Habermas and Rorty on intersubjectivity and truth

12 Aug, 2017 at 12:30 | Posted in Theory of Science & Methodology | 4 Comments

We teachers do our best to be Socratic, to get our job of re-education, secularization, and liberalization done by conversational exchange. That is true up to a point, but what about assigning books like Black Boy, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Becoming a Man? The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people – black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children’s throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like “There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homo-phobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.”

I have no trouble offering this reply, ​since I do not claim to make the distinction between education and conversation on the basis of anything except my loyalty to a particular community, a community whose interests required re-educating the Hitler Youth in 1945 and required re-educating the bigoted students of Virginia in 1993. I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.

Richard Rorty

Although Rorty’s view is pointing in the right direction re handling intolerance, his epistemization of the concept of truth makes the persuasive force of the argumentation weaker than necessary. Jürgen Habermas gives the reason why:

As soon as the concept of truth is eliminated in favor of a context-dependent epistemic validity-for-us, the normative reference point necessary to explain why a proponent should endeavor to seek agreement for ‘p’ beyond the boundaries of her own group is missing. The information that the agreement of an increasingly large audience gives us increasingly less reason to fear that we will be refuted presupposes the very interest that has to be explained: the desire for “as much intersubjective agreement as possible.” If something is ‘true’ if and only if it is recognized as justified “by us” because it is good “for us,” there is no rational motive for expanding the circle of members. No reason exists for the decentering expansion of the justification community especially since Rorty defines “my own ethnos” as the group in front of which I feel obliged to give an account of myself.

Here I think one can also invoke Adam Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’ to reduce the risk of making public decisions based solely on history, vested interests, and cultural or religious traditions. The decisions we as ‘reasonable persons’ make for building a ‘good’ society must be justifiable from more than one perspective.

Reasoning and intellectual probing are our most important allies when evaluating different ‘cultural’ and ‘religious’ claims. There is no other justifiable way than the ‘path of reason.’ Even those who don’t want to follow that path have to give reasons for why.

In a global world, we have to go beyond local perspectives and prejudices by taking a ‘view from nowhere.’ Building a just and open society in such a world, considerations of universality and impartiality are always necessary.