent framework" that binds our knowledge ofnature "with transcendental necessity" is something we learn about from sciencessuch as paleontology, evolutionary biology, anatomy, etc.To call the interests quasi-transcendental seems only to name the problem, notto solve it: how could an interest that grounds our knowledge of the empiricalitself be known to have an empirical origin?" A circle seems to arise: we needto know something about nature as it is independentlyof the "knowledge-constitutiveinterests" to ground the theory's assertions about the "interested" structure ofknowledge, but if these assertions are true it is just this sort of knowledge whichturns out to be impossible. The issue isn't, as Habermas sometimes suggests,whether' 'sciences of origin" such as the theory of evolution might involve somespecies-interest other than the instrumental one," but rather whether they cancoherently be thought of as operating subject to any interest at all. For if theydo so operate, then the' 'nature" they disclose is not nature in itself, but rathernature as constituted subject to some interest; while if they do not so operate, andare somehow' 'interest-free," then the claim that all knowledge is intimately boundwith interest is vitiated. In the first case, "nature" - including the nature we believepreceded us - turns out to be a human (social) product; in the second case,"objectivism" turns out to be justified.The trouble is that Habermas wants to have his cake and eat it too - to assert,against positivism, the' 'interested" contribution of a species-subject to the natureinvestigated by natural science on the one hand while maintaining a naturalisticbelief in the origin of this subject through purely natural processes on the other.The dilemma thus engendered seems to me to be insoluble: but it is just the dilemmaI have suggested bedevils Western Marxism from the beginning. To say that even


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334 Praxis Internationalinterests, just as Lukacs avoided it by excluding natural science as a whole fromthe critique of objectivism. The real function of the notion of nature-in-itself inHabermas's epistemology is thus to save materialism, by insuring that the theoryconforms to our (and natural science's) pre-philosophical intuitions that nature isindependent of us and antedates us. But these intuitions are ones that the rest ofthe epistemology simply contradicts. The problem is the same one Lukacs faced:the difficulty of combining a theory of knowledge as the act of a world-constitutingsubject with a materialism in which nature must retain ontological priority. Theantinomical status of nature in Habermas' s quasi-transcendentalism is the first hintthat his attempt at synthesis does not succeed.

IVThe second problem with Habermas' s account has to do with the methodologicaldistinctions it draws between natural science and social theory. Although as I have

argued Habermas's position represents an advance over Lukacs in recognizingthe need to offer a non-objectivist, non-positivist justification of natural science'sclaim to validity, I now wish to show that nonetheless on the level of methodHabermas in his early works remains incongruously beholden to an outmodedpositivism.Habermas himself has in recent years conceded as much. In the 1982 "Replyto My Critics", he writes that "in the light of the debate set off by Kuhn and

Feyerabend, I see that I did in fact place too much confidence in the empiricisttheory of science in Knowledge and Human Interests. ' , 18 Yet I am not sure thateven now Habermas sees the full significance of his failure to examine that debate.Indeed, I want to argue, the deeper implications of the Kuhnianor "post-empiricist"critique of positivism help to point out some significant difficulties in Habermas'sepistemological position as a whole. Further, I will try to show, these samedifficulties continue to haunt even Habermas's later work, in which the problemsof Knowledge and Human Interests have purportedly been resolved.Natural science, according to the scheme of Knowledge and Human Interests,is fundamentally monological: the scientist is confronted with a world of objectshe or she is concerned to control, not a world of other subjects with whom heor she needs to communicate. "Purposive-rational action . . . is in principle solitary,"Habermas writes. 19 It is based on the possibility (quasi-transcendentally guaranteed) of the replicability of experiment: "every individual experiment assures usof a universal relation, which, under exactly similar conditions, must also be con-firmed in all future repetitions of the same experiment.' '20 It is erfolgskontrollien,concerned with the success or failure of technical operations with external nature.It is marked above all byprogress - indeed, Habennas writes, this is "the exemplaryfeature" that distinguishes it from other forms of knowledge."Much of what Habermas writes about scientific method rings quaintly today in


