Communicative rationality

Communicative rationality or communicative reason (German: kommunikative Rationalität) is a theory or set of theories which describes human rationality as a necessary outcome of successful communication. In particular, it is tied to the philosophy of German philosophers Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and their program of universal pragmatics, along with its related theories such as those on discourse ethics and rational reconstruction. This view of reason is concerned with clarifying the norms and procedures by which agreement can be reached, and is therefore a view of reason as a form of public justification. rationality refers primarily to the use of knowledge in language and action, rather than to a property of knowledge. One might say that it refers primarily to a mode of dealing with validity claims, and that it is in general not a property of these claims themselves. Furthermore...this perspective suggests no more than formal specifications of possible forms of life... it does not extend to the concrete form of life... Communicative rationality or communicative reason (German: kommunikative Rationalität) is a theory or set of theories which describes human rationality as a necessary outcome of successful communication. In particular, it is tied to the philosophy of German philosophers Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and their program of universal pragmatics, along with its related theories such as those on discourse ethics and rational reconstruction. This view of reason is concerned with clarifying the norms and procedures by which agreement can be reached, and is therefore a view of reason as a form of public justification. According to the theory of communicative rationality, the potential for certain kinds of reason is inherent in communication itself. Building from this, Habermas has tried to formalize that potential in explicit terms. According to Habermas, the phenomena that need to be accounted for by the theory are the 'intuitively mastered rules for reaching an understanding and conducting argumentation', possessed by subjects who are capable of speech and action. The goal is to transform this implicit 'know-how' into explicit 'know-that', i.e. knowledge, about how we conduct ourselves in the realm of 'moral-practical' reasoning. The result of the theory is a conception of reason that Habermas sees as doing justice to the most important trends in twentieth century philosophy, while escaping the relativism which characterizes postmodernism, and also providing necessary standards for critical evaluation. According to Habermas, the 'substantive' (i.e. formally and semantically integrated) rationality that characterized pre-modern worldviews has, since modern times, been emptied of its content and divided into three purely 'formal' realms: (1) cognitive-instrumental reason; (2) moral-practical reason; and (3) aesthetic-expressive reason. The first type applies to the sciences, where experimentation and theorizing are geared towards a need to predict and control outcomes. The second type is at play in our moral and political deliberations (very broadly, answers to the question 'how should I live?'), and the third type is typically found in the practices of art and literature. It is the second type which concerns Habermas. Because of the de-centering of religion and other traditions that once played this role, according to Habermas we can no longer give substantive answers to the question 'How should I live?' Additionally, there are strict limits which a 'post-metaphysical' theory (see below) must respect – namely the clarification of procedures and norms upon which our public deliberation depends. The modes of justification we use in our moral and political deliberations, and the ways we determine which claims of others are valid, are what matter most, and what determine whether we are being 'rational'. Hence the role that Habermas sees for communicative reason in formulating appropriate methods by which to conduct our moral and political discourse. This purely formal 'division of labour' has been criticized by Nikolas Kompridis, who sees in it too strong a division between practical and aesthetic reasoning, an unjustifiably hard distinction between the 'right' and the 'good', and an unsupportable priority of validity to meaning. There are a number of specific trends that Habermas identifies as important to twentieth century philosophy, and to which he thinks his conception of communicative rationality contributes. To look at these trends is to give a clear outline of Habermas's understanding of communicative rationality. He labels all these trends as being post-metaphysical. These post-metaphysical philosophical movements have, among other things: