Truth and Justification E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 612

Beschreibung

In this important new book, J& #252rgen Habermas takes up certain fundamental questions of philosophy. While much of his recent work has been concerned with issues of morality and law, in this new work Habermas returns to the traditional philosophical questions of truth, objectivity and reality which were at the centre of his earlier classic book Knowledge and Human Interests. How can the norms that underpin the linguistically structured world in which we live be brought into step with the contingency of the development of socio-cultural forms of life? How can the idea that our world exists independently of our attempts to describe it be reconciled with the insight that we can never reach reality without the mediation of language and that 'bare' reality is therefore unattainable? In Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas answered these questions with reference to a weak naturalism and a transcendental-pragmatic realism. Since then, however, he has developed a formal pragmatic theory which is based on an analysis of speech acts and language use. In this new volume Habermas takes up the philosophical questions of truth, objectivity and reality from the perspective of his linguistically-based pragmatic theory. The final section addresses the limits of philosophy and reassesses the relation between theory and practice from a perspective that could be described as 'post-Marxist'. This volume, now available in paperback as well, by one of the world's leading philosophers will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy, social theory and the humanities and social sciences generally.

Leseprobe

Contents

Translator’s Introduction

1 Toward a Postanalytic and Postcontinental Philosophy

2 Kantian Pragmatism

3 Objective and Normative Validity: A Revised Conception of Truth

Introduction: Realism after the Linguistic Turn

I Communication or Representation?

II Content and Guiding Themes

III The Transcendental Problem—After Pragmatism

IV Two Fall-Out Problems: Endangering the Objectivity of Cognition and Blurring the Difference between the World and What Is Innerworldly

V Weak Naturalism—After Kant and Darwin

VI Realism without Representation

VII Truth and Justification

VIII Progress in Legal Discourse

1. Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy: Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn

I

II

III

2. From Kant’s “Ideas” of Pure Reason to the “Idealizing” Presuppositions of Communicative Action: Reflections on the Detranscendentalized “Use of Reason”

I

II

3. From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic Philosophy of Language

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

4. From Kant to Hegel and Back Again: The Move toward Detranscendentalization

I

II

III

IV

V

5. Norms and Values: On Hilary Putnam’s Kantian Pragmatism

I

II

6. Rightness versus Truth: On the Sense of Normative Validity in Moral Judgments and Norms

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

7. The Relationship between Theory and Practice Revisited

Notes

Index

This edition © 2003 Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThis work originally appeared under the tide Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung, © 1999 Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Chapters 2 and 5 of the German edition have been omitted; translations of both were included in the volume On the Pragmatics of Communication (1998). In their place the author has included two new essays (chapters 2 and 5 of this edition).

First published in the UK in 2003 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 0-7456-242-3

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Translator’s Introduction

To write an introduction to a volume to which the author himself has already written a lengthy introduction may seem superfluous. However, it is perhaps the very length of Jürgen Habermas’s own introduction to Truth and Justification that warrants a briefer preface. Moreover, given the nature of the essays collected in this volume, it is important to situate his work in relation to major current thinkers of the Anglo-American analytic—or, more aptly, postanalytic—tradition. This collection, perhaps more than any other by Habermas, is an intervention in and contribution to current debates in what he terms “theoretical philosophy,” that is, in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. At the same time, these essays elucidate the connection between Habermas’s moral and practical philosophy and his epistemology and metaphysics. As such, the volume will be of interest to analytically oriented philosophers as much as to those who have followed Habermas’s work in social theory and discourse ethics.

Habermas continues to be one of the few thinkers today aiming to develop a comprehensive philosophy. Although his main focus in this volume is on questions of knowledge and objectivity, these are always reconnected to issues of moral, social, and political theory that have occupied Habermas over the last several decades. The essays cover topics as wide-ranging as epistemological and moral cognitivism, cultural relativism, legal theory, practical reasoning, and human rights. Most important, Habermas shows how all these different issues impinge on one another and how a thoroughgoing pragmatism can provide a unified account of a vast array of phenomena. In doing so, he bridges the gap between so-called continental and analytic philosophy. On the one hand, he brings together the tradition of Humboldt, Hegel, and Heidegger with that of Frege, Quine, Davidson, and Dummett; on the other hand, he plays the two traditions against one another in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses. The result is a historically informed conceptual map and a trenchant diagnosis of the state of debate among contemporary, pragmatists. Finally, the present collection of essays marks certain shifts in his thinking, in particular regarding his conception of truth.

A distinctive feature of Habermas’s work has been his defense of enlightenment reason even in the age of what he himself has called “postmetaphysical thinking.” He has always treaded the narrow path between objectivism and subjectivism—be it in his social theory and practical philosophy or, as here, in his epistemology and metaphysics. That is, on the one hand, he has sought to avoid reducing social situations or moral issues to mere objectively observable phenomena but instead to theorize them from a participant perspective. On the other hand, he has been critical of social or ethical theories that accord too much constitutive authority to the subject or the linguistic-community.1 Thus the purpose of the theory of communicative action has been to address problems of action coordination and social integration by developing an intersubjectivist theoretical framework that avoids the pitfalls of both objectivism and subjectivism. From the outset, Habermas has embraced the “linguistic turn” as the basis for such a framework: The theory of communicative action situates the roots of rationality in the structures of everyday communication and regards the critical power of reason to be immanent in ordinary language. Using the resources of speech act theory, Habermas understands communicative action in terms of the raising of criticizable validity claims. Following the publication of The Theory of Communicative Action in the early 1980s, he went on to develop a cognitivist moral theory in the form of discourse ethics. The core of this theory is the so-called Principle of Universalization, according to which a moral norm is justified if all those affected would assent to it under conditions of an ideal speech situation.2 Moral norms, unlike ethical values, have a universal and unconditional validity. At the same time, moral rightness is an epistemic notion. That is, it is defined in terms of what rational agents would agree on under (approximately) ideal conditions.

