Dialectical Synthesis': An Inquiry Into The Habermasian Paradigm Of Legitimate Knowledge

Habermas challenged positivistically minded philosophers of science who explicitly or implicitly presupposed that the empirical analytical sciences provide the model for all legitimate knowledge and dismissed all other claim to knowledge as pseudo knowledge. Habermas distinguished three non reducible quasi transcendental cognitive interests. They are the technical, the practical, and the emancipatory. Each of these cognitive interests is itself rooted in historical rationalization. "The overall task of critical theory is therefore to disclose those interests which lie behind the carious exercises of Knowledge in a dimension of human existence. The approach to empirical-analytic sciences incorporates a technical cognitive interest, that of the historical- hermeneutic sciences incorporate a practical one, and the approach of critically oriented sciences incorporates the emancipatory cognitive interest".1

For Habermas, there is no philosophy that is above critique. There exists no transcendental plane of timeless certitude, no place where a disinterested consciousness could detach in itself from all historical and ideological concerns and thereby lay claim to some absolute of knowledge. All theories and particularly those which present themselves as perfectly neutral and objective are ideologies concealing their own vested interests by dressing them up in the guise. There exists, Habermas argues, pluralism of interests. He groups them under the above mentioned three categories.

The instrumental interest is the perspective which motivates the allegedly neutral empirical-analytic sciences. This perspective limits the meaning of empirical facts whose validity depends, in turn, on their technical exploitability within a utilitarian system of behaviour.  The criterion invoked here is that purposive rational action. It is epitomized in the contemporary ideology of scientific technology. Habermas defines it as the cognitive interest in technical control over objectified processes. It is otherwise know as positivism.

This is the type of scientific knowledge that logical positivists, logical empiricists, and philosophers of science in the analytic tradition were primarily interested in ‘analyzing'.

Habermas was not degenerating or criticizing these forms of knowledge. His point is that it is only one type of knowledge; it is not to be taken the canonical standard for all forms of knowledge. This is why Habermas challenged positivistically minded philosophers of science who explicitly or implicitly presupposed that the empirical-analytical sciences provide the model for all legitimate knowledge and dismissed all other claims to knowledge as pseudo knowledge.

The second category of interest, the practical, favours a model of communicative action. Practical interest- refers to a field of inter subjective action. For Habermas, this is the domain of the ‘historical hermeneutic sciences'.

The Historical-Hermeneutic disciplines are governed by a practical interest of furthering understanding. ‘The historical hermeneutic sciences gain knowledge in a different methodological frame work. Here the meaning of the validity of propositions is not constituted in the frame of reference of technological control…..Access to the facts is provided by the understanding of meaning.. The verification of law like hypothesis in the empirical analytic science has its counter part in the interpretations of texts. Thus the rules of hermeneutics determine the possible meaning of the validity of statements of the cultural science.'

The Historical-Hermeneutic sciences endeavour to understand the inherently human dimension of meaning achieved through the interpretation of messaged exchanged in everyday language. Habermas believes that Marx recognized a distinction between technical and practical interests when he separated the relations of production and the forces of production. The critique of ideology depends upon recognition of the split between the technical-analytic interest and the practical-communicative interest. In making this critical difference between the interests of technical control and practical communication, Habermas endeavours to restore the possibility of genuine critical theory.

Although Habermas has appropriated the insights of the hermeneutic tradition, he has been sharply critical of its implicit historicism-its hidden form of positivism. ‘One of the Habermas' most basic and challenging thesis is that we cannot even make sense of the concepts of meaning, understanding, and interpretation unless we rationally evaluate the validity claims that are made by participants in these forms of life.'

The third category of interest of Habermas is the interest in emancipation of critical reflection. Habermas identifies this with the project of critical social science modeled on the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and Institute for Social Research. The Critical Social Sciences dispel the positivist illusion of disinterestedness and unmask the ideological interests at work. A critical social science is a dialectical synthesis of the empirical analytic and historical hermeneutical disciplines. It goes beyond the one-sided approaches. If a reflection is made on the forms of knowledge and the disciplines guided by the technical and practical interests, it could be realized that they contain an internal demand for open free, non-coercive communication. Habermas argues that it is only by exposing this conflict between practical and technical interest, we can become aware of the third and ultimately most positive form of cognitive interest,- the interest in emancipation as a basic human need for autonomy, responsibility and justice.