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Praxis International 335observation, which often takes the form of an experiment, we generate initialconditions and measure the results of operations carried out under theseconditions. 22r, elsewhere:Theories in the empirical sciences are required strictly to separate [theoretical]propositions from facts. The empirical accuracy of their. . .inferences is subsequentlychecked [kontrolliert] by means of empirical propositions expressing the result ofsystematic observations independent of the theory. To the extent that they haveempirical reference, "pure" languages [i.e., those employed by empirical science]demand in principle a separation between understanding logical connections andobserving empirical matters of fact. 23Despite its pragmatist tinge, this is fundamentally a positivist account: it unritically repeats precisely the dogma of a split between theory and observation,tween language and "data", that post-empiricist philosophy of science has beeno concerned to reject. Habermas is much more concerned, of course, to showhat the hermeneutic sciences are not marked by this split - and, indeed, uses thisfference to support his critique of positivist attempts to assimilate social sciencenatural science." But he is fighting a straw man. He attacks mainstream episteology for defending the applicability of positivist methods to social materialithout noticing that in fact among mainstream epistemologists by the late 1960saith in the applicability of those methods anywhere was rapidly dying.The truth, as Mary Hesse has convincingly pointed out, is that the picture oftural science painted by Kuhn and the post-empiricists looks remarkably similaro Habermas' s picture of a hermeneutic science. 25 Natural sciences as well asocial sciences, in that picture, are marked by an inevitable, and non-vicious,ircularity in the relation between interpretive scheme (theory) and data, by anstitutive role for discourse among investigators, by the lack of any fonnalizableutral framework for obtaining "truth". What post-empiricism has done, in fact,s to discern the element of discursive (as opposed to formal) rationality so centralo hermeneutics within the natural sciences themselves, thereby rejecting theitivist dream of a formalizable Method for science uncorrupted by the messinessr ordinary language." This seems to put into question not only Habermas'strong emphasis on the monologic character of natural scientific investigation, butlso his sharp dualism between "empirical" natural science and "hermeneutic"ocial science.This point can be pushed too far, though. It would be a mistake to accusebermas in Knowledge and Human Interests of having failed to recognize aundamentally discursive aspect to the work of natural scientists. On the contrary,s already noted, insisting on this aspect is cental to his assertion that the methodsf the natural sciences may not, contra positivism, be taken as the only route tonowledge. Habermas criticized Mach and Comte for ignoring the constitutive


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336 Praxis Internationalpermanent consensus can be generated by means of scientific method, then realitymeans nothing but the sum of those states of fact about which we can obtainfinal opinions";28 and if this is so, then the process by which such opinionsare formed becomes crucial. Peirce recognizes, writes Habermas, that "thecognitive process is discursive at every stage" 29 - opinions are not formed monologically, but through discussion. "The logical analysis of inquiry, therefore, isconcerned not with the activities of a transcendental consciousness as such butwith those of a subject that sustains the process of inquiry as a whole, that is withthe community of investigators, who endeavor to perform their common taskcommunicatively. " 30Thus a communicative element to natural science is admitted by Habermas fromthe beginning. In the Positivismusstreit of the early 1960s, Habermas had alreadyargued in a similar manner, with respect not to Peirce but to Popper. Popper inThe Logic of Scientific Discovery had exposed a fundamental circularity in thepositivist account of the relation of theory to observation. Universal theoreticalstatements, early positivism held, had to be "verified" by appealing to singularstatements (' 'basic statements," "protocol sentences' ') expressing the results ofempirical observation. But these basic statements themselves, Popper pointed out,could not be formulated without employing universal terms, in essence committingtheutterer to theoretical (especially dispositional) claims. Thus the process of testinga theory "has no natural end": it is not a matter of stopping at indubitable protocolsentences but of deciding, Popper argued, which basic statements we wish(tentatively) to accept." This decision is inevitably a social one, made by thecommunity of investigators, and reveals itself as sedimented in the very languagescientists speak. Science thus depends upon the possibility of this sort of socialagreement; its absence, Popper writes, would mean the "failure of language asa means of universal communication . . . . In this new Babel, the soaring edificeof science would lie in ruins." 32 Popper's work, Habermas argues, thus revealsscientific research to be irreducibly social, since inevitably tied to discursiveagreement from the very start, just as Peirce's does."Indeed, Habermas criticizesboth Popper and Peirce for failing to take this insightseriously enough. Neither figure adequately recognizes that the discovery of anirreducibly communicative element at the heart of natural science's theorizing infact explodes the empiricist identification of natural scientific knowledge withknowledge tout court: it now turnsout, Habermas argues, that there must be anotherform of knowledge, a hermeneutic one, to make the communication among investigators possible. If Popper had taken his position further, he would have seen thata hermeneutic social theory, employing methods and "values" quite distinct fromthose of the natural sciences, is thus not only possible but even necessary, in orderto ground natural science;s own claim to validity. 34 The same is true of Peirce,Habermas writes:


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Praxis International 337purposive-rational action which is in principle solitary . . . . The communication ofinvestigators requires a use of language that is not confined to the limits of technicalcontrol over objectifiednatural processes. It arises from symbolic interactionbetweensocietal subjects who reciprocally know and recognize each other as distinct individuals. This communicative action is a system of reference that cannot be reducedto the framework of instrumental action,"But there is something puzzling in this argument. For the recognition of anavoidable communicative element to natural scientific inquiry would seem to

that such inquiry cannot be understood on the model ofmonologic instrumentalat all; it is curious that Habermas interprets it instead as meaning that there

ust be another form of inquiry, the hermeneutic. He accepts Peirce's accountof natural science, that is, but then wants to complement it with a different accountof the Geisteswissenschaften as tied not to "Iabor' but to "communication". Itisn't clear, though, why the recognition of the discursive character of natural sciencedoesn't vitiate precisely the dualism Habermas is trying to establish. If naturalscientific theorizing isn't monologic, then the sharp break between "empirical"and "hermeneutic' sciences Habermas asserts no longer seems plausible. Instrumental action alone turns out to be no more the sole foundation for natural sciencethan it is for the sciences of society - which is exactly what post-empiricism leadsone to expect. 36Habermas's argument in the Positivismusstreit perhaps makes his position - and

