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RATIONALITY AND CROSS-CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING
By

Vasile Pirau

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Philosophy

1998

ABSTRACT
RATIONALITY AND CROSS CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING
By

Vasile Pirau

The aim of this dissertation was to explore in what sense rationality secures the
ground for the possibility of cross-cultural understanding and to question what kind of
understanding, if any, can be valid across cultures. My goal is not to directly answer
these questions; rather it is to Show why it is meaningful to raise them. My project
explores the relativist challenges posed by recent upheavals in post-analytical philosophy.

In this respect, I discuss the arguments of Wittgenstein, Winch, Quine, Davidson, Hollis
and Habermas (such as "language games", "forms of life", "indeterminacy of translation",
"charity", "bridgehead" and "communicative rationality") regarding the possibility of
understanding other cultures and to see how they treat the nature and the relevance of
rationality for such understanding. This is a debated issue in the tug of war of adversary
claims arguing over the relevance and meaning of problems that arise in the clash of
cultures in multicultural societies, though we may notice that these disputes repeat battles
fought long ago. In the light of the contemporary distrust of a unique and self-sustaining
rationality, postmodernist tenets, which are inclined toward a persuasive relativism, give

up hopes of establishing the universal premises of understanding over cultural divides and

securing the validity of a single language of the mind from skeptical doubt, as once

Vasile Pirau
Descartes too ambitiously dreamt. And yet, since the idea of cross-cultural understanding
bears on the ability to achieve a rational consensus among people with different cultural
identities, this issue has far-reaching practical implications in the context of Splitting
differences and conﬂicts between interest groups we witness today.

After a comparative scrutiny of different attempts to move between the radical
alternatives of rationalism and relativism, I stand close to Habermas's View of
communicative rationality. By exploring the context transcendent power of the rational
potential of language-use oriented toward communication, he gives up the monological
and one-sided positions and moves over a wide spectrum from language theory to
sociology to develop better conceptual weapons than the other participants in relativity
debate I have discussed so far. Habermas’s idea of understanding is tied to the validity
claims redeemed and vindicated in any speech act and bears on critical assessment of
arguments which provides for the intelligibility and the possibility of dialogue between
different linguistic and cultural ﬁameworks. On the basis of the critical thrust of
communicative rationality, he points to a diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity
accounting for systematically distorted communication, and provides "a yardstick" for the
assessment of the disturbances bearing on understanding. Nevertheless, several critical
objections to Habermas's project reveal gaps and ambiguities in his sometimes shifting
view. In thinking about these problems I believe that a three-tier reconstruction of
rationality may be an appropriate approach of the three-fold structure of reason on the
analytically distinct levels of phenomenological, scientiﬁc-theoretical and normative
discourses. However, the convincing story about the promise yielded by this project

remains yet to be told.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I) Introduction ............................................................................ 1
1.1) On the Aim of the Project ................................................................... 1
1.2) The Cartesian Background ................................................................... 7
1.3) A Challenge to the Cartesian Project: The Cultural Foundations of Reason...... . . 13
1.4) The Sequence of the Argument ............................................................. 24

Chapter 2) Ludwig Wittgenstein and Peter Winch: Understanding a Language and
Understanding a World...... . . . . . .39

2.1) From Language Games to Forms of Life ................................................ 41
2.2) Whose Rationality? What Understanding? .............................................. 50
2.3) Irrationality or Misunderstanding ......................................................... 57
2.4) A Rejoinder to Winch: ”Latent Rationality" versus Consistency .................... 65
2.5) Rationality at Cross-Roads and The Relevance of Translation ...................... 82
Chapter 3) W. V. Quine: The Indeterminacy of Translation and World-
Incommensurability .............................................. 85
3.1) From the Indeterminacy of Translation and the Inscrutability of Reference to
the Breakdown of Communication ...................................................... 88
3.11) Radical Translation .................................................................... 88
3.12) The "Gavagai-Rabbit" Example ...................................................... 91
3.13) The Consequence of World-Incommensurability .................................. 94
3.2) The Appeal to Charity ..................................................................... 96
3.21) Three Objections to Quine's Thesis of Indeterminacy of Translation ........... 99
3.22) "Save the Obvious!" .................................................................. 110
3.23) Charity Maxim and Psychological Conjectures ................................... 113
3.24) An Inescapable Dilemma ............................................................ 119
Chapter 4) Donald Davidson: Interpretation and the Need for Charity .............. 126
4.1) Davidson's Departure from Quine: Public Accessibility of Language vs.
Quine's Cartesian Vision .................................................................. 127
4.2) Reasonableness and the Need for Charity .............................................. 134
4.21) Charity and Reasonableness .......................................................... 135
4.22) Anti-Relativist Connotations of Davidson's Critique of the
Idea of Conceptual Scheme .......................................................... 142
4.23) Charity: Interpretation of Belief and Holding True Sentences .................. 151
4.24) The Value and the Limits of Davidsonian Charity ............................... 161

iv

Chapter 5) Martin Hollis: The Rational Bridgeheads of Understanding ............. 168

5.1) Reason and Universal Understanding ................................................... 168
5.2) Concluding Remarks: Is Reason a Universal Bridgehead? .......................... 177
Chapter 6) Jurgen Habermas: Communicative Rationality and the Possible
Understanding ............................................. 1 83
6.1) Communicative Rationality: An Overview ........................................... 187
6.11) Preliminary Remarks ................................................................. 187
6.12) Understanding and the Need for a Transcendental Argument ................... 195
6.2) Universal Pragmatics and Communicative Competence ............................ 216
6.3) Discourse Ethics and the Universal Possibility of Reaching Consensus .......... 231
6.4) Communicative Rationality: An Assessment ......................................... 256
6.41) Communicative Rationality and the Transcendence of Cultural and
Historical Contexts .................................................................... 257
6.42) Communicative Rationality and the World Well Lost ............................ 281
Chapter 7) CONCLUSIONS ................................................................... 298
7.1) Closing Remarks ........................................................................... 298
7.2) A Reference to a Larger Argument ...................................................... 311
Notes ................................................................................................. 314
Bibliography ........................................................................................ 333

Chagter 1 2 INTRODUCTION:
MN THE AIM AND THE DIFFICULTY OF THE PROJECT

In what sense can rationality secure the ground for the possibility of cross-cultural
understanding? What kind of understanding, if any, can be cross-culturally valid? The
aim of my project is not directly to answer these two questions; rather it is to Show why it
is meaningful to raise them. My endeavor is designed to explore the arguments of
Wittgenstein, Winch, Quine, Davidson, Hollis and Habermas regarding the possibility of
understanding other cultures and to see how they treat the nature and the relevance of
rationality for such understanding. Even the minimal feasibility or desirability of my
account is highly debatable in light of the contemporary distrust of reason.1 On views
fashionable among post-analytic and postmodernist thinkers, conceptual reﬂection on
rationality is an artiﬁcial and "self-indulgent" intellectual habit which turns its back on
real problems. No doubt it is risky not to take seriously cautions against a theoretical
exercise like the present one, but in what follows I will try to Show why addressing the
two questions raised above is neither a gratuitous nor an idle enterprise.

Without anticipating arguments which are to be developed later, I will present two
minimal reasons for pursuing these issues.

1) By linking the themes of rationality and cross-cultural understanding I mean to
imply that if we could bring a theoretical proof for a common rationality, then on this
ground we could establish conceptual bridges over the yawning gaps of understanding
that separate different cultures. Obviously this is a debated issue in the tug of war of
adversary claims. At one end of the rope, the modern intellectual tradition inspired by

Descartes believed that a common core of humanity consists of a reason that provides the

2
universal ground of understanding among all individuals. At the other hand, the more

recent tendencies inclined toward relativism, ﬁnd the earlier view, if not a matter of
wishful thinking, at least a very hazardous theoretical ambition. For instance, postmodern
critics such as Winch, Rorty, Lyotard, and others, argue that the notion of a
transcontextual rationality is meaningless, and, consequently, stress the breakdown of
understanding across incommensurable linguistic frameworks or cultural multifarious
discourses. Nonetheless, I ﬁnd the possibility of such skeptical contentions not to be
persuasive enough to discourage theoretical exploration of a common basis of
understanding and the pursuit of a practical ideal which depends on possible agreement
about cultural values, conventions, interests, and patterns of behavior.

it) Since the idea of cross-cultural understanding bears on the ability to achieve a
rational consensus among people with different cultural identities, this issue has far—
reaching practical implications. It may inspire us to behave responsibly and to value the
importance of rational agreement in the context of nationalist hatreds and clashes between
interest groups we witness today. Insofar as the only alternative to dialogue and
understanding is terror, brute force and degenerating wars, such a discussion suggests
deep pragmatic reasons for responding to the problems of contemporary conﬂicts.
Perhaps, it is needless to say that a conceptual solution to splitting differences, which
threatens with cultural fragmentation, may bear on survival of the world as we know it.
In the long run, the commitment that motivates my present approach is to address the
question whether we should assume the risky but heroic mission of addressing the
problem of moral and social dysfunctions of our time or we should be satisﬁed by getting

comfortably immersed in mere concrete petty horizon of everyday life. While one cannot

3

assist with a skeptical indifference and impotence to how the world we live together is
being torn apart by terror and ethnic or religious wars, the theoretical engagement into the
issue of rational communication between cultures is an intellectual duty. But, it is a goal
much beyond my reach to address the whole range of social and political complexities
that bear on the topic of this paper. My endeavor remains inherently incomplete and only
alludes to such contemporary historical dilemmas. To be able to clarify such practical
consequences properly, it would be necessary to amass enormous and detailed empirical
evidence, and would go beyond the limits and more modest intentions of this project.

To achieve its goal, the dissertation must address the Skeptical and relativist
challenges, which restate traditional philosophical quarrels over the nature of reason and
knowledge. As such battles were fought many times in the past history of philosophy, we
realize that the pursuit of rationality that underlies cross-cultural understanding goes on a
path between two extremes. They are comparable with the mythological dangers
represented metaphorically by the Scylla of a transcendental rationality that
overoptimistically provides an underlying basis for a universal mind, and the Charybdis
of incommensurability and deconstructionism that makes the idea of a general human
understanding an implausible ideal that must be abandoned. The ﬁrst is advocated by
philosophers who were committed to the traditional sense of reason, the latter is assumed
by post-analytic and post-structuralist thinkers who have reshaped in a great extend the
intellectual fashion of our time.

I shall make a comparative scrutiny of the merits and weaknesses of different
attempts to move between these extreme dangers. To avoid the pitfalls presented by the

radical alternatives of rationalism and relativism, I will follow Habermas’s view, which

4

has been oﬁen described as an attempt to restore the philosophical project of modernity.
In the end, in the light of his guidance on the path of examining and evaluating different
theories regarding the possible conditions of understanding across cultures, I will assess
the value and the adequacy of his concept of communicative rationality. It seems to me
that Habermas's theoretical attempt to secure the universal and unavoidable rational
presuppositions of communicative action presents the most promising contemporary
approach to rationality. He restores a sense of rationality that preserves its cross-cultural
relevance and relies on a universal communicative competence. On this view, speakers
engaged in dialogue inescapably make validity claims, such as propositional truth,
normative rightness and expressive sincerity, which are redeemed and vindicated
discursively in the process of linguistic exchange.

My concern will remain essentially theoretical, for it strives to go beyond the
phenomenological maze of diverse militant appeals of various ethnic or minority interests
as expressed in immediate political agendas or promoted in apparent idiosyncratic
lifestyles. My project does not aim so far, nor could it, given the inherent constraints of
its theme. Though breaking with the giveness and immediate facticity of the lifeworld,
the pursuit of rationality that provides a bridging ground for understanding across cultures
calls again and again for social and historical knowledge. This undertaking requires a
continuous engagement with the intellectual tradition and a rethinking of past beliefs and
commitments. The question is whether we Should resign ourselves to giving up the
classical ideal or should we strive to save it. In order to answer, I need to explore the
justiﬁcation for the sovereign and autonomous reason which makes a general concept of

human understanding possible, and which has been the intellectual heritage of Descartes's

5

rationalist project. He attempts to offer a paradigmatic description of the single reason
that transcends the peculiar and varying forms of cultures. Moving on a wide spectrum
from vehement denial to manifest acceptance, in the last four hundred years philosophers
of different orientations took a stance in one way or another toward the Cartesian Reason
which inspired the paradigm of modern thought.

I will make good on the claim that abandonment of the solitary ﬂight of the
rational understanding over cultural differences imagined by Descartes gives rise to the
problems and dilemmas which will be addressed in what follows here. In this respect,
some previously mentioned critical arguments will be ﬁirther tracked down, but only to
the extent that they bear upon the implausibility of the Cartesian project and its later
demise. Giving up the ambition of the Cartesian subject erodes conﬁdence in attempts to
build any notion of a single rationality and a transcultural idea of understanding. After
all, critics observe, such a rationality is itself in need of legitimation and is just an
expression of Western culture which has been unfairly imposed to others. As soon as we
are ready to step beyond the self-conﬁdent biases rooted in our own traditionz, the
possibility of understanding people remote from us, and the meaning of rationality itself,
remains subject of philosophical debates. In addition, the dialectical queries on these
heavily argued issues reveal once more why they are an unﬁnished business of
philosophy.3

The difﬁculty and the importance of my project lie in the need to construct a sense
of the conditions of cross-cultural understanding in the light of the philosophical failure
of traditional attempts to establish a universal reason and the lack of persuasion of

empirical arguments for a plurality of rationalities.4 But reaching my goal requires going

6
against long held beliefs that are not easily dislodged. To Show this I need to analyze the

philosophical background and to say something about how questions bearing on the ideas
of rationality and understanding arise in the space of modern thought.

In this section I will try to reconstruct Descartes's response to the question
whether reason can provide a universal basis for reaching an understanding between
inhabitants of different cultures. Is there a rational bridge that can link different linguistic
and cultural meanings, and provide a basis for mutual discussion and agreement? What
would be the nature of such a rationality? When Descartes confronts the issue of cultural
plurality, he attempts to overcome the difference of customs as well as the idiosyncrasy of
opinions and personal preferences by pointing to a substantive concept of Reason. This
reason is autonomous, forrnalist, and immune to revision. With this idea Descartes hopes
that a universal idea of human understanding can be secured. Only aﬁer exploring the
nature of his inner consciousness can man ﬁnd the clue for truth. That is why Descartes
begins his metaphysical argument by asking, " What am I?” A concise formulation of his
answer is this: I am a thinking substance (res cogitans) in contrast with matter which is
extended (res extensa) and in continuous motion. In the tradition of Plato and Aristotle
our essence is the rational mind consisting not only of the ability to ratiocinate but also of
the awareness of one's own thoughts and their intelligible contents.

In consequence, in coping with the issue at hand, my ﬁrst step is to reconstruct the
Cartesian conception as the point of reference for the arguments that will be discussed in
this paper. The ensuing section will present historical and anthropological arguments,
which challenge Descartes's concept of reason and raise doubts regarding its empirical

adequacy to social life. We will see that ﬁeld research in ethnography and anthropology

7

prompts the demise of the Cartesian programme and lays out the premises of relativism
which will be discussed in the following chapters.
1.2) THE CARTESIAN BACKGROUND
Descartes describes the contrast between a unique, sovereign reason and peculiar
and ever changing cultures. Reason is the master voice within various discourses and
imageries that are rooted in the unreliable world of "customs and examples". Hence, the
language of the mind must be abstracted from the maze of everyday life in order to reach
the certain ground of understanding, which is beyond any skeptical doubt.5
In the Discourse on the Method (1637) Descartes vows not to allow himself to be
persuaded by what he ﬁnds in the book of the world unless on the evidence of reason.
...so long as I merely considered the customs of other men, I founded hardly any
reason for conﬁdence, for I observed in them almost as much diversity as I had
found previously among the opinions of philosophers... they Showed me many
things which, although seeming very extravagant and ridiculous to us, are
nevertheless commonly accepted and approved in other great nations; and so I
learned not to believe too ﬁrmly anything of which I had been persuaded only by
example and custom (my emphasis). Thus I freed myself from many errors
which may obscure our natural light and make us less capable of heeding reason
(Discourse on the Method, 1988, part 1, sec. 10, pp. 24-25).
How could other nations hold "extravagant and ridiculous" beliefs since, as Descartes
himself suggests, rationality (as well as "good sense") is equally distributed in all
humans? He also claims that the diversity of our opinions does not imply that some men
are more rational than others; it only means that one may choose different paths of
viewing things. Reason is equally shared and therefore it is not fair to blame it when we
go astray. In his Meditations he assumes that mistakes rather occur when our will goes

beyond our understanding in making judgements. Therefore, errors of thinking may

follow from our peculiar interests, wishes and desires, not from reason itself. What is

8

disturbing here is that Descartes seems to refer to entire forms of life, "great nations" to
use his own words, that could get lost in the pursuit of truth, not only that individuals are
liable to err. Whole lifeworlds could be misguided by biases rooted in their cultural
beliefs.6 But while cultures may be misled, the light of Reason is trustworthy and beyond
doubt. Descartes makes that point clear again:
I have recognized through my travels that those with views quite contrary to ours
are not on that account barbarians or savages, but that many of them make use of
reason as much or more than we do. I thought, too, how the same man, with the
same mind, if brought up from infancy among the French or Germans, develops
otherwise that he would if he had always lived among the Chinese or cannibals;
and how, even in our fashions of dress, the very thing that pleased us ten years
ago, and will perhaps please us again ten years hence, now strikes us as
extravagant and ridiculous. Thus it is custom and example (my emphasis) that
persuade us, rather than any certain knowledge (Discourse, Part. 2, sec. 16, p. 28).
Therefore, Descartes thinks he is justiﬁed in adopting a skepticism toward knowledge
received through distorting "custom and example". Since a "maj ority vote" does not
count as a proof for him, a solitary well-guided mind alone ﬁnds the way out of the
confusing cultural imagery. Thus, one's individual reason is opposed to a collective
culture built upon corrupting "customs and examples". Self-sustaining certainty provides
an escape from the prejudiced labyrinth. According to Descartes's account of the human
condition, in order to avail oneself of Reason, one must be liberated from the errors
which deceiving customs instill. This departure from "messy" cultural beliefs enables
well-directed minds to reach a set of clear and distinct ideas which are so reliable that no
reasonable human could refuse to assent to them. If lack of understanding or
miscommunication still occurs, that does not mean that the truth is less compelling. It is

just a Sign that the sober standards of lucidity and logical cogency were disregarded.

At one time Descartes fears that we all may be led to error by a malicious demon

9

"of the utmost power and cunning", who uses all his skills to deceive us. We would have
no way to ﬁnd out if we all were prisoners of a mystifying appearance, walking in a
dreamlike unreality. We can cite that metaphor like the situation of a traveler to a strange
land of liars who are careless about truth, and, disregarding any kind of norms, are totally
dishonest. Such a traveler could make no sense of their verbal behavior. Nonetheless,
Descartes cannot accept that a benign God could tolerate that. A generalized delusion is
inconceivable in a world ruled by a good and inherently non-capricious God. Descartes
would have never forgiven "le mechant Dieu" for making humans so ill-suited to the
pursuit of truth. Notwithstanding, he concludes that there is no proof for suspecting
God's benevolence. Therefore, it is fair to assume that we are equally endowed with a
capacity for clear and distinct ideas and can understand each other. It is not God's fault if
people misuse their reason. Cultural misery is tolerable and curable; we may get lost on
the maze of the world of extravagant and distorting customs but we can discover the right
direction by following the guidance of reason. AS for the possibility of always being
wrong, without ever being aware of it, of course, a just God could not have done this to

7
US.

Or could He?

Descartes faces this question when he has to Specify the relationships between
self-evident intuitions reached in the light of reason and reality external to the mind. In
this respect, there is a distinction between insights into necessary truths, a kind of
intellectual intuition such as "a cause must be as great or greater than its effect", and
impulses, a kind of inclination to believe opinions like "the heat which I feel is produced

by ﬁre". The former is grasped by reason in all minds as clear and distinct ideas. The

10

latter are not intelligible but sensible and can be subject to doubt. By the senses we can
have only a confused notion of matter like an image or an imprint that result form the
inﬂuence of the body over the mind and are potentially distorted by cultural biases or
personal habits and prejudices. So, on the one Side, Descartes considers the reason which
apprehends in the way of geometry the necessary attributes of being that possesses
qualities describable in mathematical terms. On the other side, the empirical formation of
beliefs and opinions is tinged by custom and example that may cause fallacies, and
consequently may push understanding between people to chaos and inherent conﬂict.
Descartes knows from his own life that people are torn apart by faith and interests, since
as a young soldier he himself participated to the religious wars. He tries to overcome the
emotional distress that causes our liability to err by founding the self-intelligibility of
rational arguments on the trust in God (Natura Naturans). If God exists, then we can
count on our sense experience and on our reason. An essentially good Creator would
never deceive us. Nevertheless we still can go wrong because we are fallible insofar as
judgements occur in the intellect, which is ﬁnite, and their selection involves the will in
the form of "assen " and "dissent" which is inﬁnite. To avoid fallacious thinking we
have to make a proper use of the cognitive abilities God built into our selves and to
conduct our beliefs in the light of reason toward what is clear and distinct. Descartes
appeals to the divine guarantee to enhance the reliability of rational understanding and
credibility of the epistemic subjects; then he seems to have forgotten about the Creator
and tries to manage without him. (For that eloquent omission Pascal never forgave
Descartes). The burden falls on our selves. Once we are endowed with reason, we are

responsible for bringing our understanding under its rule or we will go astray. Failure to

11
fulﬁll this duty is not only an epistemological mistake leading to error, but a mishandling

of our abilities and a betrayal of God's trust and therefore a sin.

And yet reason is backed up by God in its solitary, meditative journey that
transcends the particular and exuberant world of culture impregnated by sense
experiences and prejudice. Quine calls this attempt to free reason from the mundane
captivity of daily life a move outside of the world, a kind of "cosmic exile" (see Ernest
Gellner, Reason and Culture, 1992, p. 99). Descartes's reason freed from "custom and
example", functions as a public, egalitarian and universally valid court and its ﬁrst ruling,
without right of appeal, is to enact the very existence of the Absolute Warrant. Should
we still doubt the voice of cultures, inherently distorted by prejudice and bias, as a mere
deception? So far as God's benevolence would be incompatible with such a way of being
generally deceived, this hypothesis is not quite plausible. But Descartes shows the
contrasts between the clarity of reason and messy variety of customs, and in order to
insure that reason prevails, he postulates its autonomy and sovereignty. But how could he
be wholly conﬁdent that his truth-seeking mind is not driven by his own cultural bias?
What makes him immune to the kind of fallacies for which he holds people accountable?

In this respect, at the end of his contemplation, he may have forgotten to pray to his God
of order and sobriety to spare him the confusion or mystiﬁcation that lead astray other
people.8

In conclusion, the rationalist tradition inspired by Descartes claims that human
reason is identical in all ages and societies. But is it? The ideal of certainty, initiated by
Descartes, was permanently damaged by attacks against the logical order, which provided

a model for the workings of the mind. One was mainly theoretical and came from the

12

research in the foundations of mathematics, which damaged the credibility of any attempt
to reduce mathematics to logic. Although this kind of internal criticism is not my concern
here, I will refer to it shortly in section 2.4 of the next chapter by making a few
suggestions which are prompted by the need of redeﬁning rationality. I will show there
that the pattern of rationality sought by Descartes and intrinsically associated by Frege to
the prerequisites of logical reasoning appears open to questioning. But it is not my
intention to expand these considerations further as they lead too far from the aim of this
dissertation.

Another blow, somewhat more extensive and more direct, against the sober and
organized Cartesian reason came from outside, from the exotic ﬁelds of mistrusted social
sciences such as anthropology, sociology and psychology. We shall see that this kind of
criticism gets new strengths from a more analytically oriented attack which is launched
from the mid-ground of linguistics which is covered by a relatively recent philosophy
walking in the tracks of latter Wittgenstein. Above all, these debates signal the demise of
the Cartesian ambition to secure understanding across cultures on the basis of a
turiversally valid reason. The anthropological and sociological approaches Show reason
and understanding to be bound by cultural practices. And that is why I need to address
these issues. First, in the next section I will question the plausibility of the prerogatives
of Cartesian reason and challenge its claimed priority to the speciﬁcs of culture. Then, in
the ensuing chapters I will discuss the attempt to demolish the universality of
understanding built on the ground of context-free rationality from a culturalist
perspective, which proves instead that languages express closed articulated world-views.

But before that, I need next to examine some empirical considerations from social

13

sciences which lay out realistic premises for the criticism of the attempt to build up
knowledge of other cultures on a substantive notion of reason abstracted from culture. In
the end we must recognize that we are bound to look for a more limited, but more
appropriate and feasible project of understanding than the one the overly optimistic

Descartes once imagined.