The idea of critical interest takes us to the center of Habermas' thought. The critical sciences obey an emancipatory cognitive interest which insists on self reflection. In doing so, it seeks liberation from the constraints of ignorance. Here cognition is not for the sake of something else. Cognitive knowledge operates for its own sake. Habermas will argue that the very reflection which links knowledge to emancipation reveals the interest base of knowledge as such. It combines theory and practice in its very method. To argue that knowledge is grounded in practical interests runs contrary to positivist philosophy of science. By ‘positivism', Habermas means the philosophical movement initiated by August Comte and later continued by the Vienna School under the name "logical positivism". Positivism maintains that all forms of knowledge conform to the kind of knowledge advocated by the natural science. The knowledge involves the causal explanation of events. Habermas calls this knowledge as scientism. ‘Positivism assumes that the truth of a scientific fact consists in correspondence with a reality whose meaning preexists the selective perception and conceptual activity of the perceiver. That is, it is assumed to  be freed from all practical values and interests that might lend it a subjective, interpretative cast.'

Habermas observes that there is no scope for subjectivity of the individual in positivism. Natural science understands knowledge in terms of causal explanations. It will explain any phenomenon in terms of causal law. This is not accepted by Habermas. The causal law is established by factual observation. For example, the gravitation should be established by factual observation of falling of thing from the top when they are thrown up. Natural science which is the strong root of positivism believes that facts are objective.

The objectivity of natural science is questioned by Immanuel Kant. Actually objectivity is another word for inter-subjectivity. Inter-subjectivity approach is imbibed in the objectivity. But natural science avoids this inter-subjective element. Hence this point is being criticized by Habermas.

The repeatability in natural science is questioned by Habermas. Habermas argues that the entire outlook of natural sciences is not giving importance to active dynamic role of human. Further positivism claims to be value neutral. The moral freedom of the individual is deleted by natural science. But Habermas says that there could be no such theory as value neutral in any enterprise. If there is one value neutral theory, human beings can not take it. Habermas brings in here the transcendental and anthropological argument. He says that knowledge is conducive to values and values are necessary for self preservation. But by and large there is a survival interest. But it should not be taken in the selfish sense. It is not that Habermas thinks in terms of survival interest, but it predominates. To justify this, he gave this anthropological view.

His anthropological view holds that there is a need for life preservation which also leads to emancipation of freedom of human individuals. But on the other hand, Habermas views that it is not possible to throw away the pursuit of scientific knowledge. So he wanted the knowledge which is technically useful and morally binding, not only morally binding but also morally liberating. So Habermas believes that positivism is false as philosophical theory about the essential structure of cognition. It neglects the fundamentally interested nature of all knowledge. Habermas thinks that positivism gives a false account of scientific methodology. Habermas insists that a critical social science guided by an emancipatory interest is necessary for guaranteeing the objectivity.

Habermas in his ‘Knowledge and Human Interest' traces back to the prehistory of positivism. In doing that job, he analyses the tradition of German philosophy from Kant through Hegel and Marx. By analyzing this, he tries to justify that a critique of knowledge must aspire to social critique. Actually Habermas has not totally rejected the positivist philosophy. He felt that the path of reflection leading from Kant to Hegel and Marx was not entirely suppressed by the positivist philosophy of science. In his ‘Knowledge and Human Interest' Habermas had touched upon fundamental issues that preoccupied thinkers in a variety of fields. He had advanced a provocative interpretation of movement of though that encompassed Kant,  Fichte, Hegel, Marx,  Dilthey, Peirce, Nietzsche, Comte and Freud.

In this context, it is worth of observing what Charles Pierce has said. He provides an important link between Marx and Hegel. The Kantian notion of reason was transformed by Marx and Hegel from synthetic activity to social activity. For Kant, the synthetic power of the mind produces causal unity in the world. Pierce shows how the production of a causally unified world becomes the function of labour. It is the instrumental action. He argues that the discovery of causal regularities occurs only in the course of instrumental interventions in nature. Passive observations alone do not help to differentiate the non causal connections from the causal connections. For Pierce, the experimental behaviour is necessary for the discovery of causal connections This forms the basic logic underlying the scientific enquiry.