In this collection, Habermas turns to the implications of the theory of communicative action—and, more broadly, of the linguistic turn—for epistemology and metaphysics. He returns to the problem of representation and objectivity, an issue he has not addressed in detail since writing Knowledge and Human Interests. In particular, he distinguishes a nonepistemic notion of objective validity from the above notion of moral validity. Having worked out the linguistic and pragmatic turns in practical philosophy, that is, in the theory of action and rationality and in ethics, he wants to do the same for ontology and epistemology. In taking this route, he reverses what he takes to be the dominant approach in both analytic and continental philosophy, namely, to give primacy to theoretical over practical philosophy and, consequently, to develop practical philosophy in the light of theoretical philosophy, rather than the other way round—or, more appropriately, rather than developing the two in tandem. His goal, as these essays make clear, is to steer a middle course between the Scylla and Charybdis of much contemporary thought shaped by the linguistic turn, namely, between a pragmatist contextualism that gives up all claims to objective knowledge and a reductive objectivism that fails to do justice to the participant perspective of agents in interaction. This raises two central problems: How can the ineluctable normativity of the perspective of agents interacting in a linguistically structured lifeworld be reconciled with the contingency of how forms of life evolve? And how can the assumption that there is an independently existing world be reconciled with the linguistic insight that we cannot have unmediated access to “brute” reality? Habermas wants to answer both questions from a thoroughly pragmatist perspective. Indeed, he believes that, for the most part, the pragmatic turn has still not been adequately realized, and that this failure accounts for the problems faced by other conetmporary pragmatists, as his engagement with them here illustrates.

1 Toward a Postanalytic and Postcontinental Philosophy

A major theme of this collection of essays is Haberinas’s continuing effort to mediate between the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy, which he regards as complementary and without both of which his formal pragmatics would not be possible. Here we find him engaging the views of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Apel, on the continental side, and Frege, Dummett, Davidson, Putnam, and Brandom, on the analytic. Towering above all, of course, are Kant and Hegel as the two main historical figures informing contemporary debate. He identifies two major currents in twentieth-century philosophy in the wake of the linguistic turn. The first is represented by Wittgenstein and Heidegger and emphasizes linguistic world-disclosure, that is, the idea that our access to reality is always filtered and indeed made possible by our language or conceptual scheme. As already indicated, this strand jeopardizes the notion of objectivity since it puts us at the mercy, so to speak, of “Being” or of the grammar of our language games. The second is represented by Quine and Davidson and veers too far in the direction of objectivity; it embraces an empiricist outlook at the expense of doing justice to the participant perspective of language users (pp. 69ff., 112ff.). In addition, he identifies a third current, namely, that of Kantian pragmatism, represented by Putnam, Dummett, Apel, and others—including himself. This group takes the linguistic turn seriously not just as a methodological shift, but as a paradigm shift (p. 69). Proponents of this third strand seek to do justice both to the constitutive nature of language and to the objectivity of claims to truth.

The first essay explicitly takes up the complementarity of the analytic and continental traditions, with Wilhelm von Humboldt emerging in some sense as the historical hero of the collection. Although language has a constitutive function for Humboldt, he also emphasizes the possibility of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication and retains a notion of objective reference. Habermas does not make it explicit, but his reading of Humboldt—and especially of Humboldt’s emphasis on the interchangeability of the dialogical roles of speaker and hearer—parallels on the continental side his earlier reading of Mead on the Anglo-American side.3 Moreover, for Habermas, Humboldt lays the foundations of the kind of Kantian pragmatism he defends. Both the hermeneutic and analytic traditions, however, limit themselves to what Habermas calls the “semantic aspects” of language (p. 62) and treat pragmatics as secondary. Insofar as Humboldt argued that there are three aspects or levels of language, namely, world-disclosure (taken up by hermeneutics), representation (taken up by formal semantics), and pragmatics, his account goes beyond these two traditions.

What is missing from the continental tradition is an adequate account of the representational function of language, of reference and propositional truth (p. 61). For this purpose, Habermas draws on the analytic tradition, particularly on the work of Hilary Putnam. He stresses that sameness of reference is a formal pragmatic presupposition of communication, and this presupposition is independent of the specific—and possibly divergent—descriptions that two speakers may associate with a term or referent. Indeed, for two speakers to disagree about the appropriate description of a referent presupposes that they are referring to the same thing.4

The most salient difference between analytic and continental thought, according to Habermas, is that the analytic tradition does not engage in cultural critique (p. 79). If we accept this characterization, then Habermas shows himself to be a decidedly continental thinker. Despite the focus on theoretical philosophy, there is a palpable sense of the political throughout the volume, starting with the introduction’s concluding section of legal theory all the way to the final essay’s observations on the relationship between theory and practice and on the philosopher’s role as public intellectual. The connection between Habermas’s epistemology and his social-political theory is increasingly foregrounded in the later essays. The final three essays are, albeit in different ways, intended to show how the main themes of the volume are connected to the bulk of Habermas’s oeuvre in social theory and moral philosophy.

2 Kantian Pragmatism

Habermas is one of several contemporary “Kantian pragmatists.” It is therefore not surprising that his debate with philosophers like Hilary Putnam or Robert Brandom is cast in terms of how to “pragmatize” or, as he puts it, “detranscendentalize” Kant. What follows, in other words, from understanding the transcendental conditions of possibility of our experience as something in the world, of situating them in our practices (pp. 18, 20ff.)? The first part of essay 2 contains a detailed account of his appropriation of Kant. On the one hand, Kant’s necessary subjective conditions of objective experience are transformed and given the “quasi-transcendental” role of intersubjective conditions of linguistic interpretation and communication. Yet on the other hand, if taken too far, this detranscendentalization leads to undesirable consequences. As the tides of essays 3 and 4 suggest, one might say that we must find a middle road between Kant and Hegel. Habermas argues that Hegel was right to historicize reason, but that he subsequently went too far in the direction of an “objective idealism” according to which objectivity is ultimately reduced to intersubjectivity. When “spirit” (Hegel) or “Being” (Heidegger) or simply lifeworlds or linguistic frameworks are given too much constitutive authority, the result is linguistic determinism and cultural and epistemological relativism. Situating transcendental features of experience in local forms of life raises the problem of how to theorize an objective world existing independently of our conceptual schemes or practices. If what we know depends not merely on universal structures of the mind, but on the conceptual articulation of our language—since this articulation is what gives us access to “reality” in the first place—there are as many ways of knowing as there are languages. If these languages furthermore are regarded as incommensurable, the concept of objectivity loses all bite and we are left with relativism. Even though Habermas, too, argues that we have no “uninterpreted” or direct access to reality, but that our grasp of how things are in the world is always mediated through language, he rejects relativism in epistemology as much as in moral theory.