1.3) A CHALLENGE TO THE CARTESIAN PROJECT:
THE CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS OF REASON

The goal of this section is to Show that Descartes's aim to secure human
understanding by transcending the world of "custom and example" was vulnerable to an
empirically oriented criticism coming from social sciences.

We have noticed Descartes's attempt to explain the understanding of others in
terms of a universal reason that provides a substantive basis for a generally Shared human
identity. But the conviction that rationality ﬁxes the essence of the mind and provides for
the basic capacity with which we are equally endowed, to successfully undertake the
unending quest for truth, is not my main concern here. My occasional references to the
traditional belief in the rational essence which insures human identity (which has
constantly fascinated philosophers, and amongst them Descartes is a leading voice) are
relevant only insofar as they warrant the appeal to a universal ground for a generic
understanding between people. But we shall see that once reason comes under the target
of sociologists and anthropologists exploring the social roots of rationality, it loses its
traditional autonomy and is shown to evolve from cultural practices. In consequence, the

concept of understanding loses its credibility and must be redeﬁned in the context of a

14

new pluralist setting.

A line of attack against Cartesian rationality was revealed by its inadequacy in
dealing with the hitherto ignored implications of cultural difference and otherness. The
challenge to the universality of reason began when newly discovered lands with cultures
unknown to the old continent were fascinating European travelers eager to explore the
variety of God’s creation. They returned home with descriptions of exotic moral beliefs
and patterns of behavior which contrasted with the customs familiar to their own world.
The outcome was to concentrate attention on the cultural variation and apparent
inconsistency of man's moralities. But to be different, Enlightenment philosophers (like
Rousseau) argued, does not mean to be irrational. They soon fashioned the romantic
ideal of the Noble savage, as the genuine incarnation of human nature, undistorted by the
civilization that imposes formal conventions, moral prejudices, and cultural biases.

Later, with the methodological development of descriptive social science, ﬁeld
researchers questioned the validity of the European claims about reason which were then
imposed upon apparently "strange" people and remote cultures. But many thinkers
refused to accept a more ﬂexible pluralistic rationality and reacted with skepticism to the
alleged discovery of unfamiliar styles of thinking and religious patterns of alien cultures.
Intolerance toward other kind of reasoning or behavior of pre-modern peOple was
expressed in the pejorative connotations of words like "primitive", "pre-logical", or
simply "irrational".

The reductionist view of reason which disregards differences between cultures
and identities of other people by subjecting them to the norms of reason and morality

accepted by Westerners was called into question by, among others, James Frazer. His

15
collection of stories on sympathetic and homeopathic magic in The Golden Bough (1913)

was very inﬂuential. He assembles there a wealth of ethnographic material concerning
unfamiliar beliefs and cultural practices and explains them by associative principles.
Frazer makes his bizarre stories intelligible and charming, notwithstanding he fails to
account for the order and the similarity of human vision. His implicit recourse to a kind
of Humean principle of psychological association yields limited results in this respect.
Frazer is bound to just empirically Show that cultural practices (either religious or
scientiﬁc) have coagulated accidentally from perceptions and impressions like a "rolling
snowball". However, he clearly suggests that the standards of judgement and meaning
frameworks we use in interpreting experience depend on the way of life in which we are
embedded. From this viewpoint, the self-evident logical principles (contradiction,
implication, etc) associated by Descartes and Kant with a changeless universal human
nature are in reality acquired by people following their rules of speciﬁc cultural practices.
Different habitual ways of organizing social life form different practices of rationality in
different cultures.

Emile Durkheim shares with Frazer, and against Descartes, the supposition that
the study of culture cannot simply be discarded as irrelevant for the understanding of
what appears to us as reasonable behavior in other societies. But Durkheim criticizes
Frazer's Humean methodology because it reduces the universality and necessity of reason
to empirical contingency and, in general, he accuses empiricism of irrationalism for
denying the logical structure of understanding. Nevertheless, his own research
conclusions converge with Frazer's claim that the cognitive categories of the mind

constitute a common rational core that the intellect acquires in the empirical process of

16
religious rituals. In The Elementary F arms of Religious Life (1912), published two years

after Frazer's work, he uses the "ethnological" investigation of primitive religions to
prove that rationality is not rooted in the illusory Cartesian mental substance but
originates in what he calls "savage" practices.9 Thus he develops the hypothesis
supported by ethnographic evidence that conceptual structures are not to be deduced
transcendentally, but appear as dependent variables of social interaction rooted in
religious ceremonies like magic rites. Durkheim argues that "the categories of human
thought are never ﬁxed in any one deﬁnite form; they are made, unmade and remade
incessantly" (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, [1915], 1976, p. 15). They are
collective representations expressed in universal concepts showing the mental state of the
group and providing for its integrity. Although mental structures and general ideas are no
longer related to an immutable reason, they provide for social cohesion and are a common
basis necessary for understanding between different communities. Unlike Kant, who
postulates an a priori structure, Durkheim collects evidence from anthropological
ﬁeldwork to support his thesis: people began to think alike because they were engaged in
the same rituals. This c00peration within cultures makes social life possible and provides
for its sociological comprehension. The conclusion of his anthropological survey of
savage mentality is that fundamental categories of thought are not transcendental, or
created by God, but they are religious in origin. Within religious rituals held at regular
intervals, the remaking of rationality is achieved by means of reunions, assemblies and
meetings wherein individuals manifest their social need for upholding and reafﬁrming in
common their collective representations. Religious practices provide a symbiosis

between moral demands and a cosmological propensity. The ﬁrst is oriented toward

17
action and regulates drives, the latter draws a portrait of the world by transposing reality

into an intelligible language. In this way Durkheim explains the elaboration of logical
rules and the generation of concepts which are applied to organize (to classify and
systematize) things (see Elementary F arms, p. 428-9). Hence individuals bound within
social life can compare their world-views, "disengage that which they have in common
and thus, in a word, generalize" (Elementary Forms, p. 432). Because gods are
conceived, not perceived, people can unproblematically agree on the same divine powers.
While sensual imagery is in perpetual ﬂux, the conceptual network consists in a corner of
the mind which is "serener and calmer". It is the relative immutability and universality of
the impersonal concept that makes cross-cultural communication possible. Durkheim
says, " [a] concept is not my concept; I hold it in common with other men, or in any case,
can communicate it to them..." (Elementary Forms, p. 433).

So ﬁnally, although Durkheim is committed to dismiss the priority of reason
which genetically evolves out of early peculiar cultural practices, he seems to return to
Descartes when he stresses the universal possibility of communication based on a
commonly shared conceptual network, which is valid beyond the historic and cultural
boundaries. Thus, socialized individuals can interactively negotiate meanings, and
exchange concepts which are deﬁned as "impersonal representations", "outside of time
and change", and are in principle communicable to all human minds (see Elementary
F arms, p. 433-4). Consequently, the trouble we experience in understanding other
civilizations is explained by an imperfect or partial assimilation of the meaning of the
words we use. Such semantic mistakes, which may appear as outright lies or

mystiﬁcation, can be avoided once we see the constructive role played by society in the

18

formation of conceptual patterns. Minds instilled with "logical life", (Durkheim's own
suggestive expression) can comprehend that truth must be free of personal bias and
relatively invariant over different lifeworlds. In order to furnish a common rational and
transcultural ground for communication, objective ideas must be abstracted from the
subjective private horizon of unstable, ever changing perceptual appearances. Durkheim
argues,

This is possible only from the moment when, above the fugitive

conceptions which they owe to sensuous experience, men have succeeded

in conceiving a whole world of stable ideas, the common ground of all

intelligences. In fact, logical thinking is always impersonal thinking, and

is also thought sub species aeternitatis - as thought for all time

(Elementary Forms, p. 436).
Durkheim repeatedly acknowledges that, as far as rationality is impersonal and objective,
it represents the collective thought that can provide a basis for universal understanding.lo
Descartes could not have hoped for more. But for Durkheim, the interactions and
relationships between actors which involve both representations and practices are no
longer to be regarded as an irrational inﬂuence upon a pure though corruptible Cartesian
reason. "Quite on the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of
psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousness" (Elementary Forms, p.
444). Therefore, humans are rational just because a higher disengaged social life of the
community is pulsing inside of everyone, and "this impersonality naturally extends to
ideas as well as to acts" (Elementary Forms, p. 446).

In conclusion, Durkheim agrees with Descartes that rationality consists of a
conceptual make up of the mind that makes universal understanding possible.

Nevertheless, instead of looking for metaphysical arguments regarding the reality of the

self as a thinking substance like Descartes, he discovers reason as evolving out of cultural

 

19

customs such as primitive magical rituals. Durkheim agrees that the "cogito" is universal
currency in linguistic exchange since it is abstracted from "communal thought". Reason
is not sanctioned by a benevolent God but is genealogically rooted in savage's "unreason".
Max Weber was surely aware of Durkheim's approach, though he is not interested
in ﬁnding rationality in the remote mythological world of the savage. They both explore
the worldly roots of reason in religious practice and argue for its social rather than the
metaphysical character. Unlike Durkheim, though, Weber does not explore why all men
are rational on the basis of ethnographic data. While seeking a value-free, impartial
standpoint, he ends up showing the function of a religious prejudice which in his view
informed the pattern of rationality that made possible the rise of capitalist world order. In
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920) Weber pays tribute to Descartes.
He remarks on the role played by the Cartesian orderly, sober and detached reason in the
conﬁguration of Protestant virtues which provide for the underlying rationality of the
modern social and economic order. Weber contends that despite Descartes's allegiance to
the Catholic dogma and his education acquired as a loyal disciple of the Jesuits from "La
Fleche" College, his "cogito_ergo sum was taken over by contemporary Puritans", who
exploited the ethical signiﬁcance associated with it. He argues that the Cartesian reason
gave a peculiar tendency toward asceticism to the Reformed faith (Protestant Ethics, p.
118). Through Puritan tendency toward the uniformity of life and the pattern of rational
conduct on the basis of the Christian idea of worldly calling, inspiring self-restraint from
consumption and luxury, sobriety and duty, asceticism was carried out of monastic cells
of the saints into everyday life. For Luther this is the state in which the individual ought

to live and against which it was impious to rebel. As Weber contends, calling is not a

20

condition prescribed by Heaven but a chosen destiny to be pursued with a sense of self-
responsibility. For Protestants in general, all men are in the same relation with God and
hence the privileged status of the priest as a mediator with the divine is abolished and
replaced by the view that everyone equally partakes of the sacred. Nobody in the world is
more sacred that anybody else. In particular, this morality of sobriety, orderliness, and
uniformity opposes the wasting of wealth as an irrational behavior and facilitates the
capitalist way of thinking. Thus, the Protestant ethics inﬂuenced the idea of rational
organization of the society through rational planning and accumulation of capital through
ascetic compulsion to savings, commitment to labor and investment, free selection of
means to achieve utilitarian ends and standardization of production (see Protestant Ethics
and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1930, 1950, pp. 171-2).

Nonetheless, Weber introduces the alienating process of instrumental reason.
Whereas initially it established the ideological premises of capitalist development, later it
justiﬁes a crushing bureaucratic system which deprives the individuals caught within it of
their freedom. He emphasizes that the moral idealism rooted in the Protestant ethics
which disregarded and despised the utilitarian pursuit in the material world was soon in
conﬂict with the obsession for proﬁt and efﬁciency of the rising bourgeois society for
which it initially provided the rational foundations and legitimation. Weber describes this
paradoxical situation in an inspired metaphor: the "light cloak" on the shoulders of the
saint expressing the readiness for religious resignation and withdrawal from the material
world, "which can be thrown aside at any moment" (Protestant Ethics, p. 181) will
fatally become an "iron cage". The new system will end up crushing humans under

unprecedented inexorable power of commodities and subjecting their lives to the

21

annihilating power of bureaucracy (Protestant Ethics, p. 181).ll Weber assumes, "the
intensity of the search for the Kingdom of God commenced gradually to pass over into
sober economic virtue; the religious roots died out Slowly, giving way to utilitarian
worldliness" (Protestant Ethics, p. 17 6). Practical idealism rooted in Protestant rationality
of life will be replaced by the "capitalist orgy" of the accumulation of proﬁt, the
ambitions for controlling the market and the lust for money. Capitalism will end with the
unprecedented inexorable power of material commodities over the lives of men.

Unlike the generic Durkheimian idea of a rationality that is coextensive with
humanity itself, Weber's notion of rationality as being rooted in the peculiar Protestant
tradition is narrowly tied to the Puritan ascetic ideal and to the way of life of the middle-
class in the new economic system. This kind of rationality provides the content of a
particular attitude, ("the spirit of capitalism"), which allows for there being other
rationalities in other societies. By contrast, from Durkheim's point of view, all human
beings in a community are rational so far as they learn norms through rituals and acquire
the same basic logic and moral principles. For Weber, what was induced and culturally
transmitted was a new pattern of rationality stressing the demands of sobriety and rigor
drawn from the Protestant religion. On his interpretation, the principles of social
organization differ from the ecstatic practices of magic wherein Durkheim located the
rationality of natives. The differences between them reﬂect a theoretical divergence
about understanding. While for Durkheim all people are rational and can communicate
with each other so far as the conceptual network is universally inculcated to everyone
through socialization, Weber allows for irrational individuals in a rational world.

Moreover, instrumental reason could be trapped by a paradox which has undesirable and

22

absurd consequences as long as it remains silent about values and says nothing about the
nature of ends to be accomplished. So one cannot use one single ruthless-mindedness
and calculable efﬁciency. There is no Single idiom, no "single conceptual currency" as
Gellner says, which would enable the multiple and sometimes contrasting ends, and the
array of assertions to be cross-connected, systematized and expanded (see Gellner,
Reason and Culture, chap. 9).

In sum, the anthropological arguments show that Descartes's notion of reason and
his belief in a conceptual understanding that ﬂies over the gaps between cultures and
transcends the differences are not altogether defensible. If in the Cartesian coronation
ceremony rationality was anointed king over all cultures, in empirical ethnographical and
sociological research we get into the shadow of the tower of Babel, the mythical place of
linguistic confusion, where custom and example endowed with priority and authority
become again the ruler. This conclusion goes against Descartes who fears that to adopt
such path would lead people to personal confusion as far as they would no longer be able
to distinguish truth ﬁom falsehood and may succumb to social and political chaos. That
is why to rely on arguable opinion instead of certain knowledge means to be led astray on
the path of un-reason. In this respect, the anthropological and sociological study of
diverse forms of life challenges the Cartesian project of rational understanding. Once we
accept the demise of the Cartesian project, we have to abandon the wishful thinking that
rationality abstractly ﬁxes human nature and provides a universal warrant for
communication between people irrespective of the speciﬁcs of cultures.12

Comparative studies of different cultures following Durkheim and Weber have

provided sociological and anthropological evidence suggesting that we must surrender the

 

23

idea of reason as a self-sustained decision procedure that grounds trans-cultural
understanding on the basis of a universal idiom of communication. In the next chapter,
we shall see that Peter Winch argues that since there are no explicit unchanging rules
wired in our beads by God, they arise out of a particular context of symbolic modes of
social life within which they function. In order to make intelligible such peculiar criteria
and values from potentially idiosyncratic ways of living, one has to accommodate oneself
to and get familiar with the cultural practices of subjects under investigation from within
their world. Therefore, on this view, the ascription of rationality to people from a culture
alien to ours does not make sense as long as they plainly reject our standards. From this
perspective, the demands of consistency or efﬁciency are rendered inapplicable to natives
who can ﬁnd witchcraft and magic as justiﬁable as modern medicine or science. By this
reasoning, Peter Winch thinks that we may not apply our rules to a tribal community like
the Azande which does not recognize these rules. Therefore we cannot judge natives on
the basis of catching them in a contradiction to which they are persistently blind. He
claims that our habitual modes of thought, rational standards and interpretations within
lifeworlds are as much reﬂections of our particular time and place as our customary
modes of social behavior. Since every culture as an idiosyncratic form of life has its own
fundamental frameworks, judgements of people caught in one speciﬁc tradition must be
interpreted with respect to the views they share and agree upon. It would be non-
perrnissible to judge their intellectual beliefs or standards of behavior from the view of
another tradition to which they do not consent. The questions suggested by Winch's
approach are: Can we consistently judge a person belonging to another culture as being

irrational, or even rational? How are we to decide cross-culturally what patterns of

 

 

 

24

rationality have a genuine intellectual authority over alien natives?

I will address these questions in the next chapter, which will carry on the
anthropological arguments hinted above. In what follows, I need to discuss brieﬂy the
internal logic which guided the progression of my argument in the ensuing chapters and
to clarify the strategy I deemed appropriate to carry out the issue in the way I did.

1.4 THE SE UENCE OF THE ARGUMENT

Now I will summarize what is to come in each chapter and indicate how it ﬁts into
the plan of the work as a whole. Having identiﬁed difﬁculties with the Cartesian
standpoint, in subsequent chapters I turn to considerations bearing on the development of
an adequate concept of rationality for cross-cultural understanding.

In chapter two I will examine more radical arguments for the abandonment of the
Cartesian conception of reason than those presented here. In the introductory chapter we
have seen that anthropological and sociological research suggests that rationality emerges
within contingent social practices rather than being rooted in a faculty independent of
empirical conditions. Now we will examine the claim that rationality is a matter of
culturally-bound linguistic frameworks. Peter Winch who seeks more ﬂexible patterns of
intelligibility for grasping diverse cultural practices has advocated such a view. His
perspective rejects Descartes's belief in the universality and the intelligible basis of
reason.

Winch develops a two-fold interest in the conception of rationality and the
problem of cross-cultural understanding in relation to a new idea of social science. He
draws from the later Wittgenstein's culturalist view of language and from the empirical

basis of anthropological research. To comprehend Winch’s arguemnt we need to explore

 

 

 

25

Wittgenstein's claims that the complexity of life cannot be conveyed by the Simplicity of
some metaphysical ﬁctions like Descartes' notion of rationality. He argues that one can
only look from the single window of one's home-language as a relatively enclosed world
of meanings in which a speciﬁc perspective on understanding is constructed. Second, we
will see that Winch's view rests on social and cultural grounds and supports the
suggestive, but still elusive, formula that different societies or native communities live in
distinct worlds. These claims, based upon ﬁeld research in anthropology and linguistics
like Evans Pritchard's study of Zande magic, lead to the denial that there is anything
universal across different cultural practices. They imply that if we are ever to understand
other cultural frameworks or conceptual schemes we must rely on a notion of rationality
which makes sense only from "within" a given context. In consequence, understanding
other cultures becomes problematic for Winch. Since he cannot explain how an
anthropologist can still do his job in the ﬁeld, I will Show that Winch generates a
"research paradox".

Without anticipating the subject which will be discussed further, it seems obvious
to me that arguments drawn from Winch justiﬁes a retreat into relativism. This is a
consequence of his support for a double abandonment: ﬁrst, he gives up the very notion
of a one objective reality (or a single world), which is to be described as culture-laden
and inherently multiple; second, he discards the rational choice among beliefs and actions
as meaningless. This surrender pushes the traditional ideal of reason through the mill of
the radical thesis of incommensurability, which grinds the idea of culturally loaded
"forms of life” and makes room for the supposition of incommunicable “linguistically

articulated worlds ". Consequently, Winch assumes that the conception of the nature of

26

social science is consistent with the explanation of criteria of rationality that are relative
to a cultural context. He argues by referring to the problem of apparent irrationality that
logical understanding has at best a very limited applicability to the intelligibility of
radically different cultural practices.

On the basis of this outline discussion, we can anticipate each section of this
chapter. The account of rationality and understanding across cultures is linked with the
problem of making sense of linguistic meanings that give us access to one’s world. The
chapter proceeds as follows.

In section 2.1, "From Language Games to Forms of Life", I will trace the
background of Winch's relativist conception and I will brieﬂy describe his view which
implies that Descartes's notion of rationality "ﬂies in the face of ordinary language" and
needs to be abandoned. In this respect, a more plausible alternative seems to be provided
by Wittgenstein who claims that social activities can be interpreted and properly
understood only within ways of life construed as language games.

After having summarized Wittgenstein's account of language games, we can turn
to the use Winch makes of this thesis when thinking about the possibility of
understanding other styles of drinking and kinds of behaviors. In section 2.2, " Whose
Rationality, What Understanding? ", we will present Winch's conception of rationality
and knowledge of different cultures as it emerges from his "new" idea of social science.
From this perspective, section 2.3, "Irrationality or Misunderstanding", will discuss the
problem of apparent irrationality as a result of misunderstanding rather than an expression
of an incoherent or a defective mind.

There are certain difﬁculties with Winch's view that I will review and assess. In

 

27

section 2.4, "A Rejoinder to Winch: 'Latent Rationality' versus Consistency", I present
three objections to Winch's position. First I Show that, if holding inconsistent beliefs is a
Sign of irrationality, then Western culture is not different from native communities like
the Azande, which are caught in a contradiction. Second, in contrast with the formal
rationality tied up with the logical form, I introduce a concept of "latent rationality" which
ﬁts better with the elusive character of life situations. Third, the methodological question
is could an investigator ever escape from the framework of a home language and get
immersed in another remote and possibly idiosyncratic form of life? Sometimes Winch
implies that a ﬁeld anthropologist is supposed to be able to contrast and evaluate disjoint
planes representing different belief systems and to grip the multiplicity of world-
perspectives. To understand how the relativist constraint can be eluded, Winch must
explain why the anthropologist reserves for himself a privileged access to a neutral state
of mind, a special position which is essentially denied by relativists to inhabitants caught
in their symbolic home-lands. What makes possible the social scientist's success in
understanding people coming from alien cultures? The vicious circularity of
understanding implied by Winch's relativist tenet cannot avoid "the research paradox ".
In addition, we will show that the notion of apparent irrationality as applied to Zande
natives by Evans-Pritchard can be consistently generalized, inclusive to our own culture.
It seems to me that the imputation of irrationality does not demonstrate mental
incoherence. As we shall see, it may indicate instead an inner conﬂict (in the observer or
within the cultural framework) resulting from the antagonism between instrumental
reason centered on success and efﬁciency (in the pursuit of practical ends) and the goals

of preserving the coherence of thought (by pursuing truth, rightness or sincerity).

28
Finally, in section 2.5 I will try to Stun up where we stand in the argument by

emphasizing that the explanation of the breakdown of communication between cultures is
inevitably related to the issue of translation which mediates understanding between
speakers of different languages. If one agrees with Winch that grasping meanings is
bound up with a speciﬁc concept of rationality and proceeds within a language system,
one cannot avoid saying that the translation that mediates linguistic communication and
makes possible understanding between inhabitants of different cultures bears on
relativism. For instance, in order to become aware when an alien speaker behaves
irrationally, the question is whether the participants in conversation could exchange
equivalent meanings. It is this linguistic bridge of understanding which has been so
dramatically narrowed by Winch. So, the discussion of the problem of translation is a
logical step and, insofar as it has been famously carried out by Quine, turning to his point
of view becomes not only relevant but quite necessary to the issue at stake. This idea will
be carried out in the next chapter.

Therefore, we have shown that linguistic philosophy threatens to deepen the
problem of relativism so far as it bears on cross-cultural understanding. In chapter three,
("Quine and the Problems of Translation: Charity vs World Incommensurability" we
turn to the work of an eminent philosopher of language who has wrestled with
communication between languages by taking up the problem of radical translation.
Though Quine argues for the thesis of the "indeterminacy of translation", he also
introduces a principle of charity that may be useful for our purpose. The ﬁrst thesis
builds upon the ontological assumption of the inscrutability of reference and leads to

radical relativistic assumption of incommensurable worlds. The principle of charity

 

29

locates the promise of an alternative way to avoid the unacceptable relativist stance by
making appeal to a more "charitable" interpretation effective especially in the early stages
of translation. Thus, after considering the semantic arguments regarding the breakdown
of understanding, I argue for the fruitfulness of Quine's inquiry into the possibility of
communication through maximizing (or optimizing) the agreement when reading other
cultural discourses. This is what he calls the maxim of charity. The value of this
methodological recommendation remains to be weighed against Quine’s contention that
translation is essentially indeterminate which relies on the related theses of linguistic
idiosyncrasy and world-incommensurability.

The discussion sketched above is developed in two sections as follows: First, in
section 3.1, I explore Quine's explanation of the breakdown of understanding in terms of
indeterminacy of translation and inscrutability of reference. The linguistic divergence,
which leads to the gap between two languages, points to analytical hypotheses. Thus, in
3.11, I will approach Quine's discussion of semantic difﬁculties posed by the problem of
radical translation. In 3.12 I will analyze his Gavagai-Rabbit example which provides
the paradigmatic argument: speakers of idiosyncratic languages cannot understand each
other since they live in different worlds and share incommensurable cultural values. The
relativist consequence of this example will be emphasized in 3.13.