what is wrong with it - clearer. He convincingly criticizes Popper for a residualpositivism in still believing that the potentially falsifying "facts" which arecompared with theoretical predictions in an empirical test of a theory can beidentified as "facts" in a theory-independent way, and shows indeed that theimpossibility of conceptualizing a "fact" separately from a theoretical context reallyfollows from Popper's own account of the "basis-problem".37 It turns out,however, that what Habermas means by the "theoretical context" in which thefacts of science are constituted is simply the technical project of science asinstrumental action as a whole - the facts are constituted, that is, by the' 'technicalinterest.' '38 He doesn't see what Kuhn, making a similar critique of Popper, saw:that there is not one "theoretical context' ' in which scientific facts are constituted,but rather potentially many such competing contexts. Habermas in a sense"anticipates" Kuhn here in that he insists on the theory-ladenness of facts in science;but the only' 'theory" he really finds them laden with is the single one implicitlyposited by the universal and evolutionarily determined behavioral system of"instrumental action." He doesn't recognize, as Kuhn does, that "theoryladenness" means that facts may be laden with particular scientific theories, andthus may change over historical time.Kuhn's insight means that scientific facts are constituted in a social context,


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338 Praxis InternationalHabermas, discursive justification is thus a part of science, but only a part; thenormative principles (the "values' ') that guide it, such as successful predictionand control, come from elsewhere - from an independent realm of monologicpurposive-rational action where hermeneutic categories do not apply. 39 Again,Kuhn's insight is more radical: it is that discourse, and the hermeneutic categoriesand logic it entails, are central to the actions and the norms of scientists too,determining what they see, what they do, what standards they employ, what countsas successful prediction or control for them, etc.Habermas criticizes Popper for the latter's faith in theory-independent falsifiers;but Habermas seems equally criticizable, in the Kuhnian context, for his own faithin discourse-independent action. In the last analysis, Habermas turns out to beoperating with a relatively minimal notion of the contribution of discourse to naturalscience, according to which the only role it plays is in theory-choice; "datacollection," "experimentation", etc,. are taken as essentially monologic, and tiedto the framework of instrumental action. That the state of the discussion abouttheories might in turn affect the "observed data", a commonplace of postempiricism, seems not to be seriously considered by Habermas; to recognize it,it seems to me, would be to see the inadequacy of his dualism. The "instrumentalframework" is simply never encountered independently of the communicative one;his attempt to separate the two out (even if only for "analytical" purposes),40seems indicative of the extent to which Habermas himself remains in thrall topositivist assumptions.

vHabermas's later work on theories of science, beginning with his self-critical"A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests," attempts to overcome theseproblems by more clearly rejecting the positivist view of scientific method asmonologic." Instead of seeing the distinction between natural science and her

meneutic social theory as founded on a parallel distinction between instrumentalaction within a world of objects and communication within a social world of subjects,Habermas now explicitly admits that both sides of the latter distinction play a rolewithin natural science. His new theory of communicative competence asserts aconstitutive role for discourse in the genesis of all validity claims, including thosein the natural sciences. The truth of a statement cannot be explicated independentlyof an account of the process of argumentat ion in which consensus on that truthis achieved; thus scientific theories, to the extent they are correctly called' 'true,"cannot be viewed as tied only to a monologic framework of purposive-rationalaction.Indeed, "discourse" now becomes a technical term, reserved by Habermas fora specific sort of communication, ofwhich the paradigm case is precisely scientificargumentation. Whereas under ordinary conditions of communication (for which


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Praxis International 339Discourses serve to test the truth-claims of opinions (and norms) that have becomeproblematic. In discourses the only permissible force is the force of the betterargument; the only permissible motive is the co-operative search for truth. Becauseof their communicative structure, discourses are freed from the requirements ofaction; they do not accommodate processes in which information is acquired; theyare purged of action and experience. Information serves as the input to discourse;the output consists in the acknowledgement or rejection of problematic truth-claims.Nothing is produced in the discursive process except arguments . . . . The strangesuspension [of belief] that makes hypothetical thinking possible extends to truth claimsthat in the practical realms of communicative and instrumental action are normallynaively accepted. 42cientific and normative discourse follow the same pattern. Instead of focusingn our experiences in the world (with the truth-claims implicit in our accountsf those experiences presupposed), as ordinary communication does, discourseocuses on the truth-claim itself, and tries, through argument, to determine whethert is justified."In discourse, where' 'the only permissible force is the force of the better argueverything is potentially up for debate - not only the particular truth-claimhose validity has become problematic, but the theory employed to justify it, andven the correct language for the description of the observed phenomenon andhe method for its observation. "The formal properties of discourse must thereore be constituted in such a way that the level of discourse can be shifted at anyment, and that whenever necessary an initially chosen linguistic and conceptualystem can be recognized as inappropriate and subjected to revision: progressn knowledge takes place in the form of a substantial critique of language. " 4 4aberrnas presents an account of theoretical discourse as moving through a seriesf stages marked by increasing reflexivity, as first individual assertions, thenheories, then languages are rendered problematic; at the ultimate stage it is theery process by which alternate languages are proposed and what that signifieshat becomes the explicit subject of debate, leading Habermas says "to a normativencept of knowledge in general. " As discourse becomes increasingly self-reflexive,t is inevitably driven to epistemology.45Here Habermas not only accepts the Kuhnian point that satisfactory explana