"The logic of scientific inquiry consists of three types of instrumental activity. They are: discovery of causal laws via trial and error (abduction), explanation, or inference of effects from antecedent conditions and causal laws(deductions) and experimental confirmation of laws(induction)"  *

These three types of instrumental activities comprise a methodologically sophisticated set of operations. This leads to the possibility of the acquisition of causal knowledge. The instrumental activities-abduction, deduction, induction, corresponds to primitive behaviours which evolved in response to organic changes in the species. Habermas understands that the scientific method transforms feedback monitored behaviour into a cumulative learning process by isolating causal chains under controlled conditions. To him, measuring procedures infuse instrumental actions with greater precision and inter subjective reliability. According to Habermas the objective reality is just another name for that intersubjectively agreed upon the set of properties and relationships that reflects on e possible way of interpreting nature. Pursuing the penetrating the line of inquiry pioneered by Charles Pierce, Habermas argues that  scientific method, understood asa procedure for attaining a progress since consensus about reality  ultimately derives its validity from the natural trial and error revision of belief that accompanies the success or failure of adaptive behaviour. Habermas ties objectifying technology and science to human nature. He notes that technological development is a self objectification of the subject's natural powers. Habermas maintains that once the instrumental activity is necessary for survival is institutionalized under the aspect of science, it becomes a social learning process. This social learning process is mediated by a different kind of activity known as communication.

Understanding is for Gadamer inextricably bound up with interpretation. He believes that the interpreter does not approach his subject with neutral mind. He brings with him a certain horizon of expectations, beliefs, concept and norms.  He sees the subject from perspectives opened by this horizon. According to Gadamer, all interpretive understanding is necessarily bound  to be preconceived and prejudged. But openness can only help the interpreter gradually to become aware of his own structure of prejudices in the course of his interpretative activity. In Gadamer's view, a successful interpretation entails a fusion of  horizons. But this does not mean that there is such a thing  as the correct interpretation. Unless there is an end  to history, there can be no end to the interpretative process.

To Gadamer, language and tradition are inseparable. Tradition is the medium in which language is transmitted and developed. Gadamer criticizes Dilthey by arguing that Dilthey commits objectivistic fallacy by presuming that the meaning disclosed by correct interpretation is identical with the meaning originally intended by the author.  "Gadamer's primary aim was to discredit the empathetic model of understanding deriving from romantic tradition of Schleiermacher, Ranke and Dilthey".1 Although this tradition had started out as a reaction against the Enlightenment, it discarded neither the subject- object dualism nor the methodological glorification of value freedom that were its Cartesian trademarks.

"By demonstrating that all forms of knowledge and experience are interpretative in the deepest sense, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics undercuts the shibboleth of value neutrality and presuppositionlessness   that lives at the center positivism. Science does not mirror reality. It interprets it as a measurable spatio- temporal field of matter and energy in accordance with its own methodological assumptions"2.  Habermas is in agreement  here. H e also sees Gadamer's critique of romantic hermeneutics as explaining why deep ethical currents run through the human science.

"Every successful understanding applies new meaning to the current situation of the interpreter, thereby revealing new possibilities for action"3. Habermas praises Gadamer's

understanding of the way in which ideal structures are generated within the historical process. He claims that Gadamer regards the interpreter as an actual participant in practical conversation.

According to Gadamer, understanding serves to bridge the cultural horizons of interpreter and author by means of a shared public language. The process of understanding is the mutual understanding between different cultural horizons. To Gadamer, any moral relationship requires this bridging of cultures. The agreement between communicating horizons is clarified by Gadamer in terms of the dialogical dynamics of textual understanding. The objectivity of textual interpretation is achieved by checking the distorting effects of one's prejudices. Gadamer holds that it is futile to attempt to cancel the influence of values, preferences, and linguistic assumptions, because, they form the tacit background of their understanding. This argument leads to the point that the textual meaning is not pregiven by the author' original intentions, but partially constituted by the subjectivity of the interpreter. But this argument would lead to the position that textual interpretation is an act of arbitrarily projecting one's own prejudices onto the text. If thesewere the case, there would be no difference between correct and incorrect interpretation. Hence, it would be very difficult to establish that the understanding could serve the function of moral enlightenment. Here, there is a need for conceiving the textual interpretation along with the model of simulated communication. The objectivity and moral enlightenment can be accounted for only by merging the dialogue along with textual interpretation. Moral knowledge and its limitation, like objective interpretation and its understanding, involve a process of critical reflection that can be provoked and sustained only dialogically in communication with self and other"4.

In Habermas's view, the most provocative feature of Gadamer's hermeneutics is the claim against historicism and by implication against phenomenology and linguistic analysis. The interest behind hermeneutic is an interest in dialogue with others, with the past and with the alien cultures about the common concerns of human life. The hermeneutic orientation is not that of the neutral observation but that of the partner in dialogue.