After the examination of Quine's treatment of understanding in terms of his thesis
of indeterminacy of translation in section 3.2, I will explore the concept of charity which
offers an exit from this difﬁculty. In 3.21 I will present three objections to Quine's thesis
of indeterminacy of translation which prove that his account of cultural variation of

meaning is not as persuasive as many believe. Apparently Quine himself appealed to the

30

maxim of charity in order to save the coherence of his point of view facing the
unavoidable relativist consequences of his approach (rooted in extensional semantics).

I will Show in 3.22 and 3.23 that the idea of charity has two aspects. On the one
hand, it is an attempt to "save the obvious" from linguistic relativity. This includes both
logical truth and inferences as an expression of the backbone of a kind of rationality,
which must remain cross-culturally valid, as well as the empirical reference of linguistic
sentences, namely the common base of a wide range of stimulus meanings. On the other
hand, according to a methodological recommendation introduced by Quine, we are urged,
at least in the early fumbling stages of translation, to prefer accommodating the
translation scheme rather than to assume a speaker's apparent irrationality. His policy,
expressed by the maxim of charity, is to avoid translating one's assertions in "too glaring
a falsehood" and to deem one's silliness less likely than a bad translation. However,
Quine set three important limitations for the idea of charitable understanding:
first, it works in the early stages just as a "rule of thumb";
second, he is reluctant to accept endless revision of the translation scheme in order to

avoid the attribution of irrationality; and
third, interpretation is a guessing procedure that has merely a conj ectural character being
intelligible by recourse to empirical psychology.

Finally, in 3.24, with regard to this dissertation's concern with the problem of
rationality and its relation to cross-cultural understanding, I make an allusion to Neurath's
marine metaphor depicting the human condition. The purpose of this allusion is to Show
that Quine's view may face an inescapable dilemma. On the one hand, a skeptical voice

declairns the impotence of reason and the cultural and linguistic fragmentation of the

31

mind's intelligibility. On the other, an opposing voice advocates a universal rationality
which guarantees the transcontextual possibility of understanding across languages and
cultures. Insofar as Quine ponders charity against world-incommensurability, he exposes
himself to the two horns of a dilemma.

To overcome such weaknesses of Quine's notion of charity, we must search for a
more compelling version of this principle which can insure the possibility of
understanding within a methodology of interpretation. In chapter four, I push ﬁuther the
investigations begun in Quine's theoretical horizon by proceeding on the path of one of
his greatest followers, Donald Davidson. My purpose is to analyze a kind of charitable
rationality that offers a bridging conceptual ground for understanding people living in
different cultural and linguistic frameworks. Davidson claims that in order to understand
others we need to acknowledge the intersubjective character of language and to make an
appeal to the principle of charity.

The sequence of the argument in this chapter is structured in two steps. First, in
the beginning section, 4.1, my aim is to show that since understanding is inherently
linguistic, language must have a social character. I will make good on Davidson's
insistence on the public availability of any possible language by distinguishing his
approach from Quine's behaviorist treatment of meaning. In 4.11 I will examine
Davidson's critical account of Quine's "Cartesian vision". Despite the differences
between Descartes's rationalism and Quine's behaviorism, both see the private self as the
point from which a subject can reconstruct a picture of the world. This discussion
(recalling Wittgenstein's argument against a private language) provides the premises for

the exposition in 4.12, where I review Davidson's thesis that language must be essentially

32

public or it is not language at all.

In the second section of this chapter, after having analyzed what kind of
rationality might warrant the possibility of interpretation, I turn to question why we need
such a rationality. The relativist idea of unbridgeable worlds is challenged by Davidson
in two ways. First, in 4.21 we Shall see that he points to the notion of charity previously
suggested by Quine to impose a constraint on the process of translation. According to
this principle, we are bound, as Davidson puts it, to maximize or optimize agreement.
This means that we must presuppose that people we try to understand are basically
reasonable. In a stronger sense, charity implies that we can rely on a minimal and
necessary rationality. In 4.22, I will explore the anti-relativist connotations of Davidson's
attack against the "very idea of conceptual scheme" that seems to be inherently tied to a
language and makes understanding possible. This argument is necessary to challenge the
assumption of different and incommensurable worlds and to argue that languages are at
least partially translatable.

In 4.23, we see that Davidson appeals to charity to make understanding possible
and that he goes further than Quine when enforcing the methodological demand for
charity. He claims that interpretation requires constructing a "bridging" conceptual
system to ground cross-cultural judgements, which should enable us to compare so-called
"incommensurable" patterns of behavior, even apparently different styles of religious
practice. Davidson considers that understanding creates the need for a principle of charity
which can be represented as a linguistic bridge of interpretation with two main footholds:
one is Tarski's theory of truth in terms of Convention T, the other refers to the possibility

of making sense of one's beliefs, desires and intentions. Thus, Davidson replaces the

 

33

Quinean behaviorist notion of "stimulus meaning" with the mentalist notion of "holding a
sentence true" most of the time, and suggests that people are usually true in their beliefs
most of the time.

Finally, in 4.24, after presenting Davidson's account of charity tied to a version of
rationality that provides for understanding beyond the limits of a linguistic context, I
summarize various objections to his position. As a matter of fact Davidson is openly
reluctant to accept any transcendental account of the charity principle and he restrain
himself to the more modest job of showing how disagreement is possible. In such a case
though, he cannot preclude the hypothesis that we are mostly or massively mistaken.
Perhaps this pitfall can be avoided by turning back in the direction of restoring the
prerogatives of the Cartesian reason as Martin Hollis expressly intends in building his
concept of a rational bridgehead. This is the topic of Chapter 5.

In contrast to the Davidsonian plea for inter-subjectivity, in chapter ﬁve I explore a
very strong version of a substantive reason conceived objectively, by analyzing Hollis's
notion of bridgehead. We will see that the further Hollis goes, the less defensible his
position becomes.

In section 5.1, I describe Hollis's reasons for supporting a substantive notion of
rationality which secures the possibility of universal understanding. By presenting this
view I intend to exemplify a kind of position that is stronger than the ones I have
discussed so far. Hollis's explicit aim is to restore the compelling prerogatives of the
Cartesian reason which are invariant for all cultures. He argues that there must be
rational and true beliefs which every rational mind must accept and which set an a priori

limit to relativism. Consequently, a successful translation and interpretation of beliefs

34

must presuppose "what a rational man" cannot fail to believe in simple perceptual
situations, organized by "rules of coherent judgement" to which a "rational man" cannot
fail to subscribe. The presuppositions are assumed, not discovered. They are a priori
conditions of intelligibility and establish the universal premises of the universal language
of the mind. Hollis intends to restore Descartes's hope of rational understanding. He
contends that the "bridgehead of true and rational beliefs" is "ﬁxed" rather than "ﬂoating",
in the sense that there are speciﬁc inferential principles and stimulus-belief links that are
presupposed by efforts at translation or interpretation. These are not conjectural, but
"universal among mankind", or at least among that portion of mankind we can
understand. If Hollis avoids the paradoxes and self-refuting consequences of the relativist
standpoint, he must still prove the reality of such a priori universals. In fact,
anthropological and sociological research found such "ﬁxed" transcendental conditions of
understanding to be irrelevant for possible cultural interpretation. For instance, the laws
of logic offer no guidance for the elusive aspect of every day life and are often silent on
how to revise our beliefs.

In section 5.2 I express doubts concerning Hollis's claim that reason is a universal
bridgehead commonly and invariably shared by all cultures. Obviously, Hollis can
answer the problem of credibility faced by Davidsonian charity by strengthening the
rational ground that anchors the universality of understanding. However, although he
dares to advocate a stronger view, he is exposed to the critical observations that bear upon
the Cartesian project as we noticed before.

Finally, section 5.3 is presented as a transitional one. There I review where I

stand in the argument and I present a bridge to the next chapter on Habermas's concept of

35

communicative rationality. After concluding critical remarks made so far, it may be
useful to look for a way between Davidson and Hollis. It seems to me that Habermas
goes a long way toward this by starting from the crossroads of continental hermeneutics
and analytical philosophy. The next step of the argument emphasizes a constructive goal
and will be given special attention. What follows is a twofold strategy designed to
explain Habermas's alternative to Descartes as constructed in an account of
communicative rationality, and, at the same time, to show how Habermas's redemption of
the project of modernity aims to restore the integrity of reason over the fragmentation of
value spheres.

In chapter six I approach Habermas's account of communicative competence in
which he grounds his concept of discursive rationality and provides for the possibility of
cross-cultural understanding. My goal is to show why Habermas's theory of
communicative action succeeds to a signiﬁcant extent in the attempt to ﬁnd a way out of
relativism. He intends to reconstruct the universal and necessary conditions of
communication, ﬁrst in terms of a formal pragmatic theory of speech acts, and then in the
articulation of a discourse ethic. I will try to explain his appeal to a weak-transcendental
argument which secures the universal rational ground for reaching human understanding
and shows how bridges between contrasting cultures can be built. According to
Habermas, speakers engaged in communication draw from the lifeworld the common
background of "consensual patterns of interpretation", the presupposed solidarities which
are described as "norrnatively reliable patterns of social relations", and Speaking
competencies acquired in the process of socialization ("An Alternative Way Out of the

Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason", in From

36
Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, 1996, p 605).

The chapter proceeds as follows. In section 6.1, I show that Habermas bids
farewell to Descartes with his idea of communicative rationality. I argue that the concept
of communicative reason offers two main insights: rationality is inherently linguistic and
discursive, and "communicative competence" provides the universal ground for any
possible speech act within which claims to validity can be vindicated. We can brieﬂy
anticipate the content of the sections. In 6.1, ﬁrst I will make some preliminary
consideration to justify my approach, then I will try to address the controversial problem
whether cross-cultural understanding requires a transcendental argument. We will
understand the sense of the criticism which targets Habermas for excessive formalism,
abstract universalism, impotence of mere ought, and the terrorism of pure conviction.
This recalls the objections Hegel once leveled against Kant. And we shall see that
Habermas continues in a way the Kantian line of questioning and adopts a weak
transcendental strategy of reconstruction. In 6.2 I present Habermas's theory of universal
pragrnatics and the concept of discursive rationality that has a procedural character and
lies in a communicative competence shared by all speakers. The next stage consists in
scrutinizing the universal possibility of reaching consensus (6.3). First I will analyze the
idea of discourse in general and discourse ethics in particular in connection with what
makes norms applicable. Second, on this line of discussion, I will stage out a dialogue
between Habermas and Kant on the issue of moral justiﬁcation. Third, I will explore
what Habermas calls the “postconventional” status of “the discourse” in the given
conditions of a growing gap between the traditional forms of life and the critical

reﬂective modes of argumentation. I will continue with a presentation of challenges set

 

.. -—« _ﬁ_._.r._‘___..h __4 -

37

upon “the discourse” by the process of cultural differentiation. This theme leads us to
Habermas's attempt to redeem the project of modernity.

Finally, in section 6.4 I make an assessment of the context transcendent power of
communicative rationality and I emphasize its merits. I also mention the limits and
difﬁculties faced by Habermas's argument on validity claims redeemed and vindicated in
speech acts and ideal presuppositions of argumentation (6.41). Then, I scrutinize the
concept of "ideal speech situation" in a narrative way (6.42). My goal is to point out the
normative value of Habermas's project in connection with some critical accounts of its
idealizing consequences (such as implausible portrayals of speaker-bearer argumentative
interactions and the utopian hope in a rational society). I also talk about the critical
function of rationality in the diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity and I observe that
he has not made yet a serious attempt to work out an articulated account of the violations
of the internal idealizing structure of speech. Habermas's concept of . communicative
rationality which makes possible understanding via universally motivated agreement
leaves unanswered questions regarding the utility of Habermas's theory of discourse.
Given the broad range of his problematic (Putnam calls him a "God-thinker") and the
ambiguity inherent to such an unusual extension, there are grounds for critical
interpretations from many angles. Nevertheless, if we lose sight of Habermas's
achievements or choose to discard his postrnetaphysical and non-relativist account of
rationality, we do that on our peril. I will Show why the critical thrust of communicative
rationality makes his postrnetaphysical and non-relativist account the most fruitful and
promising alternative we have explored so far.

Chapter 7 is reserved for ﬁnal conclusions. It is the place where I bid a ﬁnal

 

38

farewell to Descartes in the light of communicative rationality. I will review the main
sequence of the argument by revisiting three sets of problems. First, in section 7.1, I
conclude where we are left in the argument regarding the problem of the rational basis of
cross-cultural communication. The closing remarks are a brief summary of what I think
is the most acceptable of the available solutions to the problem and indicate what I think I
have accomplished by all the work I have done so far.

We will observe that the participants in the relativity debate (like Winch, Quine,
Davidson, Hollis, and Habermas) must acknowledge the rational pre-conditions which
make possible their own dialogue and controversy on metatheoretical issues (as I discuss
here). These are the universal and unavoidable presuppositions of argumentative
reasoning which make intelligible the difference between them and provide for the
possibility of agreement.

In the last section, 7.2, I will make reference to a larger argument which remains
to be elaborated. In this respect, I argue that a three level model of rationality is a
promising conceptual alternative. It is possible to Show that cross-cultural understanding
relies on a threefold background rationality which, properly conceived, provides the
conceptual ground and justiﬁcation for communication and consent among apparently
contrasting ways of life. However, as my reﬂections on this issue are still too intuitive

and incomplete, a conceptual construction of this promising project remains to be done.

Chapter 2) LUD WIG WITTGE_NS TEIN AND PETER WINCH:
UNDERSTANDING A LANGUAGE AND UNDERSTANDING A WORLD

In this chapter, I will examine radical arguments against the concept of a unique,
impartial rationality as developed by Descartes. My aim is to scrutinize the notion of a
culturally bound rationality which has been advocated by Peter Winch and to see how his
arguments for the thesis of diverse and multiple rationalities point to ways a more
plausible and more adequate notion of understanding can be conceived.

Such an approach begins from the conclusions of the previous chapter. We have
noted already that the anthropological study of diverse societies suggests a "world of
Babel"; what the modern tradition describes as a universal autonomous reason comes to
be seen as a matter of a speciﬁc culture. Sociology and anthropology give reason to think
that rationality is historically and socially bound and that therefore the Cartesian ambition
to transcend human interactions is implausible and inadequate. The ethnographic
researches of Frazer, Durkheim and Weber challenge the Cartesian removal of the subject
from the world of culture. In addition, they Show that the concept of ﬁxed and universal
rationality predisposes thinkers to accept ideas of objective knowledge and human
understanding in ways that obscure their own partiality and prejudice, as well as the fact
that notions of rationality evolves from social practices.

This lays the conceptual ground for the linguistic analysis which informs
philosophical debates over relativism and which radicalizes the attack against Descartes's
project of autonomous reason and universal understanding. In what follows, we will
show why the Cartesian view could have been suspected for "ﬂying in the face" of the

ordinary language-use and for misleading ethnographic research. Such a critical attitude

39

40
is reﬂected by the concept of understanding from the perspective of a culturalist view of

language inspired mainly by the later Wittgenstein. On his view, "languages" are seen as
linguistically articulated worldviews and correspondingly structured forms of life. They
refer to and help constitute a kind of wholes which appear as multiple and different and
provide the background of symbolic knowledge and customs that help the community to
interpret and relate to reality. For the members of the same culture the limits of their
language set the boundaries of their world or form of life. They can expand eventually
their horizon but they cannot step out of it. Therefore, it is only within a linguistic
framework that thought becomes possible and understanding makes sense.

Having discussed Wittgenstein's inﬂuential view on language games, I will turn
then to Peter Winch's idea of social science which has been inspired by Wittgenstein's
pragmatic treatment of language as use and is designed to grasp the meaning of human
behavior within various forms of life. These thinkers share a criticism of the universal
validity of reason, and, on this basis, rule out the possibility of understanding other
cultures from outside.

Winch inherits Wittgenstein's holistic commitment regarding the understanding of
different ways life as language games, and describes their contrasts in terms of
idiosyncratic "rule-following behavior". Here lies a premise of the relativism which
denies the a priori and universal character of reason as the cross-cultural ground for
understanding between peoples. Nevertheless, since the relativist's acceptance of
conceptual diversity brings the problem of rationality to an impasse, it has become
problematic to know what claim can be made beyond that of custom, or culturally

impregnated taste and private preferences?l3

41

In approaching this discussion I intend to draw some positive conclusions
regarding the need for styles of thinking that are better accommodated to the grasp of the
peculiarity and variety of cultural practices and, therefore, for more ﬂexible patterns of
intelligibility of what people do and say.

All WAYS (ELIVING AND LANGUAGE GAMES

In this section I will try to examine Wittgenstein's conception of language-games
and its implications regarding the understanding of different ways of living. For doing
this, I will scrutinize his analogy between how we make sense of the world and how we
come to grips with the meanings of words within various linguistic frameworks.

We have seen that Descartes aims to base human understanding on the universally
valid and certain foundations of reason as warranted by God. For Descartes, intelligible
insights into necessary truths cannot be doubted, since they are in principle immune to
mistakes rooted in culture and to historical revisions. This view implies that all rational
people share the same ideas, the same thinking self, and their mental contents are
necessarily convergent. In consequence, meanings of sentences from different languages
can be unproblematically and properly translated. And yet, we remain fallible beings as
far as impulses may incline us to give assent or dissent to undemonstrated beliefs.
Though Descartes was convinced that if one follows the self-evident light of reason and
avoids making decisions based on a capricious will, one will not go wrong either in the
construction of the world or in the understanding of others. Wittgenstein challenges this
view when making his linguistic turn. He replaces the mind as the "organizer" of reality
with the language that provides the framework within which sense contents and meanings

get structured and intelligible.

42

In consequence, Wittgenstein is credited (by Winch and Quine among others) for
creating a new perspective on the problem of understanding of cultures.14 In the
Philosophical Investigations (1953) he claims that what has to be accepted as "the given"
is describable in terms of a language-game and "to imagine a language-game is to
imagine a form of life" (Philosophical Investigations, 1953, sec. 19). If he is correct, then
the very language through which our enculturation is achieved is intelligible only to
people who share the same modes of life. Any natural language, he argues, comprises a
variety of "language games", whose signiﬁcance is derived from the forms of life of the
communities in which the language in question is learned, spoken and put to practical
use.

There is, though, an ambiguity about the contexts in which Wittgenstein's
introduces the expression "language—game". Sometimes he simply presents a list of usual
linguistic functions: describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements;
constructing an object from description (a drawing); reporting an event; forming and
testing hypothesis; presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams; solving
problems in arithmetic; making up a story, and reading it; giving orders, and obeying
them; making a joke, telling it; play-acting; asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying,
etc. Once he says,

A language game: bringing building stones, reporting the number of available

stones... If, however there are several ways of ﬁnding something out for sure, like

counting, weighing, measuring, them the statement 'I know' can take place of

mentioning how I know (On Certainty, 1969, sec. 564).

At other times Wittgenstein calls a 'language-game' the whole form of life within which

language and actions are intricately interwoven. This second sense has more global

connotations, which make it suitable for shedding light on understanding alien behavior.

 

43

As Wittgenstein says, "Here the 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the
fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life" (Philosophical
Investigations, sec. 23). In this respect, for the whole process of using words it is
particularly relevant the way children learn their native language or primitives give
signiﬁcance to their sacred rituals.15 Meanings cannot be determined apart from the
language game in which they play a deﬁnite role. As a matter of fact, what counts as
evidence for right or wrong, true or false, is subjected to public scrutiny and appears as an
outcome of an eventual agreement among people of a community (On Certainty, sec.
281). Consequently, terms central to philosophical tenets like knowledge, real, proof, or
simplicity become non-sensical outside of the distinct framework of socially recognizable
and culturally impregnated patterns of experience which are transmitted through
education. Such concepts make sense when used within socially recognizable patterns of
linguistic practices that vary on a wide range from the ordinary language of a cultural
framework, which absorbs customs and standards of j udgements to distinct vocabularies
which characterize professional groups like builders or comedians. As Wittgenstein puts
it (On Certainty, sec. 61), "A meaning of a word is a kind of employment of it " within a
language game.16 "For it is what we learn when the word is incorporated into our
language." He ﬁnally urges us to bear in mind that the language game is neither a device
for prediction and control, nor a reasonable or unreasonable standard of evaluation. It is
simply there 'like our life' (On Certainty, sec. 559).

Despite the ﬂexible and somewhat confusing use of the term "language-game",
Wittgenstein repeatedly stresses its Signiﬁcance as "processes of using words", and hence

he refers not just to a set of utterances, but also to the "actions into which it is

44

interwoven" (Philosophical Investigations, sec. 7).

The recurrent comparison in Wittgenstein's later work between playing a game
and using a language pervasively assimilates the role of grammar for the employment of
propositions within a linguistic framework with the rules of the game that are subject to a
restricted application. Correspondingly, the understanding of speaker's usage of words is
like the understanding of the behavior of a player following the rules of the game. As far
as an utterance is taken outside of the context of its pragmatic use and it is intended to
posit things, it might as well be a part of mythology postulating gods.l7 For then on, our
propositions, which may be articulated to provide an image of the furniture of the world,
appear in a false light of God's ontologic idiom which could stipulate anything to
everyone and that means that we were trapped in the bad philosophical grammar

Wittgenstein replaces metaphysically loaded essences of things with "family
resemblances", an expression designed to characterize a complicated network of
conceptual similarities "overlapping and criss—crossing: sometimes overall similarities,
sometimes similarities of detail" (Philosophical Investigations, sec. 66).18 He contends
that he only way of making sense of a problem regarding meaning is by analyzing
multiple ways of using language. For example, we identify different things by applying
the words "games”, or "numbers" not because they would point to a certain essence, but
rather because they form a family and are related by "family resemblance". In fact, as
these words may be used in different ways, it may very well be that there is no essential
nature or explicit rule, to which they call attention. Therefore, language rather can be
learned in a practical way.

So, if Descartes describes the philosophical quest in terms of the solitary journey

45

of Reason beyond custom and example, Wittgenstein exhibits the multifarious character
of philosophical approaches as merely "criss-crossing sight seeing" journeys made
possible by tracing family resemblances to which the multiplicity of language games calls
attention. And once one removes the Cartesian spectacles, the world can be seen through
multiple facets represented by "forms of life", which depend not on the "ontological
game" Descartes played so well with God in order to make Him reveal his divine
blueprint, but on the peculiar ways different communities use language. Therefore any
attempt to offer a "God's eye perspective" a la Descartes, to Wittgenstein creates "pseudo-
problems" resulting from a conceptual confusion. Since we cannot conceive of a
satisfying solution for such problems, our task is rather to dissolve them by discovering
how and why the logic of our language has been misused. Philosophy can not give an
account of things, but it can destroy the sovereignty of idols, like Descartes's transcendent
Reason, which makes possible the quest for certainty and universal understanding. Our
hope becomes that of putting our speech in order and clarifying the way we use our
words. Though we should notice that our own way of structuring knowledge is merely
one amongst many possible others. It is not a grasp of "the Platonic order", of an eternal
and immutable being which is the given to be caught by all human languages in a
supposedly invariant manner. The clarity that one might aim at is possible not on such
metaphysical grounds, but only in the limits of a language game. But this simply means
that the philosophical problems should completely disappear (Philosophical
Investigations, sec. 133).

On these reasons, Wittgenstein contends, then, that the Cartesian ideal of an

universal language is not feasible.19 The meaning of words cannot be determined apart

46
from the language game in which they are used and take a deﬁnite role. What

philosophers have accepted as "the given" is just a metaphysical ﬁction that can only be
described in terms of a language-game. And, Wittgenstein argues, "to imagine a
language-game is to imagine a form of life" (Philosophical Investigations, sect. 19). In
this respect, sometimes, meaning is compared with the social function played by an
"ofﬁcial" and different meanings with "different functions" (0n Certainty, sec. 64).
Therefore to know, for instance, what is a "beetle in a box" does not tolerate a
metaphysical emphasis since the term cannot be associated with a thing or an essence
which may allow us to get its meaning (Philosophical Investigations, sec. 293, see also
0n Certainty, sec. 482). In consequence, to be clear about meaning one must look at its
use within a language game which changes with time (On Certainty, sec. 256). "When
language game change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts
meanings of words change" (On Certainty, sec. 65).