of "anomalies" may require high-level shifts in theoretical frameworksbut also helps resolve some of its problems. While Kuhn saw thestitutive role of discourse among scientists in the development and justificationf an individual theory or paradigm - a role that could not be trivialized as relevantnly to the "context of discovery" or reduced to some (in principle monologic)"hypothetico-deductive method" - the lack of any discourse-independent languager metatheoretical framework for choosing between alternative theories led him toiew such choices as irrational (thereby betraying his own unconscious positivism).abermas sees, on the other hand, that the appeal to discourse works here too:


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340 Praxis Internationalstatus and structure, substantive epistemological conclusions can be expected toarise - e. g., about the untenability of positivist notions of method or rationality,or of "objectivism" in general."Yet Habermas shrinks back from the ultimate implications of his position. The

assertion that the very language employed by science must be open for discursiverevision, and is not "determined" by some neutral "data," leads in the postempiricist context to the denial of a theory or language-independent framework ofexperiences that scientific theories are about. "The scientist with a new paradigm,"Kuhn writes, "sees differently from the way he had seen before. "47 Thisconclusion is one Habermas cannot accept:The a priori of experience (which lays down the structure of the objects of possibleexperience) is independent of the a priori of argumentative reasoning (which laysdown the conditions of possible discourses) . . . . Theories can only be constructed,and progressively reconstructed . . . in a theoretical language whose fundamentalpredicates are always related to the independently constituted objects of possibleexperience. The theory languages . . . can interpret the structures of an object domainnot yet permeated by science. They can also to a certain extent reformulate them.But . . . these languages cannot transform the structures themselves into conditionsof another object domain. It is always the experience of identical objects of our worldwhich is being interpreted differently. 48There is no argument here, simply an assertion, and one in which Habermas'sinstinct for dualism re-emerges. The extent to which linguistic changes can reactback onto descriptions of observations is carefully limited by Habennas to the realmof discourse, explicitly separated from "action" as we have seen. Habermas seemsto be appealing here to the commonsense view that the objects of experience arewhat they are independently of us, and hence that changes in our theories cannotreally produce changes in them; but in fact such an argument is not open to him,since on his account the objects of experience are not independent but are ratherconstituted objects. Habermas thus is left simply to say that they are constituted

"independently of discourse, " constituted that is in some special' 'pre-discursive'framework which somehow is exempted from the requirement of discursive justification and is immunized against critique. Once it is admitted though that "objectsof experience" are not independent of us, the increasing reflexivity of the critiqueof knowledge Habermas identifies would seem to require that the framework inwhich they are constituted too be brought into the light of discourse; Habermas'sattempt arbitrarily to limit this reflexivity by asserting that it does not extend to"experience" seems unjustifiable on his own terms.Indeed, only what is essentially a piece of sleight-of-hand allows Habermas toaccept the post-empiricist relativization of ' 'truth" to particular theories while stillasserting the existence of a theory-independent realm of "objective experience"constituted by action. He posits a distinction between "objectivity" and "truth",arguing that problems of the constitution of objects (which in the case of natural


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Praxis International 341verifiable success [kontrollierbaren Erfolg] of action based on these experiences. Truth,i.e., the justification of the validity-claim implicitly put forward by assertions, showsitselfon the other hand not in successful feedback from action [erfolgskontroiliertenHandlungen] , but rather in successful argumentation [erjolgreichen Argumentationen] , through which the validity claim can be discursively redeemed.49The "truth" of scientific theories is now admitted to be dialogically constructedand hence social), but the experiences these theories are about are still vieweds monologic (and hence "objective"). Since these experiences themselves arexpressed in statements (of communicative action), Habermas is forced to drawrather unconvincing distinction between "facts" about ' 'states of affairs"[Sachverhalten] whose validity is justified in discourse, and the "information"bout "objects of experience" that is communicated in ordinary action. 50 Onlyreviously problematized statements, it turns out, can really be called "true" or"false" , and then only in the context of discourse; the ordinary pieces of informationwe trade with each other - "it rained last night," "he's mad at his boss," "TWAno longer flies non-stop to Boston" - are only "objective" or "subjective". 51Such a distinction seems a contortion at best, and at worst makes it impossibleto account for the obvious connection between the sentences of scientific discourseand those we ordinarily utter in communicative action. 52 Mary Hesse has criticized Habermas particularly persuasively on this score. On the one hand, if one

