عنوان

The relevance of disagreement :

TLets392666

The relevance of disagreement :

[Thesis]

Seemann, Axel.

a critique of Jurgen Habermas' notion of a 'rational consensus'.

London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London)

2000

Ph.D.

London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London)

2000

The notion of a `rational consensus' is an essential feature of Jürgen Habermas'sdiscourse-based theories of truth and rightness. Although he has somewhat toned downhis earlier stress on consensus in recent years, the notion remains of great importance forhis account of `understanding' that is at the heart of his formal pragmatic approach to theproblem of meaning. My thesis is concerned with that approach and whether Habermassucceeds in building a sustainable theory of truth and rightness on its basis.I start off by trying to elucidate the crucial notions of `the lifeworld',`communicative action' and `formal pragmatics'. I explore Habermas's pragmaticconception of understanding and its relation to the formal semantic account of meaning interms of the truth conditions of sentences. In the second part of my thesis, I introduceHabermas's early `consensus theory' of truth and rightness and mention some of thecriticisms that theory has provoked. I then focus on his revised 'janus-faced' account oftruth and show how it overcomes some of the shortcomings of his earlier theory. I thenraise some critical points about the revised approach, and go on to point out afundamental difficulty any account of truth and meaning that incorporates the notion of a`rational consensus' faces. I try to overcome that difficulty by attempting to incorporatesome kind of meaning holism into Habermas's pragmatics.The third part of this thesis is concerned with the practical consequences of thepragmatic notion of understanding. I examine what exactly the implications of formalpragmatics are for discourse ethics, and argue that there arises a problem in connectionwith the distinction between discourses of justification and discourses of application.Finally, I look at the relation between understanding and impartiality, and compareHabermas's account of impartiality as tied to a `rational consensus' with Rawls's notionof impartiality that draws on an `overlapping consensus'.In a last step, I argue that the various difficulties that arise in the context ofHabermas's pragmatic approach to truth and rightness and are ultimately due to anoverburdening of the notion of understanding and (intersubjective) agreement. I end upsuggesting that in the light of these problems, we should be interested in the notion of`rational disagreement'. I offer some very cursory remarks as to how one might go aboutan enquiry into that notion.

Seemann, Axel.

London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London)

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y