Consequently, understanding the meaning of a word or sentence is possible only
within a home-language that is the familiar framework of one's language-game
(Philosophical Investigations, secs. 7, 10, 18, 20, 40-43). This implies that the notion of
meaning as a truth-condition is replaced by a procedure for ascertaining the signiﬁcance
of a sentence by considering (in Kripke's formulation) "under what conditions can the
sentence be correctly uttered" and "what is the use or function of such utterances" (in
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 1982, p. 73, after David K. Henderson,
Interpretation and Explanation in the Human Sciences, 1993, p. 22).

Thus, if one is to "make sense" of other people's meaning and overt behavior, one

is supposed to know how their utterances are related to other sentences and actions,

 

47

which must themselves presumably be understood. Such a holistic spirit is evident in
Wittgenstein's critical response to Descartes's claim that intellectual certainty is an
intuitive achievement which can come after the absolute doubt. In On Certainty,
Wittgenstein claims that when we ﬁrst begin to believe anything the "Light dawns
gradually over the whole"(0n Certainty, sec. 141).20 That metaphor implies that what we
believe is not a single, isolated proposition like 'Cogito ergo sum', but a whole coherent
system of propositions. Since there are not any self-evident or self-intelligible axioms,
postulates or intuitions within this linguistic context, premises and consequences need to
give one another mutual support (0n Certainty, sec. 142). And insofar as we belong to a
language community which is bound together by a common background of knowledge
and upbringing, Wittgenstein claims that "we are taught judgements and their connection
with other judgements" (0n Certainty, sec. 140).

A relevant question at this point might be how can we learn to ground on reliable
evidence the propositions which must be coherently used within a form of life? On this
matter, Wittgenstein takes a stance against both Empiricists and Rationalists who seek for
a certain foundation of understanding which is objectively valid irrespective to culture.
He admits that justifying the evidence or giving grounds comes to an end, though he
contends that the end is neither certain sense-datum propositions as empiricists believed,
nor rational intuitions like 'cogito' which strike us immediately as undeniably true. On the
one hand, he assumes that

proposition of the form of empirical propositions is itself thoroughly bad; the

statements in question do not serve as foundations in the same way as hypotheses

which, if they turn out to be false, are replaced by others (On Certainty, sec. 356).

On the other hand, he contends that certainty is not mere a mental act of a thinking self

 

48
(what Putnam alludes to as the "disembodied Cartesian subject"). On the one hand, one's

"mental state" (as "cogito") gives no guarantees of what will happen and future
developments of events cannot be known for sure. On the other hand, by doubting
everything, one would not understand "where a doubt could get a foothold" nor where a
further test or experiment was possible.21 For irrefutable evidence he uses the label of
"subjective certainty", an expression which conveys one's complete conviction or total
absence of doubt, that is what one uses in attempting to persuade other people (On
Certainty, sec. 194). For instance, this might be the case of the unmistakable feeling of
cold drops on my forehead when walking through freezing rain or, more abstractly, the
experience of the passage of time which is given by successive changes of things; more
directly, by the extent of our bodily dissolution. Such an empirical reality is undeniably
revealed not by the Cartesian intellectual intuitions but by the senses, and insofar it can
provide premises for acting without doubt, Wittgenstein calls it "sure evidence". Thus,
what we accept without hesitation is not what appears to Descartes as necessary truths in
the unmistakable light of reason, but what it is unquestionable support for us to succeed
in what we do. It is like the chair I am sitting on, the keyboard and the screen I am using
right now that make possible my present undertaking of typing this text. Obviously, I
cannot deny the concrete existence of such things, which are actually used by me in the
process of writing down these very sentences, without leaving room for questioning the
normalcy of my mind. That is the evidence Wittgenstein assumes that we use as a
support for "acting without any doubt" (0n Certainty, sec. 196). In this respect, he
emphasized the primitive importance of action by quoting from Faust: "In the beginning

was the deed" (0n Certainty, sec. 402). This maxim means that at the bottom of the

49

language game lies our acting not some set of basic intuitive and incorrigible statements
either perceptive or rational (0n Certainty, sec. 204). In consequence, unlike Descartes,
Wittgenstein regards 'certainty' as a basis of acting within a "form of life" (On Certainty,
sec. 358).22
Henceforth, conﬂicting philosophical arguments about the use of terms are
likened by Wittgenstein to disputes among natives when they are faced with a new
custom. Finally he contends that the results of philosophy are "the uncovering of one or
another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got running its
head up against the limits of language." (Philosophical Investigations, sec. 119). In fact,
'subliming language' is just the attempt to ﬁnd a justiﬁcation for our linguistic practices.
On his view, the philosophical problems arise "when language goes in holiday" -
that is when a language user feels beyond any regular constraint and fails to abide by the
rules of grammar. The perplexity caused by a wild user of language who creates a new
grammar, violates the old one, or simply misconceive language is just like the confusion
generated by a chess player who nrisapplies the rules of the game, makes up new ones, or
conceives the game in some "static" manner. In this respect, Wittgenstein contends that,
'I know that that's a tree'. Why does it strike me as if I did not understand the
sentence, though it is after all an extremely simple sentence of the most ordinary
kind? It is as if I could not focus my mind on any meaning. Simply because I
don't look for the focus where the meaning is. AS soon as I think of an everyday
use of the sentence instead of a philosophical one, its meaning becomes clear and
ordinary (0n Certainty, sec. 347).
Therefore, meaning lies in the intersubjective use of language within a community. To
make sense of people's speech behaviors, philosophers should not interfere with actual

usage of language and they must leave the things as they are. For this reason,

Wittgenstein suggests that philosophy can in the end only describe world but it ﬁnally

50

leaves it unchanged.23

On such grounds Wittgenstein ruined the philosophical grammar of rationalists
from Plato to Descartes and Husserl as well as of empiricists from Hume to Carnap and
Quine who were seeking to rebuild the world image, and, inherently, the understanding
among people on the basis of some primitive evidence (either the immediately striking
certainty and undeniable truth of "cogito" or raw experience and stimulations of our nerve
endings).24

In conclusion, Wittgenstein rejects the empiricist and rationalist claims regarding
meanings which are embodied in a universal language and are expressing an impartial
epistemic standpoint supposed to be so compelling for all people who deserve to be called
rational. On his view, an utterance and correlated actions have no meaning outside the
context of a language-game and consequently in the absence of a linguistic framework we
have no system of reference to be employed when we interpret a language different from
ours. Understanding alien behavior requires understanding a form of life that is a
constellation of activities guided by speciﬁc rules.

Wittgenstein's culturalist view of language provides the conceptual background
for Winch's questioning of the idea of rationality and for his analysis of the possibility of
understanding other cultures. This discussion will be carried out in the next section.

2.2) WHOSE RATIONALITY, WHAT UNDERSTANDING?

Winch points to the similarity between language games and forms of life by
arguing that they are both rule-govemed and that in both contexts notions of
understanding and meaning make sense only within a framework. In this respect, he cites

a famous metaphor from Philosophical Investigations which compares the conceptual

51

difficulties we experience in using some terms of our language with the state of mind of
savages who are confronted with something from an alien culture. Winch exploits
Wittgenstein's analogy between certain features of our concepts and an imaginary alien
society in which all our familiar patterns of thinking are subtly distorted. Then he
suggests that what is required to understand unusual conceptual meanings is comparable
with making sense of an unfamiliar behavior from a form of life remote from ours. He
points out that we are not able to grasp the meaning of a word if we only consider its
probable occurrence in a book and formulate statistical regularities of its use. What is left
out is a signiﬁcant body of tacit knowledge. To understand a word is to describe how it
has been used within the context of a language. From here Winch infers that "linguistic
behavior has an 'idiom' in the same kind of way as has a language" (The New Idea of
Social Science, 1958, p. 15).

At this point, since Winch's argument makes reference to both "ways of life " and
"forms of life", terms which seem equivalent in Wittgenstein, we need to make a
conceptual clariﬁcation. As David K. Henderson shows, Winch makes an implicit
distinction between "ways of life" understood as particular social frameworks (e.g.
religion or in a given society or science in a given society), and "forms of life" understood
as more comprehensive types of social contexts (such as religion, magic, business, art or
science). The former appear as instances of the latter (Interpretation and Explanation, p.
23), but both are in Winch's focus when he examines the ideas of rationality and
understanding. On this conceptual basis, he targets the ideal of scientiﬁc knowledge
defended by a tradition which strives to explain human practices by empirical

generalizations on the model of a method derived from natural sciences. Such a tradition

52

leading back to 1.8. Mill assumes the reductionist view according to which a social
institution is treated as no different from a physical event and is assimilated to a kind of
lawlike uniformity or regularity. For instance, Max Weber often speaks about statistical
reasons (chance) to predict with a fair accuracy what people would be likely to do in
some given circumstances (see Idea 0f Social Science, p. 115). Unlike Weber, who
deﬁnes roles played by social actors in terms of the probability that actions of a certain
sort will be performed in certain situations, Winch argues that behavior is meaningful
only if it is governed by rules and this presupposes a social setting. Just as Wittgenstein
rejects the essentialist view of meaning and the primacy of formal language (including
logic), Winch repudiates a turiﬁed and forrnalist method of science. He accuses Weber
for failing to realize that the notion of understanding an "event of consciousness" as
employed in the "context of humanly followed rules", carries a sense which cannot
overlap the sense of knowledge ﬁ'om the "context of causal laws" without creating logical
difficulties (Idea of Social Science, p. 117, see also "Idea of Social Science" In
Rationality, 1970, p. 6). The fact of the matter is that we might be able to make correct
predictions about people's future actions and still not have any real understanding of what
they are doing. The irreconcilable character of this situation is revealed by the contrast
between counting the frequency of using a word in a discourse and providing a lawful
explanation by deducing the chance of its occurrence, and being able to make sense of
what is being said there. Winch says, "a man who understands Chinese is not a man who
has a ﬁrm grasp of the statistical probabilities for the occurrence of the various words in
the Chinese language" (Idea of Social Science, p. 115). Understanding consists in

grasping the point of meaning of what has been said or done. Therefore, Winch moves

53

understanding from the world of statistic and causal laws to the "realm of discourse" and
the conceptual relations which insures its internal coherence. Moreover, he makes a
distinction between the notions of meaning and function in a quasi-causal sense, and
contends that the former can never be reduced to the latter.

The main target of Winch's discussion is the idea of rationality that underlies the
methodological arrogance of the positivist model of science. According to the traditional
view, social events are susceptible to the same kind of explanation as natural phenomena.

Nevertheless, what counts as epistemologically signiﬁcant is the empirical ground and
logical structure of theory, and factors such as human interactions between scientists are
rejected as irrelevant and treated independently from the particular forms of activity that
is represented by the research itself. Winch argues that scientists, who focus on
discovering experimental uniformities, have overlooked the fact that the world is made
intelligible in their disciplines through social participation in established forms of
practice. They are not aware that insofar as they all Share and live by the same beliefs
assimilated in the process of socialization, they are bound by the same rules and take part
to the same life-game with those they study. The fact of the matter is that the
intelligibility of linguistic expressions and actions performed is possible only within a
form of life, and is bound by certain "considerations" or "points" which establish what is
meaningful and what is not (Idea of Social Science, 195 8, pp. 100-1). Hence Winch
assumes that, "Understanding... is grasping the point of meaning of what is done or said"
(idem, p. 115). His notion of "rule-following-behavior" is interwoven with the notion of
meaningful action in the manner Wittgenstein connected the concept of "rule" as used in

grammar or games with criteria of identity. Therefore, the investigator of a community

54

should study what underlies that "sameness" of meanings which allows for
communication between its members, and which explains why they hold the same
standards and why they do the same kind of things. The rule-following-behavior is
multifarious (from games, political thinking, musical composition, to the monastic style
of life) and depends upon the variety of roles that individuals may assume or reject within
a way of living.

Winch claims that in such social contexts it is difﬁcult to anticipate how one may
carry out an action. Unlike natural phenomena which are predictable, human events have
a fuzzy character because they involve choice between alternatives. For instance, a social
agent caught in the game of decision making, who, with understanding, performs X must
be capable of envisaging the possibility of not doing X. That means that understanding
something involves understanding its contrary too, and the logical requirement of
consistency or coherence must be taken with a grain of salt and loosened up for the
allusive situation of every day life.

For this challenge to the Cartesian notion of rationality, Winch is indebted to
Wittgenstein's analysis of linguistic behavior as following rules of a grammar. In this
respect, language use presupposes: I ) the possibility of making a mistake, and 2) the
conceptual impossibility of being mistaken most of the time. In fact, the condition of
consistency is not always observed and therefore rationality cannot be reduced to logical
understanding. As Winch says, "the forms in which rationality expresses itself in the
culture of a human society cannot be elucidated simply in terms of the logical coherence
of the rules according to which activities are carried out in that society" ("Understanding

a Primitive Society", in Rationality, 1970, p. 93-4).

55

Winch combines the early Wittgenstein's emphasis on the overlap between one's
language and one's world (when he insists that "the limits of my language are the limits of
my world") with the later Wittgenstein's holistic suggestion (Blue and Brown Books) that
understanding the meaning of a sentence means understanding a language. From here
Winch develops the idea that the inherent biases and limitations of understanding other
cultures are rooted in the employment of our language and in the way we live. Our minds
have been wired in the process of adopting the rules of the social game we are bound to
play in our society.

So far as this conclusion precludes any neutral middle ground between two
languages, it has an effect upon the methodology of social scientists in approaching other
societies. When an ethnographer leaves his home culture in an attempt to communicate
with an alien speaker, he cannot rely on the understanding of meanings or rationality
which is peculiar to his way of life. When one comes to the issue of the differences in
rationalities it make sense to ask, "whose rationality?" since "something can appear
rational to someone only in terms of his understanding of what is and what is not
rational" ("Understanding", p. 97). Thus Winch concludes that there is not a single
universal game of rationality with only one set of rules, but many kinds of rationalities
which may vary according to the cultural diversity of the forms of life. And since there is
no "norm of intelligibility in gener ", but many and varied forms" (Idea of Social
Science, p. 102), it is also important to clarify "what understanding" is at stake.25

For the above reasons, Winch dismisses the idea of a general understanding rooted
in a common humanity. Instead, he insists upon the radical difference between forms of

life and claims that the norms of rationality are not valid across the borders of a culture.

56

He seems to believe that making sense of an alien culture, which contains criteria of
rationality about beliefs and rules of actions incompatible and incommensurable with
ours, implies a task as impossible as jumping over our shadow. To do so, we would have
to divest ourselves of all prejudices and biases and suspend the criteria of rationality
which are inherently built into our interpretive scheme. That explains why in the radical
case of a complete break down communication between cultures, when the intelligibility
of alien people seems utterly impossible, the attribute of rationality applied to them is
rendered empty and meaningless.

In conclusion, by choosing to adopt through Wittgenstein's idea of multiple home-
languages, Winch is convinced that to understand a way of life is "to see the point of the
rules and conventions followed in the alien form of life" ("Understanding", 1964, p. 181).

In this respect, logic and statistics have little, if any, relevance in the account of cultures.
As he proceeds with this criticism, he concludes that the idea rationality presumably
wired in human mind as described by the philosophical tradition from Descartes to Frege
is just a nice ﬁction . The considerations discussed above Show that rationality cannot be
reduced to logical adequacy or to cognitivist aspects but also refers to the
incommensurable structures of values that makes sense of human life within of forms of
life.

We have noticed that on Winch's view our rational standards and interpretations
within given forms of life are as much reﬂections of our particular time and place as are
our customary modes of social behavior. In this case, it is relevant to ask: Can we
consistently understand somebody coming from another culture according to our own

expectations? And if we judge people different from us as being irrational, how are we to

57

decide what patterns of rationality have a genuine cross-cultural validity? Provided that
every culture is a form of life, judgements of people caught in one speciﬁc historical time
or in an idiosyncratic ethnic tradition must be interpreted with respect to the views they
Share and agree upon. It would not be permissible to judge their intellectual beliefs or
standards of behavior from the view of a tradition to which they do not belong.
Hence, the charge of irrationality prompted by the appearance of a ﬂagrant violation of
logical consistency proves to be nothing else than a misunderstanding of other cultural
behavior. Naturally, one may be misled by cultural biases or prejudices, but it is
reasonable to expect one being aware of committing a mistake and willing to make
necessary belief adjustments to eliminate it. Of course, to do so, one is required to be
aware whenever one goes wrong in interpretation and to identify the reasons for which
one fails to get the right explanations. We will see next why this is a very challenging
task.

2_.3) IRRATIONALITY OR MISUNDERSTANDING?

The above considerations lead us to the following question: how can one tell the
difference between irrationality and misunderstanding? In other words, when a social
researcher is struck by what appear to be irrational behavior, is he facing a defective or
incoherent mind, or, rather, is he caught in a misunderstanding caused by a faulty
interpretation? In this section I will explore Winch's answer to this question.

When Winch refers to the attribution of irrationality based on the apparent lack of
consistency, the classic example he has in mind is that of Evans-Pritchard's analysis of
Zande beliefs concerning the inheritance of witchcraft (in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic

Among the Azande, 1937). During an anthropological study of the Azande, Evans-

58
Pritchard discovered that they believed that witchcraft is an inherited skill, passed from

mother to daughter and from father to son. Given the common totemic origin of the tribe
that determined the structure of Zande kinship, and considering the frequency of Zande
attributions of witchcraft using the poison oracle, the logical conclusion would be that the
entire clan should be witches. Nonetheless, the Azande are not willing to accept this
conclusion. They reject it by urging "bastardy" in their support, but this is neither
evident, nor sufﬁciently extensive to constitute an alternative explanation. Nevertheless,
they see no problem in upholding the belief in witchcraft inheritance although Evans-
Pritchard himself tried to make that contradiction obvious to them. They seem to grasp
the sense of the argument that their judgment is inconsistent but persist in believing in the
inheritance of the witchcraft substance. Zande people remain recalcitrant to appropriate
adjustments in their beliefs even though they are brought to recognize that one cannot
assent to a sentence of the form p and not-p unless one’s thought coherence is lost.

Perhaps a more equal distribution of magic abilities among Zande would have
triggered changes in their society. Thus, one may assume that they were reluctant to
recognize the contradiction of their beliefs because they were not willing to accept the
inherent consequences which might have affected their world-order and would have,
produced an alteration of statuses and roles within the clan (wealth-repartition,
leadership, kinship, etc). It was easier to disregard the demands of logical consistency for
the sake of preserving the customary rules they followed in their daily life.

The anthropological observations made by Evans-Pritchard have been cited by
Winch in rethinking the idea of social science. He contends that we should not

characterize natives as "irrational" merely on the grounds that we ﬁnd them in

59

contradiction with our standards. Simply put, we can apply standards of logic within our
form of life but these are not cross-culturally valid. Natives must be judged on the basis
of accepted norms of reasonable behavior used in their own society, not on external
criteria of rationality they persist in disregarding. In particular, it is a mistake to judge
"an atheoretical culture" by the standards of a "theoretical" one. So it would be a proof of
misunderstanding to translate Zande practice into our patterns of thinking and demand
that it must respect the formal canon of "consistency".

In this way, Winch develops his idea of social science in the relativistic terms of
Wittgenstein's argument of identity between language and culture. Forms of life are
structured by linguistically articulated world-views and existential themes that store the
cultural knowledge and basic normative attitudes which shape the way linguistic
communities interpret their worlds. Each cultural framework sets up through its language
a relation to the world, what is taken to be real is inherent in a language system and
becomes a cultural category. Winch says,

What is real and what is unreal shows itself in the sense that language has... If

then we wish to understand the signiﬁcance of those concepts, we must examine

the use they actually do have - in the language ("Understanding", p. 82).

In short, Winch thinks that we should not characterize natives as "irrational" on
the grounds that we catch them in a contradiction with our standards and persist in doing
so. The standards of logic from our form of life are not cross-culturally valid and a Zande
should not be criticized for violating the rule of consistency that does not ﬁt into the
articulation of his own culture. Natives may be judged only on the basis of norms of
reasonable behavior current in their society.

The real challenge for the anthropologist is to emphasize how the native's social

60
and symbolic practices reﬂect the speciﬁc modes of identifying and distinguishing

activities that are ingredients of a language game incommensurable with our own. Winch
says, "our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in the language we
use", but we do not have a category that looks at all like the Zande perception of "magic"
or revelation of "witchcraft substance" ("Understanding", p.319). Those animistic ideas
are not at all like the conceptual devices of our methodological strategies aiming at the
articulation of a theory in terms of which to grasp a quasi-scientiﬁc knowledge of the
world. It is a mistake in principle to judge "an atheoretical culture" by the standards of a
"theoretical" one.26 To translate Zande practice into our patterns of thinking and to press
them it to follow to our formal canon of "consistency" would lead to misunderstanding.

If we were able to ﬁnd some cross-culturally valid criteria of rationality uniformly
applicable to different cultures, we could measure degrees of rationality on an objective
scale, and judge in certain cases that beliefs shared by other communities, like the
Azande, are more or less rational than the analogous counterparts in our belief system.
Alasdair MacIntyre (in "Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?" and
"The Idea of a Social Science" in Rationality, 1970) and Martin Hollis (in "The Social
Destruction of Reality" in Rationality and Relativism, 1982) endorse such a cross-cultural
rationality and ﬁnd no difficulty in applying it over the yawning gaps between different
cultural frameworks. Winch disagrees by arguing that the rules of rationality may be
shared by agents within a way of life, but vary from one community to another (as well as
patterns of behavior from overt verbal manifestations to moral commitment). He agrees
with Wittgenstein that what lies behind such cultural differences is the fact that

participants in other kinds of social practices are involved in different language games.

61

On this account, a culture, like a natural language, apart from satisfying some common
needs of speakers, gets shaped and grows within the context of the constraints of
particular historical inﬂuences or mentalities and under the determination of a distinct
geographic and economic environment. This implies that the grammatical peculiarities of
one language cannot be evaluated against each other, much in the same way as different
global ideals of living, criteria of successful or meaningful behavior and the moral norms
of justice or of the good and the evil, cannot be assessed or criticized by means of a inter-
cultural comparison. Insofar as such values are incommensurable, their comparison is not
only illegitimate but idle, and at most tells something about our preconception or
prejudices about other forms of life. The very recognition of cultural identity and
diversity of belief systems leads to the conclusion that people must be understood on the
basis of norms accepted as reasonable and current in their own society and they can be
meaningfully accused of irrationality only if they violate their own standards governing
the behavior and articulation of thought. Therefore the concept of rationality which
underlies one's capacity for understanding is applicable only within a cultural framework
and varies from one cultural framework to another.

For the foregoing reasons, Winch assumes that it is not only implausible, but false
that Zande natives may share something comparable with us. Western thinkers
sometimes interpret "the magic" of so-called primitive societies as a kind of proto-
technology, as an early and naive attempt to get control over nature (e. g. healing or
bringing the rain) by using religious means considerably less effective that scientiﬁcally-
informed techniques.” To the extent that such parallels can be drawn, ritual-symbolic

activities regularly suffer by comparison, and are even made to look irrational when

62

natives show a counterproductive resistance to more efﬁcient Western methods. In the
case described by Evans-Pritchard, the Azande stubbornly preserve their magic practices
by insulating them against empirical refutation, making logical or economical arguments
insufficient to erode their faith in supernatural powers.

Winch labels such a comparative procedure a mistake that exhibits a
misunderstanding rooted in the methodological procedure of imposing the image of our
culture on more “primitive” ones. (A classical example of privileging the inquirer’s
standpoint is Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough) Since the forms of life at stake are so
different, it would be wrong to evaluate them in the same way, by using the same criteria
and concepts. On this view, because incommensurable practices underlie a plurality of
standards of rationality, the ambitious project aiming at the grasping of trans-cultural
judgements would be at least implausible if not plain nonsense. Therefore, the
ethnographer's ascription of irrationality to Zande people is pointless because they live a
world and Speak a language different from what he is accustomed with.

In his study "Rationality" (in Rationality and Relativism, 1982), Charles Taylor
agrees with Winch's denial of trans-cultural applicability of the logical rule of consistency
to Azande. But he does not adopt Wittgenstein's explanation of incompatibilities rooted
in language-games incomparable to ours. Taylor declares that contradiction does not
matter here at all. He argues that the apparent "irrationality" would become more evident
if we could make a theoretical description of the peculiar nature of witches and witchcraft
within our conceptual scheme. But this is exactly what Winch claims that we cannot
reasonably do. The fact is that, beyond the pragmatic concern regarding how practices

and customs actually function in their own world, natives do not seem to be interested in

63
how things really are in terms of truth-conditions or in justifying what they say and

believe. They are not at all seeking for validation or conﬁrmability of their propositions
as we are. Were they to adopt such a broader epistemological perspective familiar to our
conceptual scheme, some of their central tenets would collapse (maybe from unavoidable
inner contradictions). But this would mean that they will end up accepting our goals of
the articulation of knowledge, and obviously they don't do this. So Winch may observe
against Taylor that by holding the implicit supposition of cultural reducibility we have
just fallen on the premises of the argument of linguistic convergence he already rejected.
He maintains that because of the incommensurability of norms imbedded in different
cultures there is no rational basis for choice or translability between them. Moreover, we
may not achieve an adequate account of inhabitants of a community foreign to us by
holding them accountable to rules they do not consent to. Thus, understanding the proper
nature of a given practice under study is possible only in its own terms, namely by
describing what appears as meaningful behavior to the bearers in the way the consent to.
The social scientist who aims to assimilate a pre-theoretical culture alien to our way of
life, like that of the Azande, falls into a methodological error which renders inaccessible
to him the speciﬁc character of the idiosyncratic style of rationalizing centered on ritualic
symbols and religious practices. The real challenge is to emphasize how native's speciﬁc
modes of identifying and distinguishing between their peculiar social activities provides
for their pattern of intelligibility which remains incommensurable with ours.