admits (as Habermas does) that the truth of ordinary empirical remarks such as"this ball is red" is in some sense" grounded" in the objectivity of the experienceof dealing with the ball (in the framework of instrumental action), it is hard tosee why more complex statements of science are not so grounded as well. 53 Todeny' 'this ball is red" any even "proto-scientific" status would seem to regressbehind the insight of Knowledge and Human Interests into the connection betweenscience and action. On the other hand, if as we have seen the very languageemployedby science is subject to discursive justification and hence possible revision,it is hard to see why the language of the lifeworld in which ordinary communicativeaction takes place is itself somehow immune to such revision. 54 From both pointsof view - as Hesse points out elsewhere - the sharp dichotomy posited byHabermaslooks much more like a continuum. 55But this returns us to the same conclusion we reached with respect to Habermas'sposition in Knowledge and Human Interests. Although the discursive (and hencesocial) element in science is recognized by Habermas, the significance of thisrecognition is explicitly limited by a dualism that separates theory from action,asserting the existence of a pre-discursive realm of "instrumental action" or"objectivity of experience" that is independent of language and hence (in Kuhn'sterms)paradigm-neutral. The purpose of the dualism is clear: it blocks the apparentlyrelativistic, "idealist" implications of the post-empiricist discovery of the theoryladenness of observation - and hence of the socially constituted nature of experience


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342 Praxis Internationaland "discourse" and between "objectivity" and "truth," are untenable. It wouldhave led to the conclusion that not only natural science, but all our interactionswith nature, indeed everything Habermas calls instrumental action as such, areintrinsically bound up from the very beginning with the communicative, with thesocial, with our relations to each other. It would have meant recognizing a fundamentally and irreducibly hermeneutic and indeed normative aspect to our relationsto, and knowledge of, nature (and a fortiori to natural science); it would have meant- as Lukacs almost saw - that nature is a social category.Yet this is the very conclusion Habennaswants desperately to avoid. His dualismis an attempt sharply to distinguish between the observational, monologic, "thirdperson" stance one takes up with respect to objects and the participatory, social,dialogic stance one takes up with respect to other subjects - between, in the languageof his more recent work, "the world" and "our world" .56 But post-empiricismseems precisely to indicate that this attempt must fail: that what counts as "theworld" can only be defined by "us," and that the plaintive cry that after all wemust assume some one world underlying what "we" see, commonsensical thoughit seems, turns out to be either empty or incoherent - as empty or incoherent asthe Kantian assertion of the existence of things in themselves. Habermas offersno argument to show that post-empiricism is wrong about this - he simply doesn'tlike it, because it seems to threaten not only the independence of natural sciencefrom social science but also even that of nature from society. It threatens, thatis, his materialism.But this means that Habermas's self-confessed failure adequately to considerKuhn's and Feyerabend's critique of empiricism is more than an unfortunateomission. While at first glance the Kuhnian attack on science's pretensions to objectivity might seem quite congenial to Habermas's project of combating objectivism,in fact as we have seen the implications ofKuhn's critique are not complementarybut inimical to Habermas's position. They threaten the dualism that is central to hisaccount, and in a way which reveals what turns out to be a residual "objectivism"in Habermas himself - his commitment to natural science's "objectivity", to itsindependence from the social, and his reluctance to admit the Lukacsian "natureis a social category" because of its apparently idealist consequences. His dualism,we discovered, allowed him to assert an independent and epistemologically justifiedrole for the Geisteswissenschaften, while at the same time insisting on naturalscience's "objective" and immutable validity in its own sphere. Post-empiricism,I think, persuasively shows this dualism to be untenable. In doing so, it throwsus back upon the same problem we have been tracing: the contradiction betweena Hegelian account of the social character of knowledge and the materialistic demandfor an objective science of nature. Again, Habermas's elegant attempt to reconcilethese turns out not to succeed.


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Praxis International 343y the discovery of social and hermeneutic elements in the natural sciences onhe other. A significant remark in a relatively early text may help clarify matters.In his 1965 Frankfurt inaugural lecture, reprinted as the appendix to Knowledgend Human Interests, Habermas argued eloquently against the "illusion of pureheory" - common, he said, to positivism and Husserlian phenomenology - whichailed to see the necessary and unbreakable connection between knowledge andnterest. Positivism's power, in particular, depended on its unjustifiable claim thatcience describes reality "as it is" independently of any human interest; thisjectivist illusion . . . deludes the sciences with the image of a reality-in-itselfonsisting of facts structured in a law-like manner; it conceals the constitution ofhese facts, and thereby prevents the interlocking of knowledge with interests fromhe lifeworld from coming to consciousness. "5 7 It is not science's "interested"haracter, its rootedness in the lifeworld, that Habermas wants to criticize, butather the delusion that the connection between knowledge and interest could be,r in science has been, overcome. Positivism's failure lies in its lack of self