Habermas argues the above problems follow not from the project of detranscendentalization per se, but from a (continued) privileging of the representational model of knowledge. According to this model, which has traditionally gone hand in hand with the correspondence theory of truth, knowledge is a matter of correctly representing the world. Habermas argues that this privileging is present even in authors who claim to have overcome this model. Indeed, Habermas makes the (strong) claim that even pragmatically oriented analytic philosophers from Quine and Davidson to Sellars and Brandom remain too caught up in the representational paradigm and thus do not fully take the linguistic-pragmatic turn (see his introduction, and essays 2 and 3). Even the most promising pragmatic approaches such as Brandom’s inferentialism, he maintains, ultimately subscribe to what Habermas regards as an objectivist understanding of agency that does not do justice to the intersubjective, dialogical nature of communication (essay 4). The threats of relativism and its converse, objectivism, in other words, both follow from an insufficiently thorough pragmatism.

Habermas counters the representational model with a pragmatic conception of knowledge. The pragmatist deflation of Kantian transcendental analysis shows how the background structures of our life-world are embodied in our practices and activities and emphasizes the participant perspective. Just as Habermas’s analysis of moral discourse involved the formal pragmatic presuppositions interlocutors must make, so the pragmatic presuppositions governing our epistemic practices play a central role here, first and foremost the presupposition of a single objective world that is the same for everyone. This presupposition lies at the core of our ability to refer to objects in the world at all and, as such, underlies the representational function of language. This representational function of language, however, for Habermas, must remain tied to “contexts of experience, action, and discursive justification” (p. 26). Thus a strictly causal theory of reference is unacceptable to him. More important, in the present context, it means that our empirical knowledge of the world and our linguistic knowledge must be regarded as interdependent. Not only does language make possible our access to reality, but our coping with the world in turn has the power to lead us to revise our linguistic practices (essay 6). Language does not (fully) determine what we can know of the world or what the world is for us. Rather, we learn from experience, and this empirical knowledge can lead us to revise the meanings of the terms we use. This is why Habermas refers to the world-disclosure of language as “weakly transcendental.”

Crucial for accounting for the revisionary power of experience relative to language is the role Habermas accords to problem solving. It is the key activity underlying knowledge acquisition. We encounter the world first in our engaged coping, and—often—we encounter it as a source of resistance. That the world provides resistance when we deal with it means that “the way the world is” is not simply up to us. Father, reality constrains our practices in tangible ways, and this provides the foothold for a robust notion of objectivity. This is crucial for learning. The resistance of the objective world is analogous to the resistance we may encounter when others criticize the claims we raise in discourse, and Habermas uses this analogy to argue for the unconditionality of moral validity (essay 6).

This pragmatist conception of knowledge has ontological implications. Working out an adequate notion of objectivity leads Habermas to endorse a “weak naturalism” to complement his epistemological realism. Weak naturalism is a form of naturalism insofar as it views nature and culture as continuous with one another. Culture evolves naturally. Here, too, learning is a central metaphor: Our socioeultural form of life has evolved from prior forms through natural learning processes. Habermas’s is a weak naturalism because he wants to refrain from making any sort of reductionist claims about social practices (such as reducing them to merely observable behavior); they are to be analyzed from the participant perspective as norm-governed practices. Similarly, weak naturalism is supposed to be neutral with regard to the mind-body problem. The idea is that once we connect transcendental pragmatism with weak naturalism, we can give an account of how reality imposes constraints on our practices (p. 30). The paradigmatic representatives of “strong” naturalism, by contrast, are Quine and Davidson, who, according to Habermas, explain human behavior naturalistically, assimilating normative social and linguistic practices to observable events in the world. By seeking to eliminate all normative elements from its explanations, strong naturalism fails to do justice to the participant perspective, whereas weak naturalism takes seriously the normative self-understanding of agents in interaction.

3 Objective and Normative Validity: A Revised Conception of Truth

Most of Habermas’s work following The Theory of Communicative Action in the 1980s and early ’90s focused on developing discourse ethics. In terms of validity, this meant working out what is involved in raising and vindicating normative rightness claims. The focus, in other words, was on normative validity (Sollgeltung), on what one ought to do. The question of truth, in contrast, for him is a question about objective validity (Wahrheitsgeltung). Here, the issue of normativity becomes tricky. Of course, the question of objective validity has to do with what one ought to believe or take to be true, and to that extent, it makes sense to speak of truth as a “normative” concept. However, truth, for Haberrnas, must not be assimilated to (merely) holding true. Ultimately, objective validity is a matter of what is, in fact, true, not of what we take to be true (despite the fact that we can confidentiy say that some of our truths have replaced earlier beliefs that we now know were false, and the fallibilist insight that, for all we know, our own beliefs may be similarly replaced in the future). Truth, in contrast to normative rightness, in other words, is not an epistemic notion—a point to which I return below.

References to truth, objectivity, and the cognitive or representational dimension of language, to be sure, have always figured in Habermas’s accounts of language and communication as well as in his critiques of other approaches. Thus, for example, he criticizes analytic philosophy of language and in particular truth-conditional approaches to semantics for privileging the representational dimension of language.5 However, at least since writing “Wahrheitstheorien,”6 Haberrnas has not addressed in further detail the question of the nature of truth. Rather, he has generally confined himself to the view that in raising a truth claim, a speaker claims that some state of affairs or fact obtains. In “Wahrheitstheorien,” Haberrnas already rejected both correspondence and coherence theories of truth, and he does so still in essays 5 and 6. On the one hand, correspondence is too strong a notion inasmuch as it assumes the possibility of direct access to “brute” or “naked” reality. On the other hand, a coherence theory of truth fails to capture important aspects of our concept of truth, even though it looks to be one of the implications of the linguistic turn: Once we grant that there is no direct, but only linguistically mediated access to reality, it seems that any belief or statement can be corroborated only by other beliefs or statements and that thus a coherence theory of truth is the only kind available to us. Yet coherence is too weak a notion for truth inasmuch as, according to Habermas, statements are true not because they cohere with other statements we accept, but because the states of affairs they describe actually obtain (even though they can be established only by means of other statements).