According to Winch, insofar as the Azande and the anthropologists share
contrasting forms of life and speak different languages, it is senseless to suppose that both

sides are starting from the same concept of rationality or reality. Consequently, the

64
anthropologist has no right to judge the belief in witchcraft and magic by the scientiﬁc

standards of Western culture because there is no common ground between linguistically
articulated world-views that are intricately interwoven with forms of life. They are
intelligible to themselves within their everyday lifeworld, and it is in this ordinary
framework that the members of a language community come to an understanding on
central themes of their private and public lives.

Language games are played by men who have lives to live - lives

involving a wide variety of different interests, which have all kinds of

different bearings on each other ("Understanding", in Rationality, p. 105).
Above all, rationality offers an insight into the fundamental issues of a way of life. It
implicitly tells something about the deep sense of existence in terms of death and
survival, love and hatred, solidarity and loneliness, innocence and guilt and therefore
cannot be reduced to the cognitivist tenet of adequacy of correspondence-truth. In
consequence, understanding bears on

different possibilities of making sense of human life, different ideas about the

possible importance that the carrying out of certain activities may take on for a

man, trying to contemplate the sense of his life as a whole ("Understanding", p.

106)

If one is totally immersed in one's home-language, the question arises how one
can ever escape from such a framework. It is often tacitly accepted that a social
investigator, an ethnographer, or a lexicographer, is supposed to be able to contrast and
evaluate divergent sets of meanings and belief-systems, and to have a grip of the
multiplicity of world-perspectives. Insofar as privileged access to a neutral state of mind
is in principle inconceivable, there is nothing to guarantee one's success in understanding

meanings of people coming from an alien culture and sharing religious customs and a

way of living incommensurable to one's own. The anthropologist himself cannot escape a

65

paradox which undermines the credibility of his ﬁndings. And, as we shall see in the next
section, this is not the only problem Winch has to solve.
2.4) A REJOINDER TO WINCH: LATENT RATIONALITY VERSUS
CONSISTENCY

In this section I will identify some difﬁculties with Winch's position. My
intention is neither to develop a detailed criticism of his conception nor address the
complex issue of the irrationality of the world but is to point to a signiﬁcant alternative
which is ignored by Winch when he addresses the problem of rationality and
understanding between people. My main goal is to indicate that things may be approached
from a different perspective which involves three possible undertakings.

a) First, I will argue against Winch that there is something we share in common
with the Azande. Ironically, the salient feature which crosses the border of cultures
seems to be holding contradictory and incoherent beliefs rather than the logical rule of
consistency. My goal is not to recount here the intricacies of Winch's claim but to point
to some conceptual difﬁculties presented by it. The point is this: Winch is right in
accusing Evans-Pritchard for mistaking Zande faith in magic with our theoretical
explanation for natural phenomena, but he is inclined to account for irrationality only in
terms of misunderstanding and this is inadequate. Whenever a social scientist is
surprised by an apparent absurdity coming from his research subjects, he should rather be
advised to review his empirical records, to doubt his competency, and to withhold his
judgment. For instance, one may raise the question whether we should keep quiet in
humility about primitive and bloody religions or any barbarian customs for the sake of

accepting difference. There is overwhehning evidence of unusually wild, evil, or simply

66

crazy behavior by people living in different times and places. Nobody is immune to such
descriptions. If we follow Thomas Kuhn, even scientists, who represent the model of
rational behavior in our culture, can proceed with their research in an irrational manner.
So even they make an exception. This shows that the problem of irrationality should
neither be discarded as illusory nor restricted to "aliens" who seem incomprehensible to
us. From here, the argument will lead in two directions.

b) I will then suggest an explanation for the conﬂicts between our deepest and
often tacit commitments, so deeply seated that they often go without saying. For doing so
I must go beyond Winch's conceptual solutions. First I Shall try to understand why people
are irrationally committed to conﬂicting beliefs by drawing from Habermas's distinction
between communicative action designed to reach understanding and strategic action
oriented toward success and efﬁciency. Then, I shall point to a kind of "latent rationality"
which explains why people can behave rationally, but which leaves room for their
sometimes being mistaken.

c) Third, I will show that a social scientist following Winch will unavoidably be
led to a paradox which makes understanding of other cultures unintelligible. The point is
that one cannot both deny in principle the possibility of understanding others and still
attempt to understand them.

Needless to say, it is not my purpose to make an extensive analysis of these
complex issues. I will present some general considerations which may be relevant for
showing why Winch's approach fails to be convincing insofar as it begs the question of
irrationality and misunderstanding. Let’s begin with a somewhat ironical observation.

a) When we scrutinize our own culture we may discover that the imputation of

67

inconsistency Evans-Pritchard made against the Azande can just as well be made against
Westerners. It is enough for recalling the ongoing irrationalities of our time to reﬂect on
the moral principles, which are, we are told, the hallmark of our civilization. Imagine the
smell of urine and terror from train cars transporting people to death camps or children
left alone thirsty and hungry in the ethnic wars, with nothing to expect from today and
frightened in the dark prospect of the future. If the memory of Nazi atrocities begins to
fade, more recent tragic developments in Bosnia or Rwanda can refresh the bitterness of
our twisted fate. Such grotesque happenings are not imputable to a Jungle tribe but to our
"civilized" world. We may remember the countless victims pushed and pulled by the
insatiable will for wealth and power of their masters. They are the "big brothers"
depicted by Orwell in his imaginary totalitarian society (1984), political leaders
demanding worship and unconditional compliance. If one does not succumb to moral
indifference toward undeserved suffering or surrender to cynical acceptance of injustice,
one should bring from the oblivion and honestly confront resentful contradictions of one's
own belief system. The schizophrenia that threatens the logical coherence of our own
western culture is clear from the many situations which involve inconsistent beliefs (e. g.
in the United States, the contradiction between liberal equalitarianism and the institution
of slavery and the persistence of racism, or the Vietnam era paradox of free-speech
guaranteed by the Constitution in contrast to stopping the spread of ideas which allegedly
pose a danger for the US. government). Whether these are examples of hypocrisy, short
sightedness, or plain failure of understanding is an open question.

Since real people do make casual mistakes of reasoning, can one legitimately

assume that the principles of logic are built in our minds and thus provide for the

68
rationality of our thoughts? The utopian hope of a perfectly organized world with some

ideally rational people is an expression of the anti-fallibilist reason, which supposedly
permeates the mind. As we have noticed, Wittgenstein and Winch argue that this is just a
logical ﬁction, which cannot be taken literally if we are to match the ﬂuent reality of the
life-world we are caught in. Their arguments make sense against the long held tradition
which identiﬁes rationality with logical form. On this view, when individuals fell into
error, either because of ignorance, stupidity or emotional distress, this just tells something
about a faulty application of a norm or about human psychological imperfections. Such
situations do not count as a proof that the logical principles are somewhat ﬂawed or
misleading so far.

Such an heroic attempt is illustrated by F rege: "If everything were in continuous
ﬂux, and nothing maintained itself ﬁxed for all time, there would no longer be any
possibility of getting to know about the world, and everything would be plunged into
confusion" (Toulmin, Human Understanding, p. 55). Without a certain foundation,
which must be kept insulated against irrationality, knowledge would become irremediably
vulnerable to skeptical attack and could plunge into indeﬁnite darkness and inﬁnite
regress. Then nothing could be said. All we have to do is to keep quiet. But Frege and
others did not give up. They made a sharp distinctions between prescriptive “laws of
thought” and our membership card to the club of rational beings, and the descriptive
“laws of thinking”, subjected to behavioral contingencies. The ﬁrst were proper concern
of logic, the latter were merely the factual and subjective business of cognitive
psychologists in the ﬁeld. Let's say one individual chooses by ignorance, silliness or

conscious intent to deny God, or fails the test of concrete multiplying procedure. These

69

are just historical and personal “gropings” irrelevant to the philosopher of rationalist
persuasion and they merely emphasize the potentially illogical character of individual
behaviors.

But Frege was later shocked by a discovery of an inescapable gap in the terms of
Russell's paradox that undermined the foundations of his formal system. Then, in the
30's, belief in the formal rationality typiﬁed by logic and mathematics was shaken by
Godel's incompleteness theorem regarding elementary arithmetic. Henceforth, the
possibility of contradictions could no longer be prevented. In the outcome, the anxiety
generated by the awareness that "irrationality" can’t be conclusively excluded erodes the
pursuit of ideal language and the hopes in a possible universal and conceptually clariﬁed
ground for understanding. In addition, insofar as God is dead, as Nietzsche emphatically
proclaims, it became senseless to appeal to the Divine Warrant, as modern philosophers
often did. The Nietzschean exultation has become again meaningful in a new light :"The
Night came upon the Falling Idols".

In the long mm, the surrender of the logical pattern of rationality may spell
additional trouble for the supposition of the identity of the rules of logic and the standards
of rationality as these are applicable to distinct modes of social life. In different contexts
as exempliﬁed by disciplinary communities of scientists or religious societies, particular
behavioral acts can be seemingly non-logical, and yet, they can count as rational within
the cultural context. Hence, in such cases the symmetry does not hold. Nevertheless,
whenever a violation of the inner rules of reasonable conduct occurs, the label of
"irrationality" is much stronger and intricately associated with "illogicality" than in the

above situations when symmetrical application supposedly fails. To substantiate this

70

latter claim, imagine the case of a scientiﬁc practitioner who unjustiﬁably refuses to obey
compelling experimental results or a religious believer who, when feeling a deep
frustration, is in an avenging mood and curses or shakes his ﬁst against God. These
examples point to capital sins against formal rationality. They describe how one's
behavior makes no sense and clashes with the framework of one's personal commitments.
Finally, such deep logical violations can have a ripple effect moving through all layers of
beliefs, and that may consequently put in question one's mental coherence and,
subsequently and the "normalcy" conditions that must be fulﬁlled by the mind. In
addition, had one admittedly accepted a guidance as the best way to adjust one’s
behavior, the refusal to comply with that guidance lead to the ﬁ'ustration of one's own
ends. And therefore one is at risk again of being a candidate for the accusation of
"irrationality".

However this last claim has been subjected to a legitimate criticism which cannot
be ignored. It has been observed that things are not as simple and clear as they are
described above and that the mere fact of having a certain end (E) and inconsistently
acting to preclude the most appropriate means (It/0 is not sufﬁcient for the conviction of
"irrationality". As Charles Taylor argues, the agent might not realize that the correct
description of his end was (E) or, more likely, that (M was the right choice of means to
reach that end. Irnplicitly, in such a case the agent either lacks the awareness that what he
was doing is incompatible with M and, thereby, he was frustrating his own goals or he
may be simply unwilling to acknowledge the contradiction imputable to him.

Long ago, skeptics raised these objections by arguing against any absolute culture-

free values like the ones represented by the criteria of rationality and logical inferences.

71

They rebelled against the arrogance of reason based upon logical principles that were
supposed to cross-culturally decide in matters of truth, identity and difference and
determine the judgements of correctness, rightness, and goodness. Insofar as their
arguments are tied to relativism they are justiﬁed to imply that the absolute knowledge
and infallible moral deliberation are nothing else than mere illusory projections of
purposes and expectations which can only make sense within the cultural boundaries of a
given community. Of course, if they were not just a subjective expression of a wishful
thinking rooted in self-deception and despair.

Wittgenstein and Winch agree with this line of thinking at a heavy cost: as the
light of reason is fading in the relativist darkness, understanding loses it way. The
skeptical denial of the universal validity of reason erodes the footholds of linguistic
bridges between cultures and renders dramatically implausible the understanding of other
forms of life. Unlike Frege, they admit that it is at least irrelevant, if not misleading, to
impose logical standards as the rules of rationality.

Wittgenstein's and Winch's critique of logical understanding undermines the
traditional credibility of the universal basis of rationality. Nevertheless, it seems to me
that their emphasis on cultural idiosyncrasies reﬂected by language leaves out an
argument which may be drawn from their perspective. The analogy between language
games and rule-following behavior implicitly refers to a possibility of committing a
mistake. People caught in different life-situations can simply follow or disregard the
standards of rational conduct in much the same way a speaker may abide or avoid the
criteria of meaningfulness when engaged in a language game. So we may anticipate one

observing a rule and doing x or disregarding that rule and not doing x, as one may choose

72

to act in a speciﬁc way or do the opposite. This tells about a possibility of a fallacious
thinking that leads to holding inconsistent beliefs and reveals a feature shared by us and
native people. It looks like that apparent irrationality crosses over the borders of cultural
frameworks. There are, of course, differences of degree as some people may appear more
reasonable than others. But one may claim that this is just a matter of empirical
psychology, since human thought is generally shaped by particular interests, wishes,
desires, and dreams which may conﬂict with the pursuit of truth or with purely moral
considerations of action. Therefore, it seems to me that, considering our own cultural
incoherence, the case of Zande self-contradictory behavior, which is described by Evans-
Pritchard and capitalized by Winch as an example of cultural idiosyncrasy, may not be an
isolated and particular situation. In this light, natives should not appear any less rational
than we are. Their frequently inconsistent beliefs should not be held to "ﬂy in the face" of
the ordinary rationality of our home language. It happens that humans may irrationally
hold some conﬂicting beliefs, prefer some commitments at the expense of others and
even could be able to justify on reasons even their most abominable and evil decisions.

In this respect, Evans-Pritchard, and other symbolic anthropologists (Leach, Turner,
Skorupski), and political scientists (Protho and Grigg, McClosky) emphasize the
underlying political and economical uses of the relevant beliefs. In particular, Evans-
Pritchard ﬁnds twenty two reasons to explain why the Azande failed to perceive the
"futility" of their magic. Among others, inconsistent beliefs are linked to limitations of
relevant information within that way of life, to the attempt to save by a refute-proof
procedure larger and more signiﬁcant subsets of the contradictory system of beliefs, or,

simply, to the support or legitimation of social and political institutions. (After all, Zande

73
idea of witchcraft substance, which triggers unequal distribution of tribal statuses, can be

associated with the notion of innate nobility, which played a role in the legitimization of
the status quo in the feudal layered society.) It is not a singular situation when people are
not willing to accept an equal share of a common heritage in order to insulate the beliefs
regarding their social hierarchy and to preclude a more democratic partition of wealth and
power. Despite the cultural particularities, perhaps, Zande resistance to acknowledge the
contradiction in which they are caught and which were made obvious to them by the
"outsider-anthropologist" can be also understood as a confusion in the face of the
unexpected and undesired consequences which may trigger the collapse of their world
order.

At this point, the question is whether scientists who establish the paradigm of
reasonable behavior for our culture, constitute an exception from the type of irrationality
so common to ordinary people. But, Thomas Kuhn Shows that scientists can often behave
irrationally in at least three ways.

First, timing the revolutions, they decline being bound by the methodological
norms of research and therefore they step outside the framework of rules which govern
the scientiﬁc game. When they are disoriented by a lack of certainty, they may proceed
in a counter-inductive way and become overwhelmed by a sense of personal
worthlessness or social despair. In such times of crisis, the theoretical and formal
reasons, which support the conservative views, count as weaker factors for scientiﬁc
choice than emotional grounds or irrationally held beliefs which determine the
abandoning the old paradigm of thought. If members of disciplinary communities who

are engaged in a kind of activity inherently rational could behave irrationally and

74

disregard evidence, shall we condemn members of a remote and peculiar tribe for doing
the same thing?

Secondly, Kuhn's analysis of the psychological dimension of the commitment to a
paradigm has shown that even beyond the conﬁnes of religion, it is easier to reveal
inconsistent beliefs than to change them (see The Structure of scientiﬁc Revolutions,
1962, esp. chap. 10). Our inability to change a belief, even if it is proven to be either
illogical or false in the light of the empirical evidence, has to do with our emotional
make-up and is in general a psychological matter. In this respect, Kuhn's scrutiny of the
psychology of scientists reveals their conspicuous tendency to pursue in an apparently
irrational or at least non-reﬂective way the pre-given paradigm according to which their
world is structured.

Third, Kuhn argues that the progress in science is not a matter of rational debate
but the result of an irrational fatality. He learns from Max Plank's dramatic description of
the dynamics of science that physicists do not give up their commitments and they prefer
to stubbornly resist to any revision which might be demanded by formal reasons or newly
discovered empirical evidence. According to Plank, the new world view wins the battle
not on the basis of scientiﬁc rationality, but because the advocates for traditional world-
view get older and inevitably die. Then, the new generations of young scientists, more
ﬂexible and open to the new kind of revolutionary arguments, ﬁll up the stage, replacing
the old generation which gradually passes away. Once the conservative view vanishes,
the new scientiﬁc spirit will ﬁnally prevail, until, in its turn, it will be swept away by a
future wave. Therefore, Kuhn shows that a tendency to unreﬂective dogmatism so

familiar to political ideologies, is also present in more objective and better conceptually

75
structured scientiﬁc ﬁelds.

In conclusion, on the basis of the foregoing considerations, we may argue that
whether imputations of irrationality can be treated as F rege did (as individual mistakes),
such apparent irrationality should not also count against the possibility cross-cultural
understanding, as Winch suggests. In fact, it is undeniably that different people can
usually exchange some common meanings in communication. When they don't, bad faith
or personal motives could play a more signiﬁcant role than cultural differences than
extreme intranslability.

b) One implication of the foregoing analysis is that imputation of irrationality is
caused by a conﬂict between pragmatic reasons for deciding what to believe and
intellectual reasons regarding the cognitive evidence for believing. Whereas the
pragmatic reasons imply accepting a statement only if the expected utility of doing so is
greater than that of not believing it, the intellectual reasons require rejecting any
statement that is less credible than some incompatible alternative. We remember the
Azande’s resistance to recognizing that they are caught in a contradiction and their
perseverance in holding the belief in magic responsible for their inconsistency.

I will develop this issue by anticipating an argument to be developed in chapter 6.

In many circumstances there may be a tacit conﬂict between an instrumental reason
aimed at efficient use of means to reach preestablished ends and a reasoning aimed at
rational consensus. In the ﬁrst case, people are strategically motivated by justiﬁcations
rooted in their own pragmatic interests of manipulation and control of other people. In
the latter, coherence becomes a condition for the comprehensibility of speech and action

is oriented to reaching understanding through linguistic communication. In this case

76
rationality applies to the procedure of discursive vindication of claims to validity (truth,

tightness and truthfulness) which tied up to argumentation.28 A cogent argument consists
of a problematic speech act for which a certain validity claim is put between brackets and
the reason through which the claim is to be established. In both cases there is an guide of
action, either the maximization of proﬁt for instrumental reason or the inference of rules
of the participation in discourse and logical or moral principle. In the case of the Azande,
for instance, this conﬂict can be understood perhaps by the prevalence of their
instrumental interest for preventing their social order from collapsing and preserving the
social status-quo at the expense of the discursive redemption of the validity claims. One
might doubt their honesty and sincerity in defending their bloody customs of opening
victims’ body to search for the blackish substance of witchcraft. Obviously, since only
after the murder they could check victim's intestines to look for what they took as the
signs of guilt, Evans Pritchard could have justly challenged the rightness of their practice.
The fact that they might have sacriﬁced a person, possibly innocent even according to
their standards is at least strange and their genuine ignorance or indifference in matters of
truth seeking is hard to defend. Such things provide for their shocking lack of meaning
transparency and make the their customs not only unacceptable but hardly intelligible.
And yet they may ﬁnd themselves satisﬁed with the grounds of their customary actions
impregnated by an instrumental rationality immanent to their form of life.

Therefore, we may conclude that the concept of understanding hinging on the
impunity of logical form may lead us to an implausible reconstruction of ourselves as
rational beings. In this light, our portraits are overly simpliﬁed as well as wrongly

idealized. Such considerations argue again for giving up a too ambitious notion reason

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and, instead, to look for a kind of weaker concept of rationality more suitable for grasping
the elusive and ﬂuent character of a way of life. Perhaps, we would then be more
accurate in our cultural self-praise and more successful in understanding why people from
other forms of life sometimes appear irrational to an outsider who does not understand the
complexity of the values that guide their decisions.

In a nutshell, I will introduce this conceptual innovation in contrast to the utopian
demands of formal rationality and I will refer to it as latent rationality. Although my
idea is vague and needs to be ﬁrrther elaborated, I use the notion of latent rationality in
contrast to formal rationality. By so doing I want to suggest that logical prerequisites may
be applied to human thought and behavior only if we take them "with a grain of salt". For
instance, if coherence and consistency are more properly loosened constraints upon the
mind, we could expect people to hold conﬂicting sets of beliefs and to act in
contradictory ways and still be rational. (In fact, to be mistaken makes sense only
provided that one can be correct as well). For this reason, I think it is relevant to replace
the utopian idea of a formal, actual and instant rationality of conceptual schemes and
logical understanding, with the weaker supposition of a latent rationality. It is latent
because it evolves as a potential background which works in time and does not strike
instantly (as Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, comes out ready made from Zeus's
head); in daily life it appears much slower and often remains tacit, hence less obviously
visible; it is more fallible than rationalists like Descartes and F rege tend to think, as well
as more ﬂexible and complex than the formal logic. Had this conception of latent
rationality been better elaborated in its details and intricacies, we would get to a more

clear understanding of the process of learning and interpretation of meanings.

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This is because, ﬁrst, in a dialectical way, to be irrational makes sense only
against the background of rationality. However, it seems to me that it is more appropriate
to contend that the rationality which underlies our behavior is latent (suggesting that it
evolves in time and remains often tacit and concealed rather than becoming instantly
obvious and visible). When implying that it is potential rather than actual we should
understand that one can be rational, even if sometimes one does not properly actualize
this capability and may act or think inconsistently. For instance, a religious believer is
not prevented by his faith from cursing. And yet, raising his ﬁst against God would be a
sin insofar as the religious way of life establishes the basic framework of guidelines for
what is normal or rational to do. It is obvious that one is seen as doing wrong only by
reference to the norms of reasonable behavior one fails to observe. To repent or ask for
mercy is to acknowledge committing a mistake by being led astray, and is usually
expressed by emotional distress and sorrow for disobeying the rules that must shape the
conduct in the most elementary life situation. Of course, one may not sin all the time or
being at case when doing evil things in much the same way people cannot be mistaken all
the time. What has been irremediably altered then? A world of sinners in which people
lost the will to believe is comparable with a world of liars where people give up the need
for truth. In both cases the rules of the game are changed.

Therefore, being regretful for doing something irrational is possible only against
the coordinate system of latent rationality which is backing up our actions. We may tell a
lie from time to time, but a compulsive liar becomes pathological case like ﬁghting with
God and will not be seen as a normal person by his fellows.

Secondly, by considering the background of latent rationality, instead of logical

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requirements it becomes more intelligible how a ripple effect may affect different tiers of
thoughts and commitments by avoiding subsequent possible changes which are not
socially or individually acceptable. Thus, in order to preserve inconsistent sets of beliefs
one may inaccurately present them as being obviously correct (as one "stacks the deck" of
cards cheating the partners in the game). In this respect, the idea of latent rationality
points to the habit of rationalizing or justifying even decisions bad or dangerous for
ourselves or for our community. In consequence, instead of discarding the problem of
apparent irrationality as an effect of a faulty understanding, we have to face it knowing
what is to be changed according to what is recognizable as a good reason in the light of
truth, tightness and sincerity. This provides the best available knowledge and the moral
principles we can use in our relation with the world.

Intuitively we may agree that when people see each other as enemies, the
background of latent rationality get even more concealed after the veil of fear and anger,
which replace conﬁdence between them. In such moments the bridges of communication
seem to be broken and people behave like religious fanatics driven by emotional distress
rather than by reason. For instance, in times of wars or social unrest the psychological
background is shattered, and the sympathetic or charitable inclinations are undercut by
nationalist hatred or the spirit of upheaval.