58 Once a philosophical self-reflection on the methodology of sciencehe project of Knowledge and Human Interests) recognized the role of interestn the a priori constitution of the objects of knowledge, the false claims of scientismo possess the only possible method for achieving objective truth about' 'reality-itself" would be unmasked.Yet on closer analysis Habermas's own commitment to the connection betweennowledge and interest, and to the importance of self-reflection, turns out to bembiguous. Toward the end of the inaugural lecture he writes:The glory of the sciences is their unswerving application of their methods withoutreflecting on knowledge-constitutive interests. From knowing not what they domethodologically, they are that much surer of their discipline, that is of methodicalprogress within an unproblematic framework. False consciousness has a protectivefunction. For the sciences lack the means of dealing with the risks that appear oncethe connection of knowledge andhuman interest has been comprehended on the levelof self-reflection. It was possible for fascism to give birth to the freak of a nationalphysics and Stalinism to that of a SovietMarxist genetics. . . only because the illusionof objectivism was lacking. It would have been able to provide immunity againstthe more dangerous bewitchments of misguided reflection. 59This is a remarkable, and revealing, passage. In the context of an essay otherwisetolling the virtues of self-reflection about the deep connection of knowledge andterest, it is astonishing to find Habermas suddenly asserting that in certain casesnorance is bliss. The seemingly evenhanded dualism that says natural science'sethods are valid "in their own sphere" turns out to have a patronizing core:t's best, apparently, for scientists not to know too much - not to know the limitsheir methods really have, nor the reasons for these limits. Only "we," on thether side of the divide, may safely be entrusted with the esoteric knowledge thatjectivism iswrong. A methodologically self-aware science would present' 'risks, "


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344 Praxis Internationalit turns out, is not the only enemy against which Habermas's account is directed:Lysenkoism too is his opponent. He is fighting on two fronts - not only againstthe positivist assimilation of social theory to natural science, but also against anyhint of a romantic relativization of science to society. The result is a complex doublegame, in which Habermas simultaneously must reject objectivist accounts of science(to save the autonomy of social theory) while also maintaining, on a new epistemological basis, the usual claims for natural science's value-freedom (to save itsrootedness in non-social reality). He needs, in a word, to assert the "interested"character of natural scientific knowledge while denying it any social character.He can only do this by employing an ambiguous notion of "interest." Theassertion of a "connection of knowledge and interest", central to his work, cannotbe understood in the sense of the critique of ideology, or the sociology of knowledge.Habermas is quite explicit, as we have seen, that the knowledge-constitutive interestshe discusses are not the interests of any particular social group or social order,but rather are universal and pre-social interests, built into the very structure ofthe species itself. "The concept of 'interest' is not meant to imply a naturalisticreduction of transcendental-logical properties to empirical ones," he writes., 'Indeed, it is meant to prevent just such a reduction." 60 By founding science onthis kind of interest, the move to a "Lysenkoist' socialization of science is blocked.Thus against objectivism's faith that science investigates an independent, external"reality" Habermas asserts that objectivity is constituted by interests; to save himselffrom "relativism", however, he has to push these interests, and the activity ofconstitution, back into the mists of pre-social, pre-historical time. Like Lukacs,he wants to say that the nature of natural science is a human construct, constitutedby humans in their practice, but fears the apparently idealist implications of this.The result is a mythical conception of "constitution," and of the humans whoengage in it, based on an entirely ahistorical notion of "interests."In the last analysis it is "objectivity" itself that Habermas, the arch-anti-objectivist,wants to defend - the objectivity of nature despite the interests involved in ourknowledge of it, and the objectivity of natural science despite its irreduciblediscourse- or paradigm-boundedness. It turns out to require a double protection:first, in the concept of "nature in itself" guaranteeing that despite the "interested"character of all knowledge, we nonetheless somehow know the existence of a quasinoumenal world independent of and giving rise to human interests, and then second,by the distinction between empirical and hermeneutic science (or, later, betweenaction and discourse) guaranteeing an independence at least to our knowledge ofnature from any real social or historical interests.But neither of these strategies work, as I have argued: the two deep structuralproblems with Habermas's account we have investigated arise at precisely thejunctures where he attempts to immunize the objectivity of nature against theinevitably "subjectivist' implications of his own theory of interests. Indeed, the


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Praxis International 345quasi-transcendentalism gives rise are simply the result of the projection onto amythical past of the problem of the social character of scientific knowledge. The"Lysenkoist ' dangers of a knowledge subject to particular social interests are notavoided by seeing these interests as "natural," built into the species as such; theyare simply shifted to a different level, where they reappear as the problem of "naturein itself". The relativist's dilemma as to how science could be both "sociallyinterested" and true turns into the quasi-transcendentalist' s dilemma as to howthe species could both constitute nature and evolve out of it; from the frying panof the sociology of knowledge, Habermas falls into the fire of a quasi-transcendentalKantianism.There is an irony here. Habermas's fundamental critique of positivism inKnowledge and Human Interests, as we have noted, is that it fails to see theconstitutive role of the human subject in knowledge; his project is to present instead