Habermas is of the opinion that the reflection can no longer be conceived as absolute. It is always rooted in the contingent complex of tradition. "Although he accepts Gadamer's point about the finitude and context bounded ness of human understanding, Habermas  rejects his relativistic and idealistic conclusions regarding the logic of verstehen. In the first place, hermeneutic interpretation must be conjoined with the critique of ideology"5.

The critique of ideology requires a system reference that goes beyond tradition by systematically taking into account the empirical conditions under which it develops and changes. Hence hermeneutic understanding must be conjoined with the analysis of social systems. If social theory is to investigate the conditions under which patterns of interpretation and of action develop and change, it will, Habermas maintains, have to be historically oriented, Hence hermeneutic inquiry must also be conjoined with a philosophy of history. Actually Habermas is not just after simply an aggregate of several useful approaches but an integrated frame work for social theory.

Gadamer does not simply plead the advantages of tradition; but argues that participation in a cultural heritage is a condition of possibility of all thought, including critical reflection. Thus in his reply to Habermas, he accuses him of employing an oversimplified concept of critique and of setting up an abstract opposition between tradition and reflection. Gadamer concludes that Habermas's critique is dogmatic. Gadamer denies that hermeneutics can be simply opposed to critical reflection as the renewal of traditional authority is opposed to its dissolution. He claims reflection is an integral moment of the attempt to understand. Reflection, according to Gadamer, is not something opposed to understanding. So, he says that Habermas makes a dogmatic confusion by separating them.

Gadamer criticizes Habermas on the count that he attributes false power to reflection. He claims that reflection is always limited, partial, and based on taken- for granted  preconceptions and prejudgments. Habermas wants to get behind language to the real conditions under which it historically develops. But, Gadamer views language as not simply one aspect of society among others. According to Gadamer, it is the universal medium of social life. In particular, labour and power are located outside of language but mediated through it. Gadamer is of the view that Habermas makes excessive claims on behalf of critical reflection. "The critic cannot pretend to be in sole possession of the truth. His ideas of the just life are not exempt from revision and rejection in dialogue with others. Thus critical self-reflection, as well as the critique of ideological distortion, cannot be pursued in isolation from the attempt to come to an understanding with others. The ideals of reason are inherently bound up with openness to dialogue- both actual dialogue with contemporaries and virtual dialogue with the past"6. But Habermas questions the methodological point of view of Gadamer. He asks the question

whether hermeneutics is or can be the sole and adequate basis of social inquiry. Habermas feels that by absolutizing or by way to ontologising of hermeneutics, it results in an aprioristic devaluation of the methods of social analysis with a theoretical basis that goes beyond the normal linguistic competence.

Though Habermas does not deny the intimate connection between critical reflection and hermeneutic understanding, he differs on the proper approach to tradition. "Habermas's counter position is an attempt to mitigate the radically situational character of understanding through the introduction of theoretical elements; the communication and social evolution are meant to reduce the context dependency of the basic categories and assumptions of critical theory"7.

The important influence of hermeneutics in Habermas's work nowhere more visible than in the ‘linguistic turn' of his later work. "Habermas agrees with Gadamer that language is not only an object in our hands, it is the reservoir of traditions in and through which we exist"8. Socialization and cultural reproduction go through the medium of language. Ego – identity is formed and reciprocally stabilized in linguistic interaction. Social action is typically accomplished coordinated through ordinary speech. It is for these reasons that Habermas has taken on the colossal task of transposing his social theory into the paradigm of linguistic communication.

"Habermas agrees that it makes good sense to conceive of language as a kind of meta-institution on which all social institutions are dependent; for social action is constituted only in ordinary communication"9.Yet hermeneutics dies, not go far enough; it is insufficiently objective. By entering social reality only through the mutuality of understanding hermeneutics comes up against the walls of tradition from the inside as it were. The problem is that language is also a medium of power and oppression; language has an ideological dimension. This could be observed even in family relations and political culture. Power relations, Habermas observes, come upon as a systematically distorted communication. According to Habermas, a critical theory of society must therefore also provide objective explanations of social reality that come so to speak, from the outside in. Habermas views that the problem with hermeneutics is that it affirms the rights of tradition at the expense of reflection, at the expense of potentially emancipatory reflection that proves itself.

Notes:

1. Gadamer. H.G., Truth and Method, New York, 1975, p.124.
2. David Ingram, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason, Yale University Press, London, p.9.
3. Ibid, p.9.
4. Ibid, p.24.
5. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas, MIT Press, USA,1989,p.182.
6. Ibid, p.190.
7. Ibid, p.193.
8. Gadamer.H.G., On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutic Reflection, 1970, p.360.

Jurgen Habermas, A  Re