We have said already that the above considerations point in a non-systematic and
mostly intuitive way to a signiﬁcant Option ignored by Winch's discussion of the problem
of rationality and understanding. My purpose has not been to explore the complex issue
of the irrationality of the world, but to show an idea of rationality in everyday life that is

latent, tacit and potential rather than formal and actual. Better articulated, this alternative

80

may be more promising than the traditional reason of rationalist thinkers like Descartes
and F rege.

c) Now let's see how Winch pushes the social scientist who seeks to understand
other cultures into an unavoidable paradox. We have noticed that once we go on the path
of "custom and example" repudiated by Descartes, it seems that the interpretive
understanding of ethnographic studies of different cultures reveals the unintelligible blend
of languages from the mythical tower of Babel. The notebook of the ﬁeld investigator of
an alien community, if it does not simply record "gibberish", may bear testimony to the
way he reads his own provincial form of thought in the speech of his subjects. He may
wonder at the inscrutability of the native mind and merely raise questions about what
"symbolic utilities" could explain native behavior. The investigator can identify what is
responsible for communication and if this is partly derived from the rationality of cultural
framework or from the uniformity of speech dispositions which unites the members of a
language community. At the individual level he may explore to the private "mystique" or
personal "mythology" and inventiveness of his informants.

Winch argues that, given the impossibility of any neutral ground and the absence
of a kinship based upon a universally shared human nature, we have to determine whose
rationality and what understanding are in ill-conceived use. Of course, in Descartes's
eyes, an inquiry like this may seem strangely. Nonetheless, it becomes reasonable in our
time as the fragmentation of understanding on a broad spectrum of ethnic divides and
group interests pushes us as never before toward the slippery slope of relativism.

However, Winch's arguments over the conceptual difﬁculties encountered by the

notion of understanding lead to a paradox sometimes called the "research paradox", at

81

other times, the "anthropologist's paradox".29 If it's true that social scientists are

irremediably trapped in a system of beliefs they acquired in the process of education and
enculturation, then they lack access to commitments or meanings characteristic of a
different world. The fact of the matter is this: insofar as ﬁeld investigators accept that the
behavioral aspects of the population under study do not correspond to their linguistic and
intellectual abilities, they should not begin a research which is doomed to lead nowhere
since the subjects investigated are beyond their reach. Nevertheless, anthropologists
continue to accumulate evidence gathered through historical or ethnographic research to
support their arguments for the relativism. By doing so they fall on the two horns of a
dilemma they cannot escape. Either
(I) Winchian social scientists can be successful in understanding other cultures, in which
case the methodological claim that
(2) one cannot transcend one 's cultural heritage to grasp meanings remote ﬁom one ’s
own would be senseless;
or (I) is false and investigators, who are well instructed in Winchian social science, know
from the start that
(19 their ﬁeld-work is merely an idle undertaking condemned to fail in principle; but
since they are doing that anyway, this entails that
(2’) they are doomed to failure and therefore to act consistently, their research shouldn't
be done in the ﬁrst place.

From the opposite alternative, i.e. the perspective of a monistic rationality rooted
in the universality of logical reasoning, the paradox never arises. According to this

standpoint, there is only one way to go about the pursuit of knowledge, and by analogy,

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one single moral path. However, Winch thinks that, in the absence of a single rationality
for all contexts, such a perspective is neither defensible nor desirable. He argues for the
possibility of multiple rationalities, and opens the door to relativism. In this matter, we
have seen, Winch follows Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein knows that although one looks to
the world out-there from the single window of one's home language, there are more things
"behveen heaven and earth" than can be conveyed by philosophers' simplifying
categories. After learning this lesson (once taught by Hamlet), we shall no longer hide
the complexity of the world under the simplicity of some logical or grammatical ﬁction.

2.5) RATIONALITY AT A CROSS-ROADS AND THE RELEVANCE OF

TRAN SL_ATION
In order to know where we are in the argument and why I should turn to the issue

of translation, we must draw some provisional conclusions. In the light of foregoing
considerations, we arrive at a strategic cross-roads from which we are confronted with a
difﬁcult conceptual choice: either there are multiple rationalities and an absence of
communication across them, or there is a single rationality that succeeds in bridging up
dialogues among cultures and historic times. The ﬁrst has relativistic consequences, the
latter leads to a somewhat implausible and idealized notion of reason.

We have seen in this chapter that, in contrast with Descartes's substantive notion
of reason, Wittgenstein and Winch make a linguistic twist in the interpretation of
rationality. Consequently, the mind has been replaced as the "organizer" of reality by
language which structures the “sense contents” according to determined conceptual
schemes. If reason is universal, the difﬁculty of understanding never arises - that is, if all

minds are necessarily rational, linguistic meanings can be consistently used in different

83

languages. Hence, all language are conveying the same ideas and the problems with
translations never arise. Such a thesis was challenged by a skepticism coming from
anthropologists confronted in the ﬁeld with the eccentric and exotic behaviors of people
from remote cultures. They learned that what happens in other minds alien to us is hardly
intelligible and remains a matter of informed guesses rather than a simple extrapolation of
the rules of rationality from our Western civilization. Many times, at least in the early
fumbling stages of interpretation, social researchers are aided in their attempt at
translating alien utterances by lucky coincidences rather than by reason. Therefore from
this point on, we need to scrutinize the linguistic routes criss-crossing different ways of
life as the extensive issue of understanding appears intricately related to the problem of
translation.

In sum, in approaching the problem of understanding other societies in terms of
understanding a language, the question that arises is to what extent can we understand
persons belonging to different cultures and apply to them our criteria, rules and values
when they seem to behave irrationally. In this respect, I have presented elements of
Wittgenstein's theory on language games which are applied by Winch to a relativistic and
idiosyncratic reconstruction of rationality within different cultural frameworks. Here we
ﬁnd a new conception of social science which yields a study of relatively enclosed
linguistic worlds to which speciﬁc understandings of rationality are inherently relative.

If we accept Wittgenstein's and Winch's portrait of the plurality of rationalities,
the question becomes, is it possible to consistently pair sets of sentences from two
divergent languages? If a language represents the speciﬁc vehicle of cultural meanings,

the problem of understanding a cultural pattern raises the question of translability of that

84

language. Therefore, the answer to the above question requires the discussion of the
possibility of translation as a semantic mediation which insures the possibility of
understanding between contrasting forms of life. We have seen above that Winch and
Wittgenstein explain how the linguistic idiosyncrasies account for the potential
breakdown of communication between an ethnographer and his native subjects. What
we have found so far, is that the problem of irrationality interpreted as misunderstanding
rather than a defective mind is inherently related to the problem of possibility of the
linguistic bridge provided by translation that insure the match of meaning between
speakers of different languages. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if Winch is right, then
social scientists that follow his methodology cannot consistently understand an alien
custom or behavior since there is no common ground between their culture and the
culture they try to understand. In such a case, the scientiﬁc enterprise of describing
remote societies in anthropology and sociology remains senseless and the research
paradox is unavoidable.

In the next chapter I move on from where we were left by Winch. We shall notice
that following Quine's famous version of the response to the above question can lead to
an illuminating path. I will analyze how Quine contrives the case of radical translation,
which is somewhat artiﬁcially contrasting with real life cases that Show a relative
compatibility between speakers of different languages. Then I will approach the way he
introduces the concept of charity in connection with the issue at stake in this paper. That
means that the interpretation of foreign utterances raises the need for a supposition of
rationality to be consistent with our own. My discussion is intended to Show that this is a

very complex problem which cannot receive a simple solution.

Chapter 3) W. V. QUINE:
THE INDETERMINACY OF TRANSLATION AND

WORLD-INCOMMENSURABILITY

Quine's skeptical treatment of "radical translation" based .on his holistically
inspired attack on meaning has been particularly inﬂuential among analytic philosophers
of language. I will consider his view of translation only insofar as it ﬁts into the problem
of the dissertation regarding difﬁculties we encounter in understanding an alien behavior.

In addition, this discussion continues the topic of the previous chapter by following a
common thread between Winch and Quine. They both start constructing their theories
from the holistic premise suggested by Wittgenstein's dictum according to which
understanding the meaning of a sentence means understanding a language (see Blue and
Brown Books). They may agree, though for divergent reasons, that when an investigator
leaves his home-culture in the attempt to communicate with an alien speaker he cannot
rely on any neutral middle ground. The farther he goes from his customary framework
pushing forth his ethnographic study, there is less reasonable basis of comparison, or, as
Quine puts it, "less sense in saying what is good translation and what is bad (Word and
Object, [1960], 1964, p. 78)".

We will see that Quine's analysis leads on two paths. First, in trying to cross over
the linguistic bridge offered by radical translation, we will see why it is too weak to hold
a process of communication. In this respect, I will scrutinize the relativist implications
of Quinean "Gavagai"-"Rabbit" argument for the indeterminacy of translation. Quine is
more concerned with "outward uniformity" of behavioral dispositions imposed by society

when inculcating a language which presses for "smooth communication" (see The Pursuit

85

86
of Truth, [1990], 1992, p. 44). On his view, we may think of understanding as an

empirical matter of making associations between words and experience in terms of
relevance relations. In this respect, uniformity that unites us in communication within the
linguistic community bears upon "patterns overlying a chaotic subjective diversity of
connections" between environment and behavior (see Word and Object, p.8). Such social
regularities which shape verbal dispositions and may provide for an interpretation scheme
of a social practice representative both for community and for individuals within it.
Complex behavioral associations could explain with a good deal of linguistic uniformity
verbal dispositions to give assent or dissent to various sentences within a commrmity of
speakers. In this respect, Quine provides in Word and Object an inspired analogy:
"Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and
trained to take shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches
will fulﬁll the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward
results are alike (Word and Object, p. 8)." This parable suggests that communication
presupposes no similarity in nerve nets in a way comparable with "trimmed bushes",
which are similar in their outward form but different in their inward twigs and branches.

Second, I shall follow the suggestion made by Quine in the maxim of charity
which imposes a constraint to understand people's beliefs by "maximizing agreement",
what implies that we are bound to ﬁnd people rational. I will follow Quine's suggestion
to prefer a charitable reading which make exotic or strange behaviors appear more
plausible to us. This issue is particularly important for opening the possibility to rebuild
the rational bridges of communication severely damaged by the thesis of linguistic

incommensurability. Nevertheless, in what follows, we will discover that in a subtle way

87
relativism is rooted in the implicit hypothesis that "the Cartesian subject", that is, the

paradigm of any thinking self can construct the world. This aspect will prompt the
discussion in the next chapter. What follows here will be structured as follows.

In section 3.1 I will focus on how Quine explains the difﬁculties of translation and
suggests that linguistic divergence ﬁnally points to analytical hypotheses. The question is
do we have anything at hand to bridge meanings over the gap between cultures? Quine’s
answer may come to rest only on the "bundle" of stimulus meaning though he warns that
the adequacy of an ethnographic report on a tribal community is jeopardize by two
common tendencies. On the one side by having "merely muffed the best translation" and
on the other, for having "done a more thorough job of reading our own provincial modes
into the native's Speech" (Word and Object, p. 77). In this respect, I will turn to Quine's
semantic reasons for the thesis of indeterminacy of translation, an argument which posits
in an even deeper sense the problem of radical incommensurability of cultural worlds.

For instance, when one coming from our Western culture attempts to understand
an alien world, an interpretative scheme is made possible by a set of translation
hypotheses of the form "when the alien says A in his Alien language, one says E in
English". In general, such linguistic correlations help draw analogies between the
interrelated uses of utterances performed by two speakers of different languages.
Intuitively, we may assume that translation is a mapping between a source-language and a
target-language that preserve meanings, or as Churchland puts it, "semantic importance"
(The Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, 1979, p. 62). Therefore the aim of the
anthropologist is to ﬁnd a match between the native's idiom and his home-tongue to give

him access to the meaning used by his informant coming from another culture. If no

88

understanding would be possible, his scientiﬁc undertaking leads nowhere and is
obviously senseless. But Quine rejects such a possibility in the imagined case of radical
translation. In what follows I will examine his argument, though, as he himself
recognizes, it is not applicable to the regular practice of translation, since a chain of
bilingual mediators could usually be found "across the darkest archipelago" between
languages (Word and Object, p. 28). Then, in the second section of the chapter (3.2) I
will Show how Quine's argument of indeterminacy leads to an impasse and, more
recently, to a signiﬁcant shift of emphasis. The pragmatic criteria, like ﬂuency of
conversation, reveal Quine's attempt to reevaluate the efﬁciency of translation according
to the relative success of the linguistic negotiations with an alien community. In addition
Quine introduces the methodological idea of charity, as a binding maxim that requires
"maximizing agreement" in the process of understanding apparently exotic beliefs and
meanings. In this respect, Quine blames the researcher in the ﬁeld for coming up with an
observation of a blatant irrationality. Henceforth in this chapter the argument is
developed in two steps. First I examine how Quine's thesis of the "indeterminacy of
translation" point to the relativistic idea of "incommensurable worlds", then I will analyze
his idea of charity and its role in the process of understanding.

3.1) FROM THE INDETERMINACY OF TRANSLATION AND THE

INSCRUTABILITY OF REFERENCE TO THE BREAKDOWN OF

UNDERSTANDING
3.11) RADICAL TRANSLATION
The problem of making sense of an alien overt behavior is related to the issue of

understanding a different language. In this section I will present Quine’s famous analysis

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of radical translation (Word and Object, 1960, chapter 2), which supports arguments for

the breakdown of linguistic mediation between completely different speakers .

Quine discusses the case of an interpreter who is confronted by the verbal
behavior of hitherto unknown people and is unable to understand them. This poses the
problem of what Quine describes as "radical translation" which calls attention to the
inapplicability of our familiar meanings when we look for ways of equating "words" or
"phrases" from our own language with utterances of an unfamiliar speech. The procedure
of mapping out the expressions of the source-language and of the target-language requires
a double task. First, to notice the social regularity of assent and dissent that may be
elicited in the face of various stimuli. Second, to be aware that the non-observational
sentences (like the ones implying the likelihood of truth of statements about sensory
events) "face the tribunal of sense-experience not individually but only as a corporate
body" ("Two Dogrnas of Empiricism", in From a Logical Point of View, 1953, p. 41).
But in the early stage of interpretation all the evidence available for constructing a
translation scheme is behavioral evidence. Quine emphasizes that the ﬁrst steps of
understanding, through radical translation, of a hitherto "untouched" linguistic
community, begins with recognizable relations between sensory stimuli (for which Quine
uses sometimes the expression ”surface irritations” - see Word and Object, p. 22) and
verbal dispositions. One learns the ”talk of things” which is “not to be distinguished
from truth about the world “(Word and Object, p. 26) by being taught how to associate
words with words and other stimulations within a conceptual scheme. The relative social
regularity of patterns of "assent to" and "dissent from" some sentences are directly

coordinated and determined by various sense-irnpingements. Hence, the observational

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sentences are designed as linguistic representations of the sensory surface irritations.
Their "cognitive signiﬁcance" (urged by logical empiricism) is based on their association
with particular classes of stimuli. Therefore, insofar as linguistic meanings have to do
with how sentences relate to the world, in order to make sense of a native's speech act, all
a Quinean lexicographer can afford is to pair observational sentences of his home-
language with apparently equivalent observational sentences of the foreign language in
the way they are commonly associated with the same classes of stimuli. This is to
produce a mapping based upon a similar "empirical content" in such a manner that the
verbal dispositions of the two speakers to assent to or dissent from the paired sentences
coincides. If this is the proper aim for the anthropologist challenged by the understanding
of an alien culture, he still falls short of providing a correct translation. Quine's argument
is that the criterion of “empirical evidence” available to the investigator cannot serve as a
sufﬁcient ground for a uniquely correct translation, because linguistic meaning is
radically undetermined by the systematically ambiguous “dispositions” of its speakers.
On the one hand, the equivalence relation required by the pairing of sentences of the two
languages must be understood "holoprastically: "that is, as not telling one anything about
the similarity of internal structure and components of the equated sentences or about the
referents of whatever components there are" (Henderson, Interpretation and Explanation,
p. 17). On the other hand, in order to supplement this appealing but essentially
incomplete behaviorist description, Quine ﬁnds it necessary in the formulation of a
translation scheme to postulate a set of "analytic hypothesis" designed to explain the
syntactical constructions (Word and Object, sec. 15, pp. 68-72). He concedes that,

whereas the linguist has no access to native meanings apart ﬁom what he can glean from

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the observed circumstances or utterances, the analytical hypotheses which are subject not
to further checking provides the dictionary and grammar for his translation scheme. (see
Word and Object, p. 70, "Philosophical Progress in Language Theory", in
Metaphilosophy 1, pp. 2-19, 1970, pp. 14-15). In this respect Quine rejects that a deep
cause of the indeterminacy of translation would be that rival systems of analytical
hypotheses cannot conform to the totality of speech behavior and dispositions. They do
ﬁt, but dictate mutually incompatible translations of countless sentences unsusceptible of
independent control (Word and Object, p. 72). This is what Quine calls more recently, in
The Pursuit of Truth (1992), the serious and controversial "holophrastic thesis" which is
stronger than what be deﬁned as “inscrutability of reference”. In his own
characterization,

It declares for divergences that remain unreconciled even at the level of the whole

sentence, are compensated for only by divergences in the translations of other

whole sentences (Pursuit of Truth, p. 50).
The rules and criteria of a scheme of interpretation built in translation manuals can be set
up in divergent ways, "all compatible with the totality of Speech dispositions, yet
incompatible with one another" (Word and Object, p. 27). Consequently, he contends
that there is no possibility for either a translation manual that can capture the meaning of
one language in another in a single way, or for an ontology common to both the Alien
Language and English.

3.12) THE "GAVAGAI-RABBIT" EXAMPLE

Quine's famous example refers to a ﬁeld linguist's attempt to pair a source-

language sentence "Gavagai" with the one word English sentence "Rabbit". The linguist

is to infer the native's assent or dissent by checking various stimulatory situations such as

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when a rabbit scurries by, which prompts him to utter "Gavagai?". As Quine puts it,
"what he must do is to guess from observation and then see how well these guesses work"
(Word and Object, p 29). In this respect, the ﬁeld-investigator can narrow down his
guesses to the most acceptable alternatives by querying combinations of native occasion
sentences and "stimulus situations". Eventually, he notices that when his informant says
"Gavagai" this observational sentence corresponds (with a high degree of constancy) with
the ostension of the same stimulus meaning he can translate holophrastically in English as
'Lo, a rabbit'. On the basis of this rough perceptual sameness "which is close to what one
intuitively expects for synonymy" (Word and Object, p.41), he may attempt to equate the
two occasion sentences and make ordered pairs according to his translation scheme.
Nevertheless, Quine points out that although stimulus meaning that represents alien’s
total battery of actual dispositions is all the linguist can get to estimate the equivalent of
“Gavagai” with “Rabbit”, it still falls Short of establishing a synonymy relation because of
different ways the matter may be cut up. This means, it is possible to associate "gavagai"
with different sorts of things such as rabbit, undetached rabbit part, the mere appearance
of rabbit or rabbithood, in general. Therefore, he concludes that in this case translation is
not sufficient to ﬁx the reference of the term "gavagai" (see. PT, p. 51). Therefore, he
cannot pretend that his calibration of the two sentences is based on an identity. In his
recent comments on this issue, Quine emphasizes as never before that this kind of
ontological relativity is relative to a translation manual. To assume that 'gavagai' denotes
the same thing as the English term 'rabbit' is to prefer "a manual of translation in which
'gavagai' is translated as 'rabbit', instead of opting for any of the alternative manuals"

(Pursuit of Truth, p. 52).

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Thus, on his view, even if we assume that stimulation differences are not relevant
and we leap to the conclusion that the alien world and linguist's world are basically made
out of the same sense impingements, and the similarities in stimulus meanings may
prompt assent to a given utterance, their worlds remain unbridgeable because of the
inscrutability of reference. Despite the equivalence of prompted assent, an uncertainty is
unavoidable in the linguist's mind. Quine's contends he would not know how to solve his
semantic indecision between the four sorts of things even if he keep questioning his
informant: "Point to a rabbit and you have pointed to a stage of rabbit, to an integral part
of a rabbit, to a rabbit fusion, and to where rabbithood is manifested" (Word and Object,
pp. 52-3). When from the apparent sameness of stimulus meanings one is inclined to
equate "gavagai" with a "whole enduring rabbit", one illicitly takes for granted that the
native shares our conceptual scheme. But there is no possibility of either a translation
manual capable of univocally mapping the meaning of one language into another or of
proving an ontology common to both languages. The situation may be schematically
presented as follows: Translation manual M1 assigns to Alien word A English word E1,
manual M2 English word E2, and manual Mn English word En.

By contrast, the traditionalist view assumes that there is one word of the series
E1...En that uniquely matches the meaning of A. Therefore one may reject the other
sentences. Under the assumption of the inscrutability of reference Quine holds that it is
impossible to identify which English sentence matches A in meaning because there is no
fact of the matter out there and hence we can never tell what is the thing in the world
designated by the native's utterance. This aspect is criticized by Newton-Smith, among

others, as the relativist consequence of the "radical-meaning-variance" thesis according to

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which the linguistic meanings are essentially dependent upon, and hence vary with the
context, either theoretical or cultural, within which they occur (see "Relativism and the
Possibility of Interpretation", in Rationality and Relativism, p. 118).}0 There is no room
left for rational choice among a variety of semantic alternatives. We may ascribe
meanings to an alien description of the world, but we know that ascription is merely
arbitrary. The metaphor of making "the best bet in the horse race" as a parable of the
rational choice is no longer applicable, since the competitors are running on different
tracks. In fact, they are not challenging each other and go on divergent paths. Thus the
analogy is quite misleading.

3.13) THE CONSEQUENCE OF WORLD-INCOMMENSURABILITY

Given the "indeterminacy of translation", we can no longer attach sense to what

the natives say the world is. There are many different and equivalent ways of construing
their verbal behavior and they involve the ascription of different theories indetenninately
describing worlds that depend not on matters of fact but on the translation manual being
used. As far as there is a gap of meaning between our world and native's world, and there
is no rational way to say which translation manual is correct, we may conclude that these
two worlds are incommensurable. Henceforth, although others' worlds and ours may be
made out of the same sense impingements, beyond the sensory surfaces they remain
essentially unbridgeable at the level of linguistic interpretation because of the
inscrutability of reference. Such a conceptual connection is acknowledged by Quine's
latest version from The Pursuit of Truth of what he prefers now to call the "indeterminacy
of reference". He feels compelled to confess that it became ﬁnally clear to him that

ontological relativity is relative to the choice for one manual of translation or another (see

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Pursuit of Truth, pp. 50-2).

In consequence, Quine's thesis regarding the indeterminacy of translation implies
the radical relativist idea of "incommensurable worlds". He claims that there is no
translation capable of preserving the meanings accepted by some natives into a different
conceptual framework. When the idea of "radical translation" is later revisited in The
Pursuit of Truth, he adds:

This is not because the meanings of sentences are elusive or inscrutable; it

is because there is nothing to them, beyond what these ﬁrmbling

procedures can come up with. Nor is the hope of even of codifying these

procedures and then deﬁning what counts as translation by citing the

procedures; for the procedures involve weighing incommensurable values

(my emphasis, Pursuit of Truth, p. 47).

Consequently, it is problematic to apply across cultures the idea of rational
understanding familiar to Western culture. Quine's classic "Gavagai"-"Rabbit" example
implicitly supports such a conclusion. Although we may suppose that for a ﬁeld linguist
it is easier to count on senses in these matters and, that is, to rely upon stimulus meanings,
the linguist's disposition to equate the native's utterance "Gavagai" with our term rabbit is
arbitrary because the issue is "obj ectively indeterminate". Different interpretations which
can be associated with native's sentence ("rabbit", "undetached rabbit part", "rabbit-
stage", and "rabbithood") differ not only in meaning, they refer to different things. We do
not know how the native who says 'gavagai' cuts up the world. Therefore, despite the fact
that the two words have the same stimulus meaning and that the native and the linguist
grasp the same sense-impingements, a unique translation is not possible because there is
nothing in verbal behavior to guarantee it. Reference is inscrutable because of different

alternative possibilities of structuring our perceptual experience, which implies indeﬁnite

variation of translations of language to language.31

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Given the presence of a "realistically" perceived rabbit "facsimile" placed in the
bush, the question is whether on the basis of accurately reconstructed stimulus meaning,
the source-language users will assent to "Gavagai" as would English speakers. Quine’s
clear answer is “no”. It should be recognized that the perceptual basis of stimulus
meaning may at times be quite ill-conceived and even well-informed guesses can hardly
be a satisfying epistemic basis for understanding. The translator is aware that his scheme
of understanding the alien linguistic behavior is not completely determined by stimulus
meanings. Were he interested to pay attention to the charity maxim, he would interpret
alien utterances to maximize attributed truth and optimize the linguistic exchange in
conversation. However, in dealing with observational sentences, the translator seeks
primarily to identify and account for those stimulus meanings that allow for
understanding and explication of similarities and differences between the alien linguistic
community on the one side and his own linguistic community on the other. In this respect
his endeavor is mainly focused on pairing sentences according to stimulus meanings that
may roughly match or differ. Therefore, on Quine's View, the translator's procedure of
reconstructing the stimulus meaning from samples of behavior inescapably involves the
use of a more or less implicit theory of perception. We shall further see that the extreme
implications of the thesis of indeterminacy of translation would lead to the impasse of
truth. Quine is aware of this problem, and since he wants to preserve the pursuit of truth,
he will seek a solution by appealing to charity.