an epistemological theory in which that role is explicitly thematized. Yet his desireto defend the" objectivity" of natural science over and against the social constantlyblocks him. He wants to reintroduce the subject, but his fear of relativism issuch that it can't be any real - socially and historically situated - subject that isintroduced: it must be "the human as such", a universal species-subject definedby contingent species-characteristics, and itself' 'constituted" (somehow) by naturein-itself. And - just as he demonstrates in the cases ofMach, Comte, Peirce, etc.- it is precisely the unavoidable return of the repressed subject that marks thelocation of the most serious problems in his own theory. The quasi-transcendentalismfinds itselfunable to account for the (apparently natural) origin of the constitutingspecies-subject, while the dualism has trouble assimilating the role of the communicative community of scientific investigators into its picture of formal, monologic,erfolgskontrolliert (and endlessly "progressive' ') objective natural science.We have returned, yet again, to the samedilemmawith which we began: the contradiction between a view of nature as social (and of knowledge ofnature as sociallyproduced or "interested' ') and materialism. I think this contradiction is unresolvable.Nature simply cannot be both constituted by us and independent of us, not bothproduced by interests and the origin of those interests. One or the other claim hasto be given up. I want to suggest that it ought to be the latter, and that the trajectoryofWestern Marxist thought on nature as a whole, from Lukacs to Habermas, indeedpoints in this direction. 61 There is no "nature in itself," or at least none we can sayanything about or that it does the slightest good for our epistemology to assume. Thenature we "encounter" has no noumenal status, nor even any noumenal correlate:it is something we constitute - in our actions, our discourse, our theories, our"data-collection," our poetry, our metaphysics and religion, our social institutions: and so this nature changes, as we dO. 62 Lukacs was right the first time:nature is a social category. And Habermas was right, too: it is constituted subjectto interests. But these interests are real social interests, which arise historicallyand also pass away. Thus there is no "One Nature", no "the external world"constituted exclusively by some noumenally generated and unchanging interestin prediction and control of "the" environment. Habermas fails to see that the


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346 Praxis Internationalimmunized from discourse than are the scientific languages or theories they helpto guide." Nature turns out to be social from the very beginning.It is this conclusion that Habermas wants to avoid, clinging to his own remnantof objectivism. He avoids it by asserting the dualisms we have analyzed, and bythe astonishing preference we have seen him expressing for a natural science keptignorant about its own epistemological foundations. But these strategies cannotwork, and inevitably issue in antinomies. Rather it is his own better instincts thatare right. Science - natural science - is "interested", which means: it is historical,it is social, it is connected not only to pre-discursive, monologic, labor but alsoto communicative interaction. Fascist physics or Stalinist genetics are undoubtedlyrisks - but so, after all, are fascism and Stalinism; the former can only be avoidedin the same way as the latter - by the continual and self-conscious struggle forhuman autonomy, for enlightened reason, for the ideals' 'unequivocally expressed[by] our first sentence.t" To call explicitly for "false consciousness" amongscientists is a denial of the very Enlightenment ideals Habermas wants to uphold;it is the tragic cul-de-sac into which his objectivism has forced him. The real defenseagainst the dangers ofLysenkoism would lie in the opposite direction - in the carefuland principled reflection by methodologically self-aware scientists about science'strue epistemological status, the sort of reflection characteristic of Habermasiandiscourse. Such discourse - as we have seen Habermas recognizing - movesinevitably towards a "critique of knowledge" as such; but in so doing it also movestowards the recognition that science and society, and hence also science and humanvalues, are inextricably intertwined. This does not mean science must follow thelead of whatever social forces are currently in power, but rather that scientiststoo must see their discourse as part of a broader public discourse about social issues

~ a discourse in which both Lysenkoism or fascist physics and the social relationsof domination that underlie them would be shown to be illegitimate. But thereflexivity of this discourse would then mean too that it would not leave science"as it is". Perhaps Marcuse will turnout to be right after all: a natural sciencethat knew itself to be social might well become a "New Science" - for the firsttime explicitly and consciously oriented towards real, discursively determined,"human interests," and hence more consonant, in its methods and even maybein its results, with the goals of a truly human society.65

NOTES* I amgrateful to the National Endowment for theHumanities for a Summer Stipend which supportedthe writing of this essay.1. Alfred Schmidt, in TheConcept ofNature in Marx, (London, 1973), describes this tension

very clearly - although he does not see it as quite so antinomical as I do.2. Georg Lukacs, Historyand Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 10. I have alteredthe translation slightly - see Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (Berlin, 1923), 23.3. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, 234.4. See Schmidt, The Concept ofNature in Marx, 69-70; Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The