In “Wahrheitstheorien,” Habermas thus infamously coined the term “consensus theory of truth,” which has caused a fair amount of confusion about and misunderstanding of his position. This early essay should be read as presenting not so much a theory of truth as a theory of justification.7 Possibly fueling the confusion, Habermas himself did espouse what he subsequently called a “discursive” conception of truth until the mid- to late-1990s, according to which truth is ideal warranted assertibility—a view he shared with Hilary Putnam, among others. In response to criticism, Habermas has since abandoned this epistemic conception of truth. As he argues at length in essays 2 and especially 6 the discursive conception as formulated hitherto is inadequate. In particular, the discursive or consensus theory of truth misleadingly suggests that we take a proposition to be true because it is or can be agreed to by all those concerned, whereas in fact, we ought to agree to a proposition because it is true, not the other way around. This change of mind is in large part what has prompted him to return to epistemology and metaphysics in order to work out a better pragmatist conception of truth; he now takes it that “the discursive conception of truth is due to an overgeneralization of the special case of the validity of moral judgments and norms” (“Introduction,” p. 8). The validity of the latter is exhausted by ideal warranted assertibility: A moral claim is normatively right if and only if all those affected would agree to it under approximately ideal conditions of discourse. There are no facts independent of the (ideal) community of those affected to which normative rightness claims purport to refer. But talk of truth, in contrast to that of normative rightness, has certain specific ontological connotations: It presupposes reference to a single objective world that exists independently of our descriptions and is the same for all of us. This realization has led Habermas to acknowledge the need for a theory of reference to supplement the theory of communicative action. Hence he endorses a direct theory of reference as developed by Hilary Putnam, which allows for sameness of reference under different descriptions. This, too, is clearly a necessary presupposition of discourse about whether what we say is true.

Truth figures at different levels in Habermas. On the one hand, truth plays a role in discussions of the nature of the theory of meaning. Habermas is drawn to the analytic tradition because it can provide a theory of meaning that, in particular, accounts for the representational dimension of language, which the continental linguistic tradition tends to neglect. Furthermore, Habermas especially applauds the recognition, since Frege, of the internal connection between meaning and validity. Although truth, as one of the three validity claims, is indispensable to the theory of communicative action, Habermas has argued against taking truth as a semantic primitive. Rather, it is but one dimension of validity. A truth-conditional semantics as developed by philosophers of language from Frege to Davidson is too narrow, in his view, for it privileges the representational dimension of language over its expressive and communicative dimensions.8

For Habermas, communication, action, and representation are equiprimordial. This has been a hallmark of his conception of speech acts since the 1970s: In performing a speech act, a speaker represents a state of affairs, establishes an intersubjective relation with a hearer, and expresses her intention. In other words, she raises three validity claims: a claim to truth, to normative rightness, and to sincerity. The insistence on these three mutually irreducible validity claims forms a cornerstone of Habermas’s conceptual system. And it is this view that continues to set him apart from the analytic philosophers he discusses. In one way or another, it lies at the bottom of his critique of Quine and Davidson as well as of Brandom and even Putnam. All are seeking to find a common denominator or to level the conceptual landscape in ways that Habermas rejects. Quine and Davidson, in his view, err on the side of objectivism by turning the communicative actions of others into mere observable behavior; Brandom assimilates norms of rationality to norms of action; and Putnam levels the fact-value distinction by associating value judgments with “ought-implying facts.”

On the other hand, Habermas also discusses truth at the level of metaphysics and ontology. This is the case, for instance, when he is trying to elucidate what is involved in truth as a validity claim. The question here is how should truth be defined? What is truth on a pragmatist account that nonetheless wants to embrace epistemological realism? For a pragmatist, of course, this very question is ill put. Indeed, one might argue that a major advantage of Habermas’s present account over that he offered in “Wahrheitstheorien” is that he no longer provides a definition of truth or equates it with anything. Rather, not unlike Brandom in Making It Explicit, he directs our attention to how the concept of truth functions, both in everyday coping and in discourse. Whereas in the latter context, we are aware of the “cautionary” uses of the truth predicate and of the fallibility of our claims, the unconditionality of truth is most evident in practical contexts of ordinary coping. There, we presuppose certain truths, practical certainties, as unconditionally valid. As Habermas succinctly puts it, “We do not walk onto any bridge whose stability we doubt” (p. 39). This unconditional acceptance is the pragmatic corollary of a realist conception of truth,

Habermas is an epistemological realist in another respect as well: The objects we can refer to may fail to meet the descriptions we associate with them. This is the core of his fallibilism; it is also where he draws on Putnam’s theory of reference. In defense of his version of a pragmatic conception of truth, he argues that the connection between truth and justification is epistemically, but not conceptually necessary (p. 38). In other words, truth may always “outrun” justified belief, even under (approximately) ideal conditions, but he nevertheless insists on the fact that from the agent’s perspective, practical certainties are and must be taken to be true absolutely at the risk of incapacitation. It is only in discourse that such practical convictions come under a fallibilist proviso.

Finally, Habermas considers himself to be a “conceptual nominalist” rather than a conceptual realist (p. 31). This follows, first, from his commitment to the revisability of language by experience. But it also means, second, that the world does not consist of facts but of things. A fortiori, then, for Habermas, facts are not things. This view is clearly reminiscent of Davidson’s claim that “nothing, no thing, makes our sentences true.”9 Although facts, for Habermas, are what is represented in true statements, he does not mean to reify or hypostatize the notion of fact. In a sense, both Davidson and Habermas allow that facts—that things are thus and so—are what make sentences true; both endorse realist views about truth; and both maintain that there is a mind- and language-independent objective world. Moreover, both are antireductionists: Like Habermas, Davidson defends the mutual irreducibility and equiprimordiality of subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity. Nonetheless, his epistemology is more strongly naturalistic and less pragmatic that Habermas’s. On the other hand, he is more suspicious of “fact-talk” than Habermas and would rather do without it entirely. In this regard, Davidson is arguably more metaphysically abstemious if not postmetaphysical.