3.2) THE APPEAL TO CHARITY
Quine's relativism painted in behaviorist colors is particularly coherent and

persuasive. But his relativistic framework with its indeterminacy of translation based on

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Behaviorism implies giving up the concept of meaning. Furthermore, the thesis of
semantic “undetermination”, precludes the possibility of a realist construal of scientiﬁc
theories and therefore undermines the truth-searching of scientiﬁc theories. In addition
some critics (Harris, Churchland) have noticed that the thesis of the indeterminacy of
translation insofar as it can be itself emphasized as an explanatory hypothesis, has some
self-refuting consequences. Finally, Quine's theory of language is blamed for presumably
failing to account for the phenomena that anthropologists or sociologists actually discover
in their research and defend in their theoretical accounts. Their point of reference is the
diversity of beliefs, yet the thesis of indeterminacy says that the very idea of such
diversity does not make sense since understanding breaks down in the ﬁrst place. A
Quinean account would be that ﬁeld investigators have latched onto the ﬁrst translation
manual that was devised. But how could we say that beliefs are different since their are
not determinate? As a matter of fact one cannot even determine what these belief are
actually about.

Under the assumption of the inscrutability of reference Quine holds that it is
impossible to identify which English sentence matches the utterance of a native because
we never know which thing in the world is designated by the utterance (like one-word
phrase "Gavagai!"). The issue of rational choice among a variety of semantic alternatives
can never arise.

Furthermore, given the indeterminacy of translation we can no longer attach
sense to what the natives say the world is. We may ascribe meanings to native
description of the world, but we know that this ascription is arbitrary. There are many

different and equivalent alternatives of construing their discourse and these are different

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ways to ascribe perspectives in terms of mutually incompatible translations. Countless
sentences, which indeterminately denote things and thus describe worlds, depend on the
translation manual being used, not on the state of affairs.

Provided there is no unique bridge between our world and native's world, the
question is, can there be any meaningful way to say that they are rational people even if
we cannot pretend to understand what they do and say? Epistemologically speaking, we
may indeﬁnitely multiply translations, but there is no way to know which translation
manual is correct. Any intercultural correlation of words and phrases, and hence of
theories, will be just one among various empirically admissible correlations (whether it
suggested by "historical gradations" or "unaided analogies"). And Quine concludes that
there is nothing out there (in the world) for such a correlation to be right or wrong
about.32

Where are we at the end of this discussion? Quine's skeptical argument for radical
indetermination across languages exacts a heavy price. We have noticed that Quine
himself explains ontological relativity as depending on one's empirically uncontrollable
preference for one dictionary among possible others, each providing access to the world
by a different semantic route (Word and Object, pp. 68-79, Pursuit of Truth, pp.50-52).
Whether there is an out-there to be right or wrong about remains "inscrutable", and it is
rather obscured than clariﬁed by diverse manners of Speaking. The question that arises,
even if Quine himself does not seem to be bothered by it, is how could one know
anything about the diversity of many cultures which populate the world and about their
communication?

I will next consider some undesirable consequences of Quine's view, which might

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have a puzzling ripple effects over the issue of understanding a verbal behavior.
3_._21) THREE OBJECTIONS TO QUINE'S THESIS OF INDETERMINACY OF
TRANSLATION

In what follows, I will suggest three lines of criticism against the claim on which
Quine bases his relativistic rejection of linguistic mediation between people from
remotely different cultures. Perhaps, Quine himself had in mind such critical arguments
when he later revisited his main tenets and adopted what appears to be a considerably
weakened version.

I) First, the indeterminacy of translation leads to the abandonment of meaning and
therefore undermines an anthropologist's or a sociologist's attempt to understand other
communities. One could not know what accounts of the relationship between language
users and their world would be more appropriate or how to explain properly the relative
similarity of the perceptual judgements and the possibility of social agreement over
linguistic borders.33 If the aim of social research is to discover the diversity of beliefs, the
thesis of indeterminacy says that the very idea of diversity of beliefs does not make sense.

How could one say that beliefs are different? Since they are not determinate, one cannot
know what these beliefs are actually about. The fact of the matter is that scientists'
linguistic investigation of other cultural practices is according to Quine under an
"empirical unconditioned variation". Of course, one can make some well-inforrned
guesses, but this situation "invites, however, the charge of meaninglessness". Two ﬁeld
linguists might share in common dispositions to verbal behavior in all imaginable sensory
stimulations, but "the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and

identically sounded utterances could diverge radically" (Word and Object, p. 26). These

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considerations give good reason to expect that their research attempts to make sense of
"incommensurable values" built in Jungle beliefs will not yield the same translation
manuals. The thesis of the indeterminacy of translation implies that: "Their manuals
might be indistinguishable in terms of any native behavior that they give reason to expect,
and yet each manual might prescribe some translations that the other reject" (Pursuit of
Truth, p.48).

An investigator, who proceeds in a more charitable way by assuming that alien
behavior is basically rational, may concede that native assumptions which appear
startlingly false are "likely to turn on hidden differences of language" (Word and Object,
p. 59). In this light it becomes obvious that some explanations which charge natives with
strange, absurd or exotic behaviors are likely to be false and hence ill-suited. The more a
scientist realizes this, the more he ﬁnds evidence that his interpretation scheme used to
make sense of his informants' speech has led him astray. He can only reconstruct the
collection of matching sets of stimulus meanings, and this may be a basis for pairing
sentences of a source language with sentences of a target language. But what can an
anthropologist do when he learns from Quine that there is nothing, no objective matter
out there to be right or wrong about" and he is aware that his "good guesses" about alien
behavior are essentially indeterminate?

This question may be pursued in two directions, following Quine's interpretation.
The ﬁrst may be described as skeptical awareness: social scientist must recognize that the
ground for his translation is unstable and he must become aware that he has reached the
inscrutable limit of our knowledge. One may then come to think that the scientiﬁc

"output" would be "no better than whistling in the dark".34 Such a bitter and

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disappointing judgement could affect the motivation of any cognitive endeavor (at least

for natural languages) and therefore applies to Quine's theoretical effort as well. As
epistemological aspects are of little concern here, I will not develop this considerations.

A second direction made possible by Quine's more recent arguments is more
constructive and requires more careful attention. It can be drawn from a shift of emphasis
from the skeptical attitude hinging on the operationally basic notions of semantics (like
distinct or synonymous meaning) to pragmatic considerations regarding chances of a
successful communication. It seems obvious to me that Quine is inclined in his later
work to adopt a weaker standpoint as he stresses the ﬂexibility of knowledge of a
language and the process of understanding through conversation rather than on the
rigorous semantic rules regarding the likeness of meaning. To substantiate this claim I
will have to look comparatively to Word an Object (1960) and The Pursuit of Truth
(1990) and to measure the conceptual distance between these two stages in the
development of Quine's thinking. If initially be attacks indirect quotation as the
misleading idiom of propositional attitude, in his more recent works he seems to treat the
issue of intentional insights into one's mind with more tolerance. He even argues that his
investigator "imagines himself in the native's situation as best he can", and claims that
"empathy" sustains all the way the radical translation (Pursuit of Truth, p. 46).

Earlier, in "The Double Standard" (Word and Object, sec. 45), Quine is interested
in the issue of indirect quotation so far as it has evident afﬁnities with the problem of
translation. He distinguishes between direct quotation, which merely reports an empirical
fact and leaves possible implications to us, and indirect quotation, which is projection of

our own wishes and beliefs in the reading of other's speech. If the ﬁrst fulﬁlls the

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demand for objectivity of the scientiﬁc spirit, the latter express a propositional attitude
which is about wishes and beliefs. A translator's interpretation may "feign" native's state
of mind in the subjective and falsifying light of what seems natural and relevant to
himself. Eventually, the social investigator may go on and superimpose his own
expectations over the subjects and speculate as he pleases upon the causes and intentions
of their utterances. However, Quine calls attention to the fact that we must “switch
muses" that beguile our representation and that "the essentially dramatic idiom of
propositional attitude will ﬁnd no place" in any scientiﬁc description (Word and Object,
p. 219). The interpretation of overt verbal behavior in the terms of indirect quotation is
altered by the descriptions made with the help of irreducible intentional idioms which
amount to the indeterminacy of translation (see Word and Object, p. 221). For this
reason, Quine recommends we use the direct quotation in order to provide an information
reliable and up to the standards of scientiﬁc knowledge. It is clear what sorts of
difﬁculties he is concemed with when we remember his "Gavagai"-"Rabbit" argument:
one reason why the ﬁeld linguist cannot meaningfully equate the two different words as
responses to rabbit is that assent to these sentences may be prompted only by the assumed
presence of a rabbit; that is, believing that a rabbit is there, and, of course, this brings
about intentionality. As Quine thinks that the appeal to beliefs creates difﬁculties and
confusions, he prefers to equate the two sentences on the basis of irritations of sensory
surfaces. What's wrong in principle with the idiom of propositional attitudes puts on the
same foot Brentano's thesis of the irreducibility of the intentional idiom and the thesis of
indeterminacy of translation. Quine infers that "the relativity to non-unique systems of

analytical hypotheses invest not only translational synonymy but intentional notions

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generally" (Word and Object, p. 221). Thus, translation as an interlinguistic mapping is

essentially indeterminate relative to the totality of speech dispositions. Therefore, Quine's
conclusion is that a scientist can keep his window open to truth or the ultimate structure
of reality only by using "the austere scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation
and no propositional attitudes." (Word and Object, p. 221). Consequently, to think that
understanding can rely on "vernacular of semantics and intentions", would yield little
scientiﬁc insight.

Thirty years later, in The Pursuit of Truth, Quine considerably weakens the
methodological demands assumed in "The Double Standard" and reevaluates the policy
that governs translation procedures at the observational level and beyond. Insofar as there
is no evidence to prove the opposite, it seems reasonable to him to presume that native
minds are pretty much like our own. Henceforth the possibility of translation will depend
on psychological conjectures regarding what the native is likely to believe according to
our expectations. This represents a methodological change since his initial attack on the
idiom of intentionality. Quine concedes now that "practical psychology is what sustains
our radical translator all along the way, and the method of his psychology is empathy: he
imagines himself in the native's Situation as best as he can" (Pursuit of Truth, p. 46). The
ﬁeld linguist is supposed to conceive and revise a manual of translation according to how
effective is it in insuring a ﬂuent or smooth dialogue between him and the native
informant. A constant failure of communication would be explained by the inadequacy of
the translation manual. Quine hopes to improve the interpreter's chances of successful
conversation on the basis of an appropriate understanding of the speaker's expressions.

Henceforth Quine is more interested in how a lexicographer could design and use a

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pioneer manual of translation as an aid to linguistic negotiation with the alien community.
The understanding of his native informant is now judged in terms of "smoothness of
conversation", "predictability of his verbal or non-verbal reactions to observable
circumstances and by coherence and plausibility of his testimony". He admits that,

Observation sentences continue to be the entering wedge for child and ﬁeld

linguist, and they continue to command the ﬁrmest agreement between rival

manuals of translation; but their distinct factuality is blurred now by the disavowal
of shared stimulus meaning. What is utterly factual is just ﬂuency of conversation
and the effectiveness of negotiation that one or another manual of translation

serves to induce (Pursuit of Truth, p. 43).

Quine reafﬁrms a point of view consistent in his old behavioral and pragrnatist
commitments from The Two Dogmas, though he seems to switch the emphasis from
semantic notions like synonymy to the understanding of expressions. He explains that in
understanding language there is a subtle interplay between word and sentence (Pursuit of
Truth, p. 58-9). The proof of one's understanding a word consists in one's correct usage
of the word in sentential contexts and one's appropriate reaction to such sentential
contexts. For this reason Quine assumes that the sentence is fundamental. However, he
maintains that we cannot test whether one understands a sentence except by observing the
use of a word in a multiplicity of sentences. For instance, if evidence satisfactorily
reveals that an informant constantly misunderstands a word over "ringing changes on its
sentential contexts", we are justiﬁed to hold this misunderstanding accountable for his
odd response to a sentence, and to exclude claims about the informant holding strange
beliefs or opinions.

Let's return to the question which prompted this comparison of Quine's two

theoretical stages. Didn't he warn the ethnographic researcher that there is nothing, no

objective matter out-there "to be right or wrong about" and, that guesses about the

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meaning of an alien behavior are indeterminate in principle?

From the perspective of Quine's view in Word and Object, we can infer that there
is nothing that can be done to achieve understanding, since the thesis of inscrutability sets
the limit of our knowledge. But this skeptical basis for denouncing such theoretical
illusions is eclipsed later by Quine's appeal to a charitable treatment of translation. I will
return to this point in the next two sections. For now, I will sum up my survey by
observing that Quine removes from the lexicographer's job a search for analytical
distinctions like synonymy and even epistemological demarcations between
understanding and misunderstanding. Though the investigator may need such
clariﬁcations, he knows he can’t have them. In pursuing the aim to improve the
understanding of expressions, the best one can do is to look for a gradual adjustment of
one’s own verbal behavior "to that of community as a whole, or of some preferred quarter
of it" (Pursuit of Truth, p.59). The modesty and vagueness of this task, which focuses on
the ﬂuency and the effectiveness of dialog, reveal the distance traveled by Quine since
Word and Object.

2) The second set of objections to Quine's skeptical treatment of understanding
have been suggested by critics like Paul Churchland who denies that the available
empirical constraints on translation are "as minimal, or as maximal" as Quine's
conception claims (Scientific Realism, p.64).

I agree with Churchland that, guided by ordinary practice of translation, we can
imagine a pair of languages across which translation is unproblematic. In this way
Churchland imagines a pair of linguistic communities across which the translation is

unproblematic and "homophonic", wherein corresponding words have the same sounds

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(though might be different in spelling, origin or meaning), but where the alien

observational sentences lack translational analogues in the correlative set in the home
language. For instance, we may contrive cases where people of an alien community (as
Quine exempliﬁed in Word and Object, sec. 4) may succeed in making a systematic Shift
in their conceptual and perceptual habits. In such a case, according to Quine's
conception, the similarities in stimulus meaning should be reﬂected in the two linguistic
registers in equivalent set of observational sentences. Churchland Shows that this
perceptual identity which compel speakers' assent and dissent is not always as clear as
Quine claims. He recalls the pairing of observational sentences from our home-language
with highly theoretical sentences of a community which purged itself of ordinary
observational terms and learned to Speak, think and observe by using vocabulary of a
physical theory. The observational terms like "red" and "hot" would be equated with the
non-observational analogues "the reﬂection of electro-magnetic waves at 0.63 um" and
i.e. with "high mean molecular kinetic energy" (Scientiﬁc Realism, pp. 64-5).

If Quine never questions the sameness of stimulus meanings, instead, he
challenges the illusion that diverse intertranslatable sentences may appear as "verbal
embodiments" of some cross-cultural meanings. However, he agrees that either linguistic
"containmen " (Quine's own word, e.g. the inclusion of Frisian in Low German) or
historic "containment in a continuum of cultural evolution" (e. g Hungarian or Romanian)
may facilitate a translation in English (see Word and Object, p. 76). But Quine's
emphasis on "intracultural verbalism" here is inappropriate. It seems to me that what
allows for inter-translability of modern languages from Romanian to English for example,

is just the ability to express the same background knowledge incorporated in language

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rather than grammatical similarities. For instance, the existence of an adequate scientiﬁc
vocabulary which is used much in the same way in different languages shows that
meanings of scientiﬁc terms are relatively preserved across linguistic and cultural divide
(e. g. Hydrogen atom, planet, integer, etc). In this respect, a modern language like
Romanian, though it has a syntax and morphology different from English (e.g "double
negation) may correspond to English better than ancient tongues like Frisian, which may
be grammatically closer to English (being historically incorporated to English through
low German), but have no linguistic counterparts to express in equivalent ways most of
the scientiﬁc, technologic and intellectual achievements of our age.

To make an even stronger counter-argument to Quine thesis, we can draw on
Churchland's discussion of speakers from another world called Alpha, who have radically
different sense organs and cannot share the same stimulus meaning with us.
Nevertheless, translation is still “homophonic” and could go smoothly in ordinary sense.
For example, consider extraterrestrial aliens who speak "scientiﬁc English" whose
observational subset mirrors different aspects of reality revealed by their alien sensory
equipment (magnetometer hands, gaschromatographic skin, electron microscopic eyes,
radar cars, etc). Here it is the highly theoretical sentences of English that are "calibrated"
(Churchland's own word) with the Alpha observational sentences, though there is no
match between their stimulus meaning and our familiar impressions on sensory-surfaces.
This case shows that Quine's constraints on interpretation and understanding are not
merely inapplicable; it shows that his translation scheme is ill-conceived, insofar as he
stresses the preservation of observationalin (in much the same way a logical empiricist

insists on empirical significance).

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3) Finally, the third set of objections makes Quinean world-incommensurability
subject to an argument which targets relativism in general. It can be stated as follows: if
rationality is dependent upon the context, and if the breakdown of communication
appears as an unavoidable consequence, then Quinean ontological relativism falls on the
three horns of the so called "the Munchausen Trilemma": 1) inﬁnite regress; 2) logical
circularity or self-referentiality ( of beliefs-reasons, beliefs-acts, habits-acts, etc); 3)
ungrounded breaking off of the process of giving reasons. Is there any way of breaking
up the vicious circularity which seems unavoidable for any relativist standpoint? I will
further address these issues.

Rudolf Carnap in "Empiricism, Semantics, and Epistemology" (in The Linguistic
T urn, 1967) offers a solution by distinguishing between internal questions "concerning
the existence of certain entities within the framewor ", and external questions
"concerning the existence or reality of the system of entities as a whole" ("Empiricism", p
73). The ﬁrst are scientiﬁc problems which become routine and are empirical, being
decidable according to the internal nrles of the linguistic framework. The latter are
philosophical and pragmatic problems like the rational choice between theories and are
treated as pseudo-problems.

Quine rejects such methodological boundaries together with the logical-empiricist
reduction of science to the ground of immediate experience. On his view, all questions
are internal and, consequently, philosophy collapses into empirical science (because it
involves the translation of one theory into another). On the one hand, in the spirit of the
ontological relativity, there is no fact of the matter and therefore no empirical ground for

choosing between two competing ontologies. On the other hand, epistemology is

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naturalized and seen as a part of psychology; rational decision between theories or

language rests on pragmatic grounds. So Quine thinks that once the problem of
justiﬁcation or validation of knowledge is treated as an internal question, the old threat of
"illegitimate" circularity is no longer a problem because issue of deducing science from
empirical data has been given up. If Peter Winch would replace epistemology with
sociology, as we have noticed in the previous chapter, Quine is ready to reduce
epistemology to psychology.

After paying this price, does Quine succeed in avoiding the trilemma? I will
Shortly answer without presenting in detail the main objections to his relativism made by
critics (for example, Stroud, Harris, and Putnam). First, by making the validation of
scientiﬁc claims an internal problem of psychology, Quine must use a "bootstrap
method", which does not solve but postpones the old epistemological circularity: the
warrant for empirical psychology must derive from within psychology. Second, does he
successfully introduce a primitive background theory to prevent an inﬁnite regress of
language? Critics target the merits of such "background theory according to which one
may determine the truth of a theory in terms of its translation into another" (James F.
Harris, Against Relativism, 1992, p. 48), and they impute to Quine an ad-hoc strategy and
accuse him of begging the question. Third, as we remember the analogy of the horse
race, ontological relativity makes the best "bet" impossible and Quine could no longer
treat the choice between theories or linguistic frameworks as a rational one.

Since my focus remains on cross-cultural understanding and communication, I
will not pursue the problems of ontologic relativity and naturalized epistemology. The

problem which deserves an answer is whether Quine is ready to throw out the baby, the

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logic and observationality, with the relativist bath water. If we address this the question
in other words, it becomes: how can we justify saying that two or more translations or
interpretations are different? This implies that they are recognizably so and that implies
that one interpretation contrasts with another or excludes another. Such a conﬂict can be
intelligible only by assuming the cross-cultural character of logical relationships of
identity and contradiction or of some ontologic criteria of sameness and difference. In
this respect, James Harris argues that "the logical conﬂict can occur only relative to a
background theory which contains the analytic-synthetic distinction and semantic rules "
(Against Relativism, p.50). Obviously, Quine's theory of ontological relativity can be
intelligible only if logic escapes from the relativist framework. Therefore a question
Quine must answer is whether the sense of "logic" vanish in the insurmountable gap
determined by radical breakdown of communication between idiosyncratic
incommensurable linguistic schemes. When Quine seems to endorse Neurath's analogy
(Word and Object, pp. 3-4) of mariners on the open sea who can rebuild their boat plank
by plank while managing to stay aﬂoat, does he take logic on board together with the
whole corpus of knowledge?

}_.2_2) "SA VF THE OBVIOUS!"

One may notice that Quine's thesis of radical translation is tied up to our linguistic
framework within which it is formulated, and thus it loses its signiﬁcance outside the
borders of this linguistic framework. Thus the outcome of the self-referentiality of
Quine's thesis of indeterminacy of translation makes his conceptual view relative to his
home-language and therefore it can not make sense for people who speak languages

completely different from ours. Quine’s view refers in principle to any language and

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hence it should be seen as cross-culturally truthful and acceptable. He also preserves the

validity of logic as the core of rationality in contrast to the cultural peculiarities of
meanings. When Malinowski imputes "pre-logicality" to his islanders by varying the
translation of their utterances in order to sidestep contradictions, and Winch justiﬁes the
Zande's inconsistencies in terms of cultural idiosyncrasies, Quine claims that it would be
absurd to accept as true certain sentences translatable in the form p and non-p.
Anthropologists can make natives sound as queer as they please, but, he concludes:
"Better translation imposes our logic upon them, and would beg the question of pre-
logicality if there were a question to beg" (Word and Object, p 58). This suggests that
appropriate translation elicits that coherence and consistency are cross-culturally valid
and hence understanding other people should make obvious that they are bound by logical
rules no less than we are.

AS we have seen, Winch is ready to abandon the invariance of logical norms in
order to make our understanding more ﬂexible and to push the notion of rationality
towards relativism. Quine is a different story. Unlike Winch, who emphasizes cultural
idiosyncrasies of different forms of life, Quine is committed to save from relativism the
universally compelling force of the kind of knowledge which crosses over cultural and
linguistic divides. He sounds like the desperate captain of a sinking ship: "Save the
obvious!" What is to be saved from the wreckage? Two things: First, simple logical
particles (particularly the truth functions like negation, or conjunction or alternation).
Quine believes that the occurrence of a contradictory utterance is evidence that something
important has been lost in translation rather than an indication of apparent irrationality.

Second, Quine further has in mind equivalent observation sentences, which can be paired

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across languages on the bridge of the sameness of stimulus meaning. He explicitly
admonishes in "Epistemology Naturalized" (in Naturalizing Epistemology, 1987, p. 27)
the attempt to "accentuate cultural relativism" by discrediting the idea of observation, and
even describes observation sentences both as "repository of evidence for scientiﬁc
hypotheses" and "absolute" ground for community agreement. He says,

Now this canon - 'Save the obvious' - is sufﬁcient to settle, in point of truth-value

anyway, our translation of some of the sentences in just about every little branch of

discourse: for some of them are pretty obvious outright (like '1+1=2') or obvious in

particular circumstances (like 'It is raining') (Philosophy of Logic, 1986, p.82).

On this basis one could offer a ground for a rough translation. On the one hand,
truth functions are considered as necessary conditions for reaching agreement in the
construction of a translation scheme. Their treatment is more fundamentally charitable
since it would be nonsense to understand some speakers as being collectively mistaken
about their own truth functional constructions or to treat them as suffering from a chronic
logical incompetence. On the other hand, according to Quine's empiricist credo,
meaning is gleaned from overt behavior in observable circumstances. In this respect,
Quine's notion of translation is also geared to a behavioral sense: what counts as an
obvious sentence to a community refers to high frequency of dispositions of the majority
of speakers to assent to it. Of course, a language community has no other choice but to
resort to observation sentences, which wear their empirical content "on their sleeves" to
anchor their beliefs. And yet, speakers' utterances may be connected to the sense
impingements in subjective ways which vary from one to another. Quine emphasizes that
high variability by saying: "One man's observation is another man's closed book or ﬂight

of fancy". To arrive at a more objective ground, the best one can do is to survey "all

speakers of a language, or most" ("Epistemology Naturalized", p 27).

