The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-Criticism

Chapter 6. Toward a Critical Pragmatism: A Brandomian Beginning

CHAPTER SIX Toward a Critical Pragmatism A Brandomian Beginning Friedman, McDowell, and Beyond Friedman’s understanding of science and its development draws heavily on Kant, while his account of the rationality of scientific change draws on Habermas. The latter account, however, suppresses the implied disputational and deliberational nature of Habermas’s communicative rationality . Still, if our reading of Dynamics of Reason is not entirely off the mark, then there is much in Friedman’s approach with which we agree: its explicit endorsement of Normative Diversity, its implied acceptance of Comparative Irrealism, its broadly interpretivist approach, and, most of all, its central concern for the rationality of constitutive framework replacement.1 But, as we have argued in detail, we also part company with Friedman on major issues. First,although many would agree that the mathematical sciences present a paradigm case of rational development, few would agree that their claim for rationality is as exclusive as Friedman implies. (Habermas certainly believed that the scope of the form of rationality Friedman adopts for the sciences extended far beyond that of the lebenswelten of mathematical physics.) The special case Friedman fashions for science against the“threat of conceptual relativism”strongly suggests that corresponding 160 upheavals in the constitutive linguistic frameworks of all but the most developed and exact sciences display a relativism that, in his opinion, defies rationality.We firmly disagree.Contrary to Friedman,the case the present study seeks to make for the rationality of framework modification and replacement extends in principle to normativity in general. Second, we disagree completely with Friedman’s contention (late of Habermas) that the ultimate motivating objective of the sort of rational endeavor invested in framework replacement is the achievement of consensus .2 It is true that successful normative upheavals normally result in communal consent—certainly under an interpretivist construal— but what makes such transitions rational, we insist, is not that they end up commanding wide agreement but that they do so rationally. A rational transition from one normative outlook to another is a transition undertaken for a reason; a justified transition; a transition deemed to be acceptable because it is considered arguably preferable to the outlook abandoned. Indeed, if consensus per se was the defining aim of scientific rationality,the very proposal of alternative frameworks would be frowned on as undermining the rationality of science. Yet Friedman writes explicitly as if the high level of agreement achieved in science in the wake of such transitions is itself the measure of their very (communicative) rationality.3 Arguing along these lines wrongly conflates the prospective appraisal of reasoned action with the retrospective evaluation of its outcome .While the former is essential to assessments of rationality,the latter, we shall argue, is arguably largely irrelevant.4 For such transitions to be reasoned through rationally (as opposed to rationalized after the event) practitioners must be able to argue against the framework to which they are currently committed. Hence our third major disagreement with Friedman who treats the problem of internal normative criticism as unsolvable. For Friedman insists (contra Habermas )5 that scientific revolutions owe their communicative rationality ultimately to the formal relations successive scientific frameworks typically bear to each other rather than to the self-critical reasoning responsible in the first place for stimulating the search for alternative frameworks and for subsequent deliberation of their relative shortcomings and merits. The special case Friedman makes for science serves at best as the exception that proves the rule. Truly diverse constitutive frameworks, it Toward a Critical Pragmatism 161 presupposes, cannot be ranked or compared. It is impossible, therefore, for practitioners of the one to argue self-critically in favor of the other. Transitions between truly diverse frameworks can, therefore, not be conducted rationally.The reason why transitions between successive scientific frameworks are rational is,according to Friedman,not because Comparative Irrealism is overcome in science but because in science Comparative Irrealism does not (fully) apply. Successive scientific frameworks are not truly diverse. They remain sufficiently of a cloth to allow their mutual replacement to be rational. But Friedman wants to have it both ways. His commendable insistence on the rationality of scientific development ends up caught between discordant Kuhnian and Kantian commitments. On the one hand, he considers successive scientific conceptual frameworks à la Kuhn to be too “radically different,” too diverse to be properly debatable across the divide...