Much of the interest of the present volume lies in Habermas’s clarification of the—often subtle—differences between his own position and similar approaches. One must, for this very reason, be careful to distinguish substantive differences from differences in emphasis between Habermas and his sparring partners. These are in a sense, to borrow Habermas’s phrase, “domestic disputes.” His and Robert Brandom’s accounts of objectivity, for example, can and perhaps should be regarded as complementary. Brandom argues that there is a “structural objectivity” built into our practices of giving and asking for reasons; for him, the distinction between something’s being true and being taken to be true is a pragmatic one, built into the structures of communication. To that extent, his account is compatible with Habermas’s own pragmatic account of objectivity. According to the latter, the formal presupposition of a single objective world existing independently of us is, after all, also a structural feature of discourse.10

Another example is the disagreement with Putnam about truth. Habermas criticizes Putnam’s account of the objectivity of value (as the inverse of the value-ladenness of facts) and his assertion that there are “ought-implying facts” and that, therefore, value judgments can be true or false. Against Putnam, Habermas argues that there are “different senses in which judgments can be correct” (p. 224). Norms must not be assimilated to facts, for the facts are not “up to us” in the way that moral or ethical norms are. The meaning of truth, as he puts it, is not exhausted by reaching consensus. At issue in this dispute is whether it is legitimate to allow for different types of truth that in turn require different types of justification or whether “truth” is a notion that applies to statements about the objective world only whereas moral judgments, though they have cognitive content, are subject to a different kind of validity. Some have argued along these lines that, in the moral domain, Habermas has been defending a peculiar brand of cognitivism, since he has consistently denied that moral claims are truth-evaluable when truth-evaluability is generally thought to be the hallmark of moral cognitivism. What difference it makes whether we talk about, say, moral or aesthetic truth or moral lightness and aesthetic authenticity, as long as we recognize that they are subject to justification in terms of different kinds of reasons, remains an open question.11

Perhaps a more salient point of disagreement between Habermas and Putnam in their ongoing debate is their respective understandings of pluralism, as this collection’s essay and especially Putnam’s response to it show.12 Putnam seems to have an almost instrumentalist conception of the value of pluralism. For him, it involves more than mere tolerance. A consistent pluralist cannot hold that some other form of life, religious tradition, or sexual orientation is “wrong.” Above and beyond this “minimal pluralism,” however, he also claims that a pluralist must accept that other forms of life, religion, or sexual orientation may have insights available to them that are not available to her, but that may be of use to her and to her own community.13 This sheds new light on Putnam’s dictum to “let a thousand flowers bloom.” The value of pluralism—rather like the value of pluralism in scientific inquiry—is that it can help us in our discovery of the good life. But a Habermasian, according to Putnam, can approach a value judgment from another community or culture in only two ways: She can ask either (a) whether it is deontologically admissible, that is, whether it violates any universal norms, or (b) whether it contributes to a collective form of life that is in the interest of all those affected.14 This, however, is too narrow an understanding of cross-cultural dialogue according to Putnam. This is no doubt the case, but a Habermasian need not be confined to this narrow conception. Putnam does not consider Habermas’s emphasis on learning processes, on the one hand, and on the dialogical nature of communication, be it intra- or intercultural, on the other. These at least prima facie surely allow for the possibility of our learning by interacting not only with the objective world, but also with others. Just as we are able to revise our linguistic knowledge in light of new empirical knowledge, so surely we must be able to revise our moral and ethical knowledge in light of our interactions with one another. Ultimately it is this ability that lies at the cognitivist heart of a realist epistemology and universalist moral theory.

Essays 1, 3, and 4 have been published elsewhere in translations by others. Habermas himself penned an English version of essay 7. While I have learned from each of these translations, I have revised all in an effort to give the volume unity of style and to correct for some discrepancies with the published German original. A few terms presented particular difficulties that should be mentioned here. (1) Habermas uses two terms for “validity,” Geltung and Gültigkeit There is a latent attempt to use them to mark two distinctions, namely, on one hand, between the objective validity of a claim and its de facto “validity for us,” its social acceptance or force, and, on the other, between objective and normative validity. The latter, in other words, is a distinction within the dimension of validity in general. However, Habermas does not draw either distinction systematically. (2) For the most part, I have rendered Aussage as “statement,” though sometimes “proposition” or “assertion” were more appropriate. Thus, for example, Habermas distinguishes between moralische Aussagen and empirische Aussagen, but also associates truth with propositions (Propositionen) and assertions as distinct from normative rightness and normative claims, which he explicitly distinguishes from assertions. As a result, it is somewhat awkward to speak of “moral propositions” rather than moral claims or statements. (3) The rather different connotations or, to put it in terms of the Brandom–Habermas debate, inferential relations of terms like practical commitments and praktische Vorhaben (“practical projects” or “undertakings”) potentially lead to confusion in transposing a philosophical debate from one language into another, one philosophical culture into another, even challenging one’s faith in the principle of translatability. For the sake of the English-speaking audience who may be familiar with Brandom’s work, I have tried to cast the debate as much as possible in Brandom’s original terms without distorting Habermas’s criticisms.

I am grateful to Gary Davis, Crisuna Lafont, Sid Maskit, Christoph Menke, Bill Rehg, and especially Jonathan Maskit for their advice and assistance with various parts of this manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank Jiirgen Habermas for generously clarifying a number of points in the text.

Introduction: Realism after the Linguistic Turn

The present volume brings together philosophical essays that were written between 1996 and 2000 and pick up on a line of thought that I had set aside since Knowledge and Human Interests. With the exception of the final essay (“The Relationship between Theory and Practice Revisited”), they deal with issues in theoretical philosophy that I have neglected since then. Of course, the formal pragmatics that I have developed since the early 1970s cannot do without the fundamental concepts of truth and objectivity, reality and reference, validity and rationality. This theory relies on a normatively charged concept of communication [Verständigung], operates with validity claims that can be redeemed discursively and with formal-pragmatic presuppositions about the world, and links understanding speech acts to the conditions of their rational acceptability. However, I have not dealt with these themes from the perspective of theoretical philosophy. I have pursued neither a metaphysical interest in the being of Being, nor an epistemological interest in the knowledge of objects or facts, nor even the semantic interest in the form of assertoric propositions. The linguistic turn did not acquire its significance for me in connection with these traditional problems. Rather, the pragmatic approach to language [Sprachpragmatik] helped me to develop a theory of communicative action and of rationality. It was the foundation for a critical theory of society and paved the way for a discourse-theoretic conception of morality, law, and democracy.