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Praxis International 347Towards a Rational Society and Theory and Practice, Habennas deals with similar issues. In sectionV below I will discuss some of his more recent attempts to reconsider the questions of these earlyworks; for the most part, however, Habennas no longer explicitly concerns himselfwith the questionsabout the status of nature and the natural sciences that I am examining. This is not to say that hisrecent work is not implicitly concerned with such questions, but showing that would require a separateessay. I believe, in any case, that the fundamental problems of his early work have not been resolvedin any of his more recent discussions.6. Haberrnas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 68-69.7. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 308.8. See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 191-198. Habermas also asserts the existence of a third, "emancipatory" interest, in "self-reflection," associated with "critical" sciencessuch as psychoanalysis and critical social theory itself. Although quite important - particularly tounderstanding the later development of Habermas's position - this third interest will not concernus here; I take it already to have been sufficiently criticized, not least by Habermas himself. See,e.g., Jurgen Habermas, "A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests," Philosophy of SocialScience 3 (1973), 182-185. See also Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory ofJurgen Habermas,(Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 92-110.9. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 194-195. (Note that "cultural sciences" heretranslates "Geisteswissenschaften".)10. See, e.g., Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 125-129.11. Thomas McCarthy has analyzed this well - see McCarthy, The Critical Theory of JurgenHabermas, 110-125 - and I am indebted to his account in what follows. See also Joel Whitebook,"The Problem of Nature in Habermas;" Telos, 40 (Summer 1979), 48-50; Richard Bernstein,"Introduction," inHabermas and Modernity, ed. Richard Bernstein (Cambridge, 1985), 13; HenningOttmann, "Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection" in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B.Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, 1982), 91-92.12. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 35-36.13. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 133. See also 312: "the achievements of thetranscendental subject have their basis in the natural history of the human species."14. See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 34.15. Habermas would later admit this. See his Theory and Practice (Boston, 1973), 14.16. See Haberrnas, Theory and Practice, 21-22. See alsoMcCarthy, TheCritical Theory of]iirgenHabermas, 121-124, and Whitebook, "The Problem of Nature in Habermas ," 59-61.17. A good Kantian, of course, could admit that nature has temporal priority over the humanwhile denying it ontological priority, but such a speculative strategy is clearly not open to Habermas.18. "Reply to My Critics," in Thompson and Held, Habermas: Critical Debates, 274.19. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 137.20. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 127.21. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests ,. 91.22. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 308.23. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 161. I have altered the translation somewhat;see Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt, 1969), 204.24. See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 144.25. Mary Hesse, "In Defence of Objectivity" , inRevolutions and Reconstructionsin the Philosophy

of Science (Bloomington, 1980), esp. 169-173. For Habermas's account of hermeneutics, seeespecially Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 161-176.26. Cf. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, 1983), especially52-86.27. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 86-90.28. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 95.29. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 97.30. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 95.31. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York, 1968), 104-105.


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348 Praxis International34. Habermas, "The Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics", 152-162.35. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 137. I have altered the translation slightly. SeeHabermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse, 176.36. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979), 343-356.37. Habermas, "A Positivistically Bisected Rationalism" , in The Positivist Dispute in GermanSociology, 203-204.38. See Habermas, "A Positivistically Bisected Rationalism", 204-207.39. See Habermas, "A Positivistically Bisected Rationalism", 206.40. See McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas, 26-30.41. Indeed although he does not say so explicitly, it seems useful to read the transformation thetheory of interests underwent in this later work - which also includes the new introduction to Theoryand Practice and the essays "Wahrheitstheorien" and "What is Universal Pragmatics?" - as inpart a response to the post-empiricist critique of positivist accounts of scientific method.42. Habermas," A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests, " 168. I have altered the trans

lation significantly; see "Nachwort" inErkenntnis und Interesse, 386. See also "Wahrheitstheorien,"in Wirklichkeit und Reflexion, ed. H. Fahrenbach (Pfullingen, 1973), 214.43. Habermas, "A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests", 169.44. Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 250.45. Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 252-253.46. Cf. Bemstein's discussion of incommensurability in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism,79-86.47. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1970), 115.48. Habermas, "A Postscript toKnowledge and Human Interests," 171. See also "Reply to MyCritics", 275.49. Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 233. Cf. "A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests",166, and see also 170: "objectivity of experience means that everybody can count on the successor failure of certain actions; the truth of a proposition stated in discourses means that everybodycan be persuaded by reasons to recognize the truth claim of the statement as being justified. ' ,50. Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien," 216-217 .51. Habermas, "Wahrheitstheorien." See also Theory and Practice, 20, where the distinctionis drawn between "opinions about objects" and "statements about facts".52. Thus Habermas is continually forced to distinguish between an experiment - which has arole in scientific discourse - and what he calls' "the structurally analogous experience I would gainin the context of life-praxis [i.e., communicative action]" - "A Postscript of Knowledge and HumanInterests," 169; see also Theory and Practice, 20, and "Wahrheitstheorien," 217-218. "Structurally analogous" here seems to be a euphemism for "identical." At what point in the course ofhis experiences did Galileo move from the "life-praxis" of looking at clocks to the "scientificdiscourse" of observing pendula?53. Hesse, "Science and Objectivity," in Thompson and Held, Habermas: Critical Debates,100-101. See also J. Thompson, "Universal Pragmatics," in the same volume, 130-131.54. See Hesse's remarks on Habermas's notion of a "reconstructive science," in ""Science andObjectivity", 111-112.55. Hesse, "In Defence of Objectivity", 181; see also "Haberrnas's Consensus Theory of Truth" ,in Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science, 225.56. See, e.g., "What is Universal Pragmatics?" in Communication and the Evolution of Society(Boston, 1979),66-68, as well as The Theory o f Communicative Action, volume I (Boston, 1984),308.57. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 305-306. Translation somewhat altered; seeTechnik und Wissenschaft als "Ideologie ", 152.58. "That we disavow reflection," Habermas would write later, "is positivism." Knowledge


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Praxis International63. This seems to me also to follow from the very important points Thomas McCarthy makes"Rationality and Relativism" in Thompson and Held, Habermas: Critical Debates, 73-75.64. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 314.65. See Towards a Rational Society (Boston, 1970), 85-88.

3.6 - Vogel, Steven - Habermas and Science (en)

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