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182 Beyond Obiectivism and Relativism PRACTICAL DISCOURSE: HABERMAS The perspective that is most illuminating for understanding the significant differences between Gadamer and Habermas is one that begins with examining how much they share in the "application" theme. Already in Habermas's initial critical review of Truth and Method, he declared, "I find Gadamer's real achievement in the demonstration that hermeneutical understanding is linked with transcendental necessity to the articulation of an action-orienting self-understanding.,,4 It is instructive to see how this perspective is worked out and transformed in Habermas's own attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of communicative action and rationality. For Habermas, no less than for Gadamer, we cannot completely escape from our horizon in seeking to understand what is alien. This has central significance for the entire theory of rationality. Habermas argues that it is an illusion to think that we can assume the position of disinterested observers by bracketing all our preunderstandings, when it comes to understanding other forms of life, horizons, and what purport to be other standards of rationality. If we want to describe other forms of life or earlier stages of our own social development, then we can only do this by adopting the "performative attitude" of one who participates in a process of mutual understanding. It is important to distinguish the different roles that evaluation plays in this process. Habermas's main point is that "classifying" or "describing" speech acts presupposes that we understand the types of validity claim that they make. An interpreter must have the ability to make clear to himself or herself the implicit reasons that enable participants to take the positions that they do take. In order to understand an expression, the interpreter must bring to mind the reasons with which the actor would, under suitable circumstances, defend its validity. Consequently, the interpreter is drawn into the process of assessing validity claims. But this process of determining that a validity claim has been made (which requires virtual participation by the interpreter) does not yet involve making an evaluative judgment about the soundness of the validity claim. Habermas's point can be illustrated by appealing again to the familiar example of Zande witchcraft. We could not even begin to understand Zande witchcraft unless we had the ability to discriminate what the Azande consider to be reasons for acting in one way or another. To do this requires a preunderstanding on our part of what it means to make a validity claim and the ability to identify those situations in which one is made. This is the sense in which under- 183 Praxis, Practical Discourse standing what the Azande are saying and doing requires identifying validity claims. But it is a different (although related question) to evaluate whether the reasons given by the Azande are good or bad reasons, and even here we need to make an important distinction. Understanding the practice of Zande witchcraft requires that we be able to discriminate what the Azande themselves consider good and bad reasons. (Presumably the Azande themselves can make mistakes.) This judgment can also be distinguished from a judgment as to whether (and in what sense) the type of reasons that the Azande give are adequate or inadequate. Habermas is, of course, aware of the everpresent danger of ethnocentricism, of unreflectively imposing alien standards of judgment and thereby missing the point or meaning of a practice. But Habermas's primary thesis is that it is an illusion to think that we can escape from this danger by imagining that we can describe alien linguistic practices without determining the validity claims that are implicitly made in speech acts. For Habermas, this is a condition for all understanding, whether it is the understanding that arises among participants in communicative action or that of the social scientist who seeks to understand alien linguisticpractices.5 The theme of our historicity, in which we are always critically appropriating what we seek to understand, is no less fundamental for Habermas than it is for Gadamer. But for Habermas the primary problem becomes one of how we can reconcile this "performative participation" with the type of intersubjective understanding that makes the claim to objectivity. When Habermas seeks to develop a comprehensive theory of communicative action or a universal pragmatics , he is not claiming that we do this sub specie aeternitatis or that we assume the position of an "infinite intellect." Rather he is claiming that within the horizon of our hermeneutical situation, we can seek to...

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