This explains a certain one-sidedness of my theoretical strategy, which the essays in this volume are meant to redress. They revolve around two fundamental questions of theoretical philosophy. On the one hand, I here take up the ontological question of naturalism: As subjects capable of speech and action, we “always already” find ourselves in a linguistically structured lifeworld. Flow can the normativity that is unavoidable from the perspective of the participants in this lifeworld be reconciled with the contingency of sociocultural forms of life that have evolved naturally? On the other hand, I turn to the epistemological question of realism: How can we reconcile the assumption that there is a world existing independently of our descriptions of it and that is the same for all observers with the linguistic insight that we have no direct, linguistically unmediated access to “brute” reality? Needless to say, I deal with these topics from within the formal-pragmatic perspective.

I Communication or Representation?

Once Frege replaced the mentalistic via regia of analyzing sensations, representations, and judgments with a semantic analysis of linguistic expressions and Wittgenstein radicalized the linguistic turn into a paradigm shift,1 Hume and Kant’s epistemological questions could have taken on a new, pragmatic significance. In the context of lived practices, of course, they then would have lost their primacy over questions in the theory of communication and action. Yet even within philosophy of language, the traditional order of explanation has persisted. As ever, theory takes precedence over practice, representation over communication; and the semantic analysis of action depends on a prior analysis of knowledge.

Still caught up in the tradition of Platonism, the philosophy of consciousness privileged the internal over the external, the private over the public, the immediacy of subjective experience over discursive mediation. Epistemology rose to the rank of a First Philosophy, while communication and action were relegated to the realm of appearances, thus retaining a derivative status. After the transition from philosophy of consciousness to philosophy of language, it seemed to make sense not to turn the hierarchy of explanatory moves upside-down, but rather to level it. After all, language is used to communicate as much as to represent, and a linguistic utterance is itself a form of action, which is used for producing interpersonal relationships.

After the linguistic turn, the relation between proposition and fact replaces the relation between representation and object. Charles Sanders Peirce already eschewed focusing too narrowly on semantics and expanded this two-place relation into a three-place relation. Thus the sign, which refers to an object and expresses a state of affairs, must be interpreted by a speaker and hearer.2 Subsequently, speech act theory following Austin showed how, in the normal form of a speech act (Mp), the propositional component’s reference to the world and to objects is interlinked with the illocutionary component’s reference to other interlocutors. By creating an intersubjective relationship between speaker and hearer, the speech act simultaneously stands in an objective relation to the world. If we conceive of “communication” [Verständigung] as the inherent telos of language, we cannot but acknowledge the equiprimordiality of representation, communication, and action. As representation and as communicative act, a linguistic utterance points in both directions at once: toward the world and toward the addressee.

Nonetheless, even after the linguistic turn, the analytic mainstream held fast to the primacy of assertoric propositions and their representational function. The tradition of truth-conditional semantics founded by Frege, the logical empiricism of Russell and the Vienna Circle, the theories of meaning from Quine to Davidson and from Sellars to Brandom all start from the premise that the proposition or assertion is paradigmatic for linguistic analysis. Aside from the important exception of the later Wittgenstein and his unorthodox students (such as Georg Henrik von Wright),3 analytic philosophy has meant the continuation of epistemology by other means. Questions pertaining to theories of communication, action, morality, and the law were as ever considered to be of secondary importance.

In the face of this fact, Michael Dummett explicitiy raises the question of the relationship between representation and communication:

Language, it is natural to say, has two principal functions: that of an instrument of communication, and that of a vehicle of thought. We are therefore impelled to ask which of the two is primary. Is it because language is an instrument of communication that it can also serve as a vehicle of thought? Or is it, conversely, because it is a vehicle of thought, and can therefore express thoughts, that it can be used by one person to communicate his thoughts to others?4

For Dummett, this question is based on a false dichotomy. On the one hand, (a) the communicative function of language must not be rendered independent of its representational function since this would yield a distorted intentionalistic picture of communication. On the other hand, (b) the representational function can no more be conceived independently of the communicative function since this would mean losing sight of the epistemic conditions for understanding propositions.

(a) By asserting Kp a speaker does not merely express her intention (in Grice and Searle’s sense) of making her interlocutor recognize that she takes p to be true and that she wants him to know this. Instead of her own thought p, she wants to communicate the fact that p to him. The speaker’s illocutionary goal is that the hearer not only acknowledge her belief, but that he come to the same opinion, that is, to share that belief. But this is possible only on the basis of the intersubjective recognition of the truth claim raised on behalf of p. The speaker can realize her illocutionary goal only if the cognitive function of the speech act is also realized, that is, if the interlocutor accepts her utterance as valid. To this extent, there is an internal connection between successful communication and factual representation.5

(b) This intentionalist emancipation of the communicative function of language mirrors the truth-theoretic privileging of its cognitive function. According to this conception, we understand a sentence or proposition if we know the conditions under which it is true. However, language users do not have direct access to truth conditions not requiring interpretation. Hence Dummett insists that we must have knowledge of the conditions under which an interpreter is able to recognize whether the conditions that make a sentence true obtain. With this epistemic turn, understanding shifts from solipsistically accessible truth conditions to conditions under which the sentence to be interpreted can be asserted as true and thus can be justified publicly as rationally acceptable.6 Knowing a sentence’s assertibility conditions is connected to the sorts of reasons that can be cited in support of its truth. To understand an utterance is to know how one could use it in order to reach an understanding with someone about something. If, however, we are able to understand a sentence solely with regard to its conditions of use in rationally acceptable utterances, then there must be an internal connection between the representational function of language and the conditions of successful communication.7

It follows from (a) and (b) that the representational and communicative functions of language mutually presuppose one another, in other words, that they are equiprimordial. Although Dummett shares this view, even he follows the prevailing spirit of contemporary analytic philosophy. The purpose of his own theory of meaning is essentially to translate the classical questions of epistemology into the linguistic paradigm. In spite of Dummett’s remarkable political engagement, questions of practical philosophy, in any case, recede into the background.8 This choice of emphasis can be explained as a result of understandable reservations regarding the later Wittgenstein’s rejection of theory. The latter connected the pragmatic turn away from truth-conditional semantics with a rejection of any systematic philosophy of language whatsoever. Yet a pragmatics that takes into account the linguistic structure of the lifeworld as a whole and takes the various functions of language equally into consideration need not be antitheoretical. It need neither limit itself to the piecemeal therapeutic handiwork of a linguistic phenomenology (as did Wittgenstein’s followers) nor aim at the epochal transcendence of a Platonistically alienated culture (as did the followers of Heidegger).

The same primacy of theoretical questions that characterizes orthodox analytic philosophy has also made its mark on the hermeneutic branch of philosophy of language. This is surprising to the extent that hermeneutics starts from the dialogue of the interpreter with formative traditions and hence is interested in language less as a means of representation than as a vehicle of communication. Thus hermeneutics followed in the path of rhetoric since the Renaissance. But even on this side the interest in the representational function of language has acquired priority, ever since Dilthey sought to ground the objectivity of understanding in the human sciences in their methodology. Heidegger’s questioning of the extistential condition of a being characterized by the distinctive feature of understanding finally brings into play a semantic interest in the linguistically articulated preunderstanding of the world as a whole. Innerworldly aspects of language use recede behind the world-disclosing function of language.

The limitation of philosophy of language begins with Frege and Russell’s focus on the semantics of assertion. On the heraieneutic side, a parallel limitation takes place in the focusing on a semantics of linguistic worldviews. Such a semantics guides the preontological interpretation of the world of a given linguistic community along categorially predetermined tracks. In Truth and Method, Gadamer criticizes Dilthey’s methodology of “understanding” in the human science from the perspective of the later Heidegger’s conception of the history of being. The authentic appropriation of an authoritative tradition is supposed to depend on a prior interpretation of the world that unites the interpreter with her object a tergo. Apel and I have confronted this emancipation of the world-disclosing function of language with a theory of epistemic interests, which was sup-posed to return hermeneutics to a metaphysically abstemious role.9 Admittedly, even Knowledge and Human Interests was shaped by the primacy of epistemological issues and problems.

Thus the latter work contained themes that receded into the background along the way to the Theory of Communicative Action.10Knowledge and Human Interests answered the basic questions of theoretical philosophy in terms of a weak naturalism and a transcendental-pragmatic epistemological realism. However, these topics have faded ever since the desideratum of an epistemic justification of a critical social theory was rendered superfluous by the attempt to formulate a direct linguistic-pragmatic justification.11 Since then I have analyzed the pragmatic presuppositions of action aimed at reaching mutual understanding independently of the transcendental conditions of knowledge.

Yet in light of the premises of this theory of language, I now wish to return to the problems associated with a Kantian pragmatism that I had set aside. As already mentioned, formal pragmatics arose from the needs of a sociological theory of action; it was meant to elucidate the socially integrating and binding force of speech acts with which speakers raise validity claims that are subject to critique and with which they make their hearers take a rationally motivated stance. Therefore the formal-pragmatic analysis of the representational func tion of language remained at a relatively low level of explication. However, it can avail itself of a broader research perspective than those theories of meaning that have evolved out of Fregean truth- conditional semantics. It has the advantage of taking all functions of language equally into consideration and of placing in the right light the critical role that the second person plays in taking a stance on reciprocally raised validity claims.

II Content and Guiding Themes

The following essays express a renewed interest in issues of a pragmatic epistemological realism that follows in the path of linguistic Kantianism.12 While the first essay, “Hermeneutics and Analytic Philosophy,” retraces how we get from hermeneutics to formal pragmatics, the second, on Kant’s ideas of pure reason, is an attempt to provide a conceptual history of the genesis of the basic concepts and assumptions of formal pragmatics in the light of the Kantian doctrine of ideas. In performing speech acts, speakers trying to reach an understanding with one another must “unavoidably” undertake certain idealizations. It has been my experience that, particularly in the Anglo-American context, the pragmatic conception of these idealizations is often misunderstood. This has prompted me to offer a genealogy that draws attention to the differences between the Humean and the Kantian heritage of contemporary philosophy of language (Davidson vs. Dummett and Brandom) and incorporates formal pragmatics into the lineage of “linguistic Kantianism.” In the next essay, “From Kant to Hegel: Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic Philosophy of Language,” I engage with the theory representing, in my view, the state of the art of pragmatic approaches in analytic philosophy of language. Brandom combines Wilfrid Sellars’s inferentialist semantics step by step with a pragmatics of discourse in order to explain the objectivity of conceptual norms from the perspective of the intersubjectively shared “practice of giving and asking for reasons.” In the end, Brandom is able to do justice to the intuitions underlying epistemological realism only at the price of a conceptual realism that obliterates the distinction between the intersubjectively shared lifeworld and the objective world. This assimilation of the objectivity of experience to the intersubjectivity of communication is reminiscent of an infamous Hegelian move. Thus, in the following essay, “From Kant to Hegel and Back Again,” I take up the question of why and how Hegel paved the way for detranscendentalizing the knowing subject, yet then himself made the move to objective idealism. By way of a metacritical engagement with Hilary Putnam in “Norms and Values,” I would like to illustrate how, even after the linguistic-pragmatic turn, one can continue to be a realist regarding questions of epistemology without assuming the burdens of moral realism. For reasons similar to Putnam’s, I have given up an epistemic conception of truth and have sought to distinguish more clearly between the truth of a proposition and its rational assertibility (even under approximately ideal conditions).13 In retrospect, I see that the discursive conception of truth is due to an overgeneralization of the special case of the validity of moral judgments and norms. A constructivist conception of the moral “ought” does require an epistemic understanding of normative rightness. But if we want to do justice to realist intuitions, the concept of propositional truth must not be assimilated to this sense of rational acceptability under approximately ideal conditions. This leads me in the following essay, “Rightness versus Truth,” to a more precise differentiation between “truth” and “rightness.”14

Kantian pragmatism—an orientation I share with Hilary Putnam15—relies on the transcendental fact that subjects capable of speech and action, who can be affected by reasons, can learn—and in the long run even “cannot not learn.” And they learn just as much in the moral-cognitive dimension of interacting with one another as they do in the cognitive dimension of interacting with the world. By the same token, the transcendental formulation of the issue expresses the postmetaphysical awareness that even the best results of these fallible learning processes remain, in a significant sense, our insights. Even true assertions can realize only those ways of knowing that our sociocultural forms of life make available to us. This insight teaches us the limits of philosophical thought after metaphysics. If we abandon Hegelian versions of the philosophy of history, the relationship between theory and practice, too, is transformed, as is shown in the final essay, “The Relationship between Theory and Practice Revisited.”16 This further enjoins philosophy to respect the limits that the division of labor of a democratically constituted, complex society imposes on its legitimate public activism.

Collected essays are naturally more unwieldy than chapters of a monograph written in a single mold. Therefore I would at least like to comment in this introduction on issues that would have deserved a more systematic treatment. When I responded to critiques of Knowledge and Human Interests in the appendix to the paperback edition in 1973,17 the turn toward a postempiricist philosophy of science had already been initiated by Thomas Kuhn. However, I had not yet fully realized the philosophical implications of a consistent contextualism. Only six years later Richard Rorty precipitated a pragmatic turn in epistemology,18 in which, despite all our differences, I was able to discern some of my own intentions. Against this background, I would first like to sketch how this turn has transformed Kant’s transcendental problematic (III).

This transformation particularly affects the idealist background assumptions that for Kant ensured the status of the unavoidable conditions of the possibility of cognition as rational and as atemporal. Yet if the transcendental conditions are no longer “necessary” conditions of cognition, it cannot be ruled out that they are based on an anthropocentrically contingent and perspectivally curtailed view of the world. And if they have a beginning in time, the difference between the world and what is innerworldly, which is crucial for the architectonic of his theory, is blurred (IV).

The classical pragmatists already wanted to reconcile Kant with Darwin. According to G. H. Mead and John Dewey, the detranscendentalized conditions of problem-solving behavior are embodied in practices. These practices are characteristic of our sociocultural forms of life, which have evolved naturally. But then the problem has to be formulated in a way that is compatible with this naturalist perspective (V).

The ontological assumption of the genetic primacy of nature further requires an epistemologically realist assumption of a mind-independent objective world. Yet within the linguistic paradigm the classical form of realism that relies on the representational model of cognition and on the correspondence between propositions and facts is no longer viable. On the other hand, even after the linguistic-pragmatic turn, a realist approach requires a concept of reference that explains how we can refer to the same object (or objects of the same kind) under different theoretical descriptions (VI). Moreover, it requires a nonepistemic conception of truth that explains how we can preserve the difference between the truth of an assertion and justified assertibility under ideal conditions given the premise that our dealings with the world are permeated by language (VII).

In moral and legal theory, however, we must preserve an epistemic concept of normative rightness. Discourse ethics, like the Kantian tradition in general, is subject to familiar objections against ethical formalism. In the context of moral epistemology, this cannot be the subject of discussion.19 Here I shall confine myself to a problem that becomes acute when Kantian ethics is detranscendentalized. I have in mind the question of what can provide the moral orientation for the very practice whose goal it is to determine the conditions for rational judgment formation and for the reasonableness of moral action. In conclusion I therefore revisit the topic of the relation between theory and practice once more with reference to the political uncertainties of morally self-reflective action. This will afford me the opportunity to engage at a metacritical level with Karl-Otto Apel’s proposal on this topic (VIII).

III The Transcendental Problem—After Pragmatism

Transcendental philosophy, as the famous phrase has it, “deals not so much with objects as rather with our way of cognizing objects in general insofar as that way of cognizing is to be possible a priori.”20 It takes itself to be reconstructing the universal and necessary conditions under which something can be the object of experience and cognition. The significance of this transcendental problematic can be generalized by divorcing it from the basic mentalistic concept of self-reflection as well as from a foundationalist understanding of the conceptual pair a priori–a posteriori. After the pragmatist deflation of Kantian conceptuality, “transcendental analysis” refers to the search for presumably universal but only de facto unavoidable conditions that must be fulfilled in order for fundamental practices or achievements to emerge. All practices for which there are no functional equivalents because they can be substituted only by practices of the same kind are “foundational” in this sense.

The reflexive self-reassurance by an active subjectivity in foro interne, outside space and time, is replaced by the explication of a practical knowledge that makes it possible for subjects capable of speech and action to participate in these sorts of practices and to attain, the corresponding accomplishments. At issue are no longer only empirical judgments, but grammatical propositions, objects of geometry, gestures, speech acts, texts, calculations, logically connected propositions, actions, social relations or interactions—in short, basic types of rule-governed behavior in general. Wittgenstein’s notion of “rule-following” provides the key for the analysis of these kinds of fundamental practices or “self-substituting orders” (Luhmann). This intuitive and habitual know-how—the practical understanding of generative rules or mastery of a practice—enjoys primacy over explicit knowledge of rules. Implicit knowledge of such “skills” supports the totality of the web of basic practices and activities of a community that articulate its form of life. Because of the implicit and, in a certain sense, holistic nature of this know-how, Husserl already described the intersubjectively shared lifeworld as an unthematically concomitant “background.”

The object of transcendental philosophy is thus no longer “consciousness uberhaupt” which is without origin and forms the common core of all empirical minds. Rather, the investigation now aims to discover deep-seated structures of the background of the lifeworld. These structures are embodied in the practices and activities of subjects capable of speech and action. Transcendental philosophy seeks to discover the invariant features recurring in the historical manifold of sociocultural forms of life. The perspectives of this investigation are broadened accordingly while the transcendental approach is maintained. Because (a) the concept of experience is understood pragmatically, (b) knowledge is seen as a function of learning processes, which (c) are enriched by the entire spectrum of life-world practices; (d) this gives rise to an architectonic of lifeworld and objective world, which (e) corresponds to a methodological dualism of understanding [Verstehen] and observation.

(a) Experience, which is represented in empirical propositions, is no longer derived introspectively, by way of self-observation on the part of the knowing subject, from the subjective capacity for “sensibility.” It is now analyzed from the participant perspective of an actor, in the context of confirmation where actions are guided by experience. Mentalism lived off the “Myth of the Given.” After the linguistic turn, we no longer have access to an internal or external reality that is not linguistically mediated. The presumed immediacy of sense impressions no longer serves as an infallible court of appeal. Absent the possibility of a recourse to uninterpreted sense data, sense experience loses its unquestioned authority.21 In its place, there is the authority of “second-order experience” that is possible only for an acting subject.

In the context of goal-oriented action, reality manifests itself differently as soon as either a habitual practice or an explicit attempt at intervention fails, for such failures indirectly call into question the experiential content of the belief motivating the action. Peirce already highlighted the epistemological significance of “success-controlled action” (Gehlen) with his “belief-doubt” model. The experience of performative failure in the face of reality, of course, can only unsettle unthematized concomitant assumptions; it cannot refute them. Controlling actions in terms of whether they are successful does not replace the authority of the senses in terms of their function to warrant truth. Nonetheless, the empirical doubts triggered by disturbances in the course of action may set in motion discourses leading to correct interpretations.

(b)