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We should not have illusions. We know now that we can get as much stability as
Neurath's boat can afford on restless waves. That is why Quine recommends that we
approach translation in a charitable way. Quine urges us to save what seems obvious for
the linguistic communities. By doing so, as Donald Davidson remarks "we make
maximum sense of the world of thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that
optimizes agreement..." (see "On the Very Idea of Conceptual Scheme", "Thought and
Talk", Belief and the Basis of Meaning", in Inquiries on truth and Interpretations, 1984).

Therefore charity is to be a favored alternative to linguistic idiosyncrasy bound to world-
incommensurability.
3.23) CHARITY MAXIM AND PSYCHOLOGICAL GUESSES

Yet, what does it mean to superimpose cross-linguistically the constraints of a
translation scheme and to map home language sentences and alien language sentences,
when each set of sentences may receive a quasi-general but diverging assents in the two
communities? Quine's reply elicits a charitable minimal rationality that can be described
in terms of a common sense psychological background which makes translation credible.

He remarks, "the common sense behind the maxim is that one's interlocutor's silliness
beyond a certain point, is less likely than bad translation - or linguistic divergence" (Word
and Object, p.59). This argument from charity says that if one's interlocutor's speech is
too silly or is strikingly wrong about some matter, this is likely to turn on hidden
differences of language. Therefore, a bad translation should be suspected for conveying
assertions which appear startlingly false rather than doubting the intellectual competence
of the native speakers. In a strong sense charity is to be understood as a minimal

rationality, in a weaker sense is a methodological maxim designed to preclude

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misunderstandings in the beginning of research when linguistic interpretations are just
based on psychological conjectures. Quine recommends charity for the earlier stages of
translation when there is little or nothing to help the dialog with an informant. According
to some interpretations, what rough equivalences are more likely in linguistic pairing of
sentences is a matter to be decided from the perspective of empirical psychology (see
Henderson, Interpretation and Explanation, p.45). When the interpreter moves beyond a
simple mapping of observational sentences a weaker and more ﬂexible charitable
approach is advisable: the usefulness of a manual of translation in the process of
communication is judged by smoothness of conversation, frequent predictability of
behavioral dispositions both verbal and non-verbal, and plausibility of messages. He
contends that native utterance should still turn out on the whole to be plausible even if
one fails to link them with observable circumstances (Pursuit of Truth, p.43,
"Philosophical Progress in Language Theory", pp. 14-15). Therefore the truth-condition
has been replaced with a plausibility condition which obviously counts as such for the
subject and not for the interpreter. Instead of seeking the fulﬁllment of a simple logical
demand, we use the framework of our psychological theories at hand and consider the
circumstances of the subjects as we reconstruct the most plausible understanding of what
they say or believe. Consequently, the anthropologist's understanding of native's style of
thinking would depend on psychological conjectures about what the native is more likely
to mean by his occasion sentences (like the utterance "Gavagai") which bear upon the
bundle of stimuli or sense impingements. That is the reason why Quine argues (in
Pursuit of Truth) that psychological intuition sustains the translator all along the way,

even beyond the observational level, "deterring him from translating a native assertion

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into too glaring a falsehood. He will favor translations that ascribe beliefs to the native
that stand to reason or are consonant with the native's way of life" (Pursuit of Truth, p
46). Since all minds are presumed to be "pretty much like our own", practical psychology
offers the guide for understanding others. In this respect, Quine thinks that "empathic"
power of imagination which scrutinize the situation of the subjects under study may help
the translation by opening one's access to the interlocutor's meanings.

In this light, good expectation that researchers can successfully understand alien
beliefs may be aided by considering the rational ground of logic in connection with the
observational dimension of speech which reﬂects the perceptual uniformities familiar
within a way of life. However, Quine treats cases where the ﬁeld researcher observes a
blatant irrationality as an artifact of the researcher's procedure. Placing the burden on the
methodological ability of making sense through translation rather than blaming the
rational incompetence of the informants is consistent with the idea of charity. Quine
introduces the condition of charity as a binding maxim which requires us to "maximize
agreement" in the process of understanding apparently exotic beliefs. He stresses that
empirical evidence available may prove that the failure to understand natives rather brings
about ethnographer's mistake in translation (see Word and Object, p. 58). This contention
points to charity maxim, which could be interpreted either in a stronger sense or in a
weaker sense, though in both cases we face conceptual difﬁculties. First, if charity is
seen as an inviolable principle, it compels the researcher to disregard the possibility that
his informants are committing a logical mistake or are behaving strangely or foolishly. In
consequence, the problem of irrationality ceases to make sense and must be completely

given up. The burden for grasping errors or fallacies in subj ects' speech remains with the

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researcher. He inappropriately assumes responsibility for breakdowns of communication
between him and his informants. (This calls to the mind the point I made in the preceding
chapter about the idealizing character of formal reason, which is inapplicable and
irrelevant for the elusive and ﬂuent nature of life).

Nevertheless Quine's claim does not extend so far. He argues rather that apparent
irrationality suggests that something important was lost in the process of understanding.
Such a risk is more likely when translation is considerably more vague and free ﬂoating.
He admits that when a contradictory utterance of the form "p and not p" is detected, this
may indicate that some revisions of the translation system are needed, unless the
competence of the researcher is called into question after all. But to know what change of
interpretation is potentially more suitable, we need to understand if we face a case of
genuinely irrational beliefs which fails both native's and our criteria of rationality, or if
we are misled by what at ﬁrst glance appears irrational to us. As soon as an ethnographer
or an anthropologist is able to overcome the fumbling character of his dialog with local
speakers and to improve his understanding of the native cultural behavior, he may ﬁnd
that the attribution of apparent irrationality was mistaken. If the researcher has been in
the ﬁeld for enough time to develop an efﬁcient scheme of translation, he will be able to
ﬂuently use the native language in smooth conversations with the members of community
under study. The better he manages to communicate with his informants, the less likely is
the deduction of apparent irrationality.

Second, at the other extreme, if the maxim of charity is understood as merely a
"rule of thumb" useful only for making informed guesses in the early fumbling stages of

translation, it remains very ambiguous and weak. In fact, Quine maintains that a

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competent researcher should not base a translation scheme on ﬁrst observations, but
should continue to test his manual during his linguistic negotiations with the native
community. Quine agrees with the requirement of extensive empirical records, which are
supposed to provide a wide pragmatic base for the proper pairing of diverging sets of
sentences from the two different languages.

The social scientist who is too charitable should remember what he knows from
his own home-culture. One cannot ignore that people often show a capacity to believe
nonsense and to hold inconsistent opinions or convictions resulting from errors of
reasoning. This does not necessarily imply that one's mind is faulty, but only that one
may, willingly or not, misuse it. It is not my interest to discuss here whether people are
often blinded by their pursuit of narrow interests or are overwhelmed by their emotional
makeup. The problem is how the interpretation of behavior bears on Quine's version of
charity.

It seems to me that charitably recognizing mistaken speech requires standards of
judgement which allow one to distinguish between what makes sense and what doesn't.
On this basis one is able to identify irrationality whenever a violation of these standards
occurs. Moreover, one can understand the difference between forms of life and explain
in what sense their contrasts amount to inconsistencies or contradictions. The point is
that the interpretation of different cultural and linguistic frameworks is possible only on
the basis of some criteria of rationality which Should not be relative to those societies
under interpretation, if they are to ground cross-culturally valid judgements and bridge
conceptual schemes.

Quine implicitly suggests that the idea of charity points to the concept of

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rationality and it is tied to logical norms, but he does not clearly elaborate these
conceptual connections. He is aware that he must save the universality of logic in order
to make his thesis of ontological relativity intelligible as it bears on the indeterminacy of
translation. We saw earlier that he cannot avoid a paradoxical conclusion: logical
relativity must fail to insure the workability of ontological relativity. The logical rules
which constitute the basic norms of rationality provide for the understanding of other
people. If they are not found in the conﬁnement of the ship at sea, from Neurath's
metaphor, where sailors can make good use of them, eventually to subject them to an
ongoing adjustment as they do with the rest of their ﬂoating platform, where are they? In
other words, if logic must escape relativity and the applicability of its preconditions is not
context-bound, the question becomes, what warrants its universal validity? This question
lingers in Quine's view of many incommensurable worlds but it is not clearly answered.
F rege once warns us that we should not identify the laws of thought, which are
psychological and contingent with logical norms, which are a priori. Quine rethinks the
problem as follows: were truth-functions just an internal matter of empirical psychology
then the necessity of logical constraints would be abandoned and Frege's distinction
would collapse. Without normative criteria for evaluation, we are unable to assess the
beliefs held by foreign people and to tell how they are different from ours. Hence, the
elimination of the epistemic concept of truth from a descriptively oriented naturalized
epistemology would lead to the impossibility of any epistemological justiﬁcation of our
own cognitive claims. For instance, if we are to speak again in the language of the
marine metaphor, since there are no rational standards, such as "rightness", in the ship's

inventory, the sailors would be adrift and would have no way to know where they are or

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even how to ﬁx their boat. They ﬁnd themselves completely lost, lamentable victims
surrounded by the inﬁnity of water. Wouldn't one be correct to complain with Hillary
Putnam that "The elimination of the normative is attempted mental suicide"? Although
Putnam continues to work in the theoretical horizon opened by Quine, he argues against
his master that reason can't be naturalized. If we discard all notions of "rightness" like
Quine, he asks, "then what are all our statements but noise-makings?" ("Why Reason
Can't Be Naturalized, pp. 240-1 in After Philosophy, 1987).

Notwithstanding, Quine's idea of charity points to rationality of logic, which
seems to be excepted from relativity. Though Quine’s account on obviousness that
warrants the validity of logic across languages and cultures, in contrast with inter-
linguistic indeterminacy (on the same foot with ontological relativity), is neither
sufﬁciently clear nor persuasive enough. In consequence, his idea of charity is bound to a
methodological maxim which poses a constraint on how to translate alien verbal behavior
as fundamentally rational. But understanding ﬁnally is a matter of psychological
conjectures and it rests on empirical psychology. Beyond this "naturalizing" aspect, his
view on charity remains so vague as to land him back in the relativism that he seemed to
overcome.

In what follows I will conclude the discussion of Quine by Showing where we are
left by his argument. This move will justify the transition to Davidson.

3.24) CONCLUSIONS IN THE FACE OF AN INESCAPABLE DILEMMA

According to Quine, a ﬁeld-linguist's attempt to build a linguistic bridge between
his own home culture and a native community shows that translation is essentially

indeterminate, and therefore it is too weak to sustain cross-cultural understanding. In this

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respect, there is no neutral middle ground to mediate communication between a Western
scientist and an alien speaker who seems radically different from everything he ever knew
until then. There is no reasonable basis of comparison, or, as Quine puts it, "less sense in
saying what is good translation and what is bad...(Word and Object, p 78)". Hence, the
relativist implications of the "Gavagai"-"Rabbit" argument are unavoidable.

Nonetheless, Quine is committed to "save the obvious" which for him is that
which must remain valid in a cross-cultural sense, i.e. Simple logical truths and stimulus
meanings. Logical rules and empirical basis of stimulus meanings may account for
"outward uniformity" of behavioral dispositions imposed by society when inculcating a
language designed for "smooth communication" (see Pursuit of Truth, p.44). Complex
behavioral associations could explain with a good deal of approximation the linguistic
uniformity within a speech community and verbal dispositions to give assent or dissent to
various sentences. In this respect, we recall Quine's analogy between people of the same
language community and different bushes trimmed in elephantine shapes. However, the
"outward uniformity" which determines verbal dispositions is not matched by an "inward
uniformity". Quine assumes that there is a "chaotic subjective diversity" of connections
between environment and behavior. Therefore, understanding across the linguistic and
cultural divide is just an empirical matter of making associations between words and
experiences in terms of relevance relations. Since there is no universal way to understand
all selves or to read minds, we can only make psychological guesses from behavior and
adjust our interpretations according to the efﬁciency of our hypotheses. At this point, the
maxim of charity plays a decisive role in preventing the linguist from too easily rejecting

an utterance because of its apparent Silliness and in requiring the. linguist rather assume

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that his informant is a rational speaker. This methodological recommendation directs us
to explain apparent nonsense as a faulty translation rather than as a result of an irrational
nﬁnd.

In sum, Quine's argument for the indeterminacy of translation particularly
persuasive in its denial of the universalist project of understanding typiﬁed by Descartes's
rational subject abstracting the peculiarities of cultures. Nevertheless, in what follows,
we will discover that Quine is not immune to a criticism, which surprisingly puts him in
the same camp with Descartes, despite the deep theoretical differences between them.
Davidson accuses Quine of holding a "Cartesian vision" which is elicited by the implicit
hypothesis that the inquiring subject can construct the world in the privacy of the thinking
and sensing self. We will turn to this subtle argument in the next chapter. But before that
I want to close this discussion with some far-reaching considerations that show where we
are at the end of this chapter and justify where I will further take this inquiry.

Philosophers and scientists that are embarked, and Quine would agree, on the
same vessel from Neurath's illuminating metaphor of human condition, crossing the
unending ocean to nowhere, may be split between the two horns of a dilemma. First, they
may listen to an enchanting skeptical voice so persuasive from Pyrrho and Carneades to
Montaigne, Hume and Quine. It talks about the despair born out of the self-awareness of
our ﬁnitude and from the disparity of our confrontation with the inﬁnite surrounding
darkness. At times, its sound could be overwhelmed by tragic and fearful accents
becoming an expression of anguish in the face of the drama of life, the dread of death and
the mysterious universe. I would cry to the navigators doomed to be ever engaged in this

odyssey: "Don't be fooled, this is in fact the disenchanting voice of the sirens who are

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paving the way for your own downfall and distress!" It is true that to stay away from the

fascination of that existentialist call for sadness and anxiety, one, eventually, has to tie
oneself to the mast like Odysseus, when he could not resist the attraction of sea nymphs
whose singing lured mariners to destruction on the rock of their island. After all, I think
that to be guided on the second alternative is more fascinating as it is more promising.
That is the transcultural voice that, after Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and the
Enlightenment, Habermas gives to rationality.

At this juncture let us sketch a concluding summary of Quine's argument
discussed so far in this chapter. We remarked that Quine's attempt to "save the obvious"
from relativity, is above all concerned with logical truth and inferences. In fact, his idea
of charity can be used in connection with what appears obvious to nearly everyone in the
community and may provide a ground for assent or dissent . However, one has to observe
that although Quine recommends making revision of translations rather than assuming
speaker's irrationality, he does not seem inclined to tolerate any a priori constraint on
understanding the informant's utterances. Of course, his policy is to avoid translating the
native assertions as "too glaring a falsehood" and to deem the speaker's silliness less
likely than bad translation. And yet, at times, Quine suggests that especially in the early
stages of translation which require ﬁrst approximation-interpretive schemes, charity is
compelling only as a "rule of thumb". At times, the reconstruction of stimulus meanings
may be made on the basis of a quite "ill-developed" theory regarding perceptual error or
by simply ﬁnding charity operating in the elaborating "good guesses". But Quine himself
must recognize that this is hardly a satisfactory basis for understanding. On his view,

there is no other exit from such limited epistemic situations when we are pushed at the

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edge of our knowledge, other than to keep testing our hypotheses and to come up with
new forms of theorizing which, hopefully, prove more adequate in the light of experience.
Therefore, the interpretation of overt behavior in observable situations remains just an
empirical problem. The radical translator has nothing a priori at hand and he cannot
have any previous knowledge of the alien language, nor get any access to bilingual help.
The charitable understanding consists in making psychological conjectures regarding
what his informant is likely to believe. Of course, in conformity with the prerequisite of
naturalized epistemology, this procedure is limited to the scientiﬁc reliance on the best
explanations presently available in empirical psychology (see Word and Object, p. 59,
"Indeterminacy of Translation Again", in Journal of Philosophy, 84, 1987, pp. 5-10, p.
7)). Ultimately, Quine is reluctant to allow endless modiﬁcations of the translation
scheme to accommodate each succeeding utterance's truth and to avoid attributing
irrationality to the Speaker.

It is fair to preclude any binding conditions on the interpretation of a foreign
language. Nevertheless, as we have already observed, Quine then must face another
problem. Had be given up the cross-language character of logical rules, it would make no
sense to presume that translations or interpretations are recognizably different,
contrasting, or excluding one from another. As I have argued earlier, it has been fairly
imputed to Quine that his concept of ontological relativity can be intelligible only if
logical relativity fails.

In order to preclude the dead-end that is inescapable for Quine, Davidson will try
to step further through the door opened by his mentor in at least two main directions.

First, he analyzes language against the intersubj ective context wherein talking and

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thinking subjects are intricately intermingled in conversation. Second, unlike Quine, he
sends his radical interpreter to venture, in the "dark" and risky forbidden land of the
intentional to capture the nature of meaning and beliefs. Davidson relies on the quasi-
mentalist notion of "holding a sentence true" instead of quasi-behaviorist notion of
"stimulus-meaning". Insofar as he claims that a correct interpretation of one's speech
must be possible in principle and must remain publicly accessible, he is more
"charitable" than Quine is willing to be (see "Idea of Conceptual Scheme", pp. 188-189,
"Inscrutability of Reference", p 235).

The next chapter will proceed ﬁrst with a critique of Quine's Cartesian tendency
in the terms of Davidson subtle remark that there persists in Quine an implicit "Cartesian
vision" that consists in the tendency to believe that each of us can privately "construct"
the world picture in the inner self. Then, in the second section, I will resume the
examination of Davidson's plea for the principle of charity, which becomes the central
methodological claim insofar as it provides the ground for possible understanding of
other people. Despite his conceptual affinities with Quine, Davidson works on a theory
of meaning as subject to an empirically informed constraint (See "Idea of Conceptual
Scheme", p. 196). His methodology of interpretation reﬁnes the basic principle of charity
in order to make sense for "intelligible error and make allowance for a relative likelihood
of various kinds of mistakes" ("Radical Interpretation", in Inquiries on Truth and
Interpretation, p. 136). The far-reaching goal of Davidson's appeal to charity is to bridge
different systems of beliefs. I will deal with his view next as a conceptual alternative to
Quine's linguistic theory and Winch's idea of social science. Responding to the question

regarding the chance to overcome the methodological paradox and the Munchausen

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trilemma raised by the relativist thesis of world-incommensurability, Davidson dares to
go closer to a concept of understanding which relies on the need for a charitable

rationality.

Chapter 4) DONALD DA VIDSON:
INTERPRETATION AND THE NEED FOR CHARITY

In this chapter, I will analyze Davidson's discussion of radical interpretation and
his appeal to charity to secure the conceptual ground of understanding. Is there any way
to bridge up the semantic gap uncovered by the Quinean theory of radical translation?
The goal of the following three chapters is to present possible responses to this question.
We shall see here that Davidson accepts the challenge of Quine's thesis of indeterminacy
of translation and uses the charity principle to offer a conceptual basis for understanding
and communicating with cultures remote from our own. In his own words, the question
is "what would it suffice an interpreter to know in order to understand the speaker of an
alien language, and how could he come to know it" ("Reply to Jerry Fodor and Ernest
Lepore" in Reﬂecting Davidson, 1993, p. 83).

Davidson constructs his theory of understanding in the horizon of the analysis of
language opened by Wittgenstein and Carnap, but, above all, Quine has been his constant
mentor. Such afﬁnities prompt references without which many of Davidson's points
would remain unintelligible. Especially, a conceptual comparison between Davidson and
Quine regarding their speciﬁc ways of interpreting the nature of language is necessary.
We will see that Davidson advocates the mentalist idea of holding true beliefs, which is
essentially different from Quine’s behaviorist treatment of stimulus meanings, and this
explains their different emphasis on the notion of charity and its role in understanding
alien speech. To emphasize how Davidson has developed the Quinean heritage, I will
Show how Davidson’s premises regarding linguistic understanding challenges the view of

his inﬂuential teacher. Thus, before I lay out the basic elements of Davidson's concept of

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interpretation in which systems of beliefs are bridged by recourse to charity, I will explore
his intriguing claim that in a subtle way Quine still looks back to Descartes. In what
follows, I begin the discussion with Davidson's contention that language must be social, if
it is to be a language at all. From this perspective I will present his criticism of Quine.
Then I will set the terms for understanding Davidson's version of the principle of charity
that provides for the possibility of communication across cultures and is intelligible on
the basis of the intersubjective nature of language.

The aim of the next section is to make good on Davidson's claim that a language
must remain publicly accessible and therefore interpretable. In this respect, I will show
that Davidson tries to distance himself from Quine's concept of radical translation and I
will review his contention that Quine shares with Descartes a view of understanding as a
private matter of an isolated self. Davidson remarks that there still persists in Word and
Object a Cartesian tendency to believe that each of us can "construct" the world in the
privacy of one's self. Even if Quine replaces the rational intuitions wired in the mind of
Descartes's subject with the irritations on the sensory surface of the perceptive subject,
according to Davidson, in deep sense, his approach remains Cartesian (see "Post Analytic
Vision", interview with G. Borradori in The American Philosopher, 1994, pp. 49-50).
This discussion is mainly intended to introduce Davidson's thesis regarding the public

accessibility of language and to prepare the conceptual ground for his notion of charity.

4.1) DAVIDSON'S DEPARTURE FROM QUINE: PUBLIC ACCESSIBILITY OF

LANGUAGE VERSUS QUINE'S CART ESIAN VISION
Quine thinks that the solitary voyage of the Cartesian subject on the neutral path

of Reason beyond the cultural peculiar imageries of different communities is as

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implausible as a "cosmic exile", to use Quine's own expression. This means that a
universal rational standpoint is equivalent to the epistemic situation of a knowing subject
that is completely abstracted from the world and makes impartial judgments in language
that is universal to all people. We have noticed that Descartes is convinced that we can
use the intellectual faculties which acts in the private conditions of the mind and that
absolute Reason provides the underlying basis for reaching a universal understanding
among people. This would be a kind of rational background that insures the possibility
for two speakers of different languages to think identical ideas. From this standpoint,
reason is the common core of humanity and hence is necessarily replicated in all humans.

Quine is aware that the Cartesian subject's exile outside of the world represents a
leap over the limits of conceptual schemes, which is as impossible as one's jumping over
one's own shadow. Nonetheless, Davidson contends that there persists in Quine a
Cartesian tendency that consists in believing that each of us is an epistemic subject who
can "construct" the world from what is given to the senses. The expression "Cartesian
vision" elicits one way of doing philosophy in which one supposes that some evidence is
presented to us (either raw experience, sensory data, or stimulations of our nerve endings,
and on this basis we rebuild the image of the outside world and understand behaviors).
Davidson says "I prefer to call such pictures empirical and Cartesian because we can
develop a picture of the world all by ourselves, and we could do so even if there were
nobody else in the world" (Interview in The American Philosopher, p. 50). Such
individualism is yielded by the presupposition that the language or the mind "organizes"
the reality provided by the senses within the structure of a conceptual scheme.

Quine might argue that this criticism is unfair. He points out in the analogy of the

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trimmed bushes in elephantine shapes that although they are "wildly unlike in their

inward twigs and branches" as "communication presupposes no similarity" of the net of
nerve endings, they are alike in outward form and that uniformity is the pattern imposed
by society, "in inculcating language and pressing for smooth communication" (Pursuit of
Truth, p. 44, see Word and Object, p. 8)). Although Quine tells us that radical translation
"begins at home", the paradigm of radical translation is exempliﬁed by the recovery of a
native's current language by a ﬁeld linguist who is attempting "to penetrate and translate a
language hitherto unknown" unaided by any interpreter (Word and Object, p 28, see
Ontological Relativity, p. 46). Found in a such a helpless and solitary situation, all the
linguist can do is to observe the behavioral responses to the environment of his informant
and record the observed correlation between his assents to or dissents from occasion
sentences which express the sensory surface irritations or stimulus meanings. The
contrast between Descartes and Quine seems so evident, though, that nobody could deny
it. For Descartes, a substantive notion of reason breaks the vicious circle of subjectivity
of understanding and the difficulty of translation does not even arise. Quine is chieﬂy
concerned with the empirical constraints of knowledge and the extensional theory of
linguistic meaning.

Nevertheless, the Cartesian reading of Quine is defensible in the light of what
Davidson calls radical interpretation of language. From this perspective, understanding
a speech requires the construction of a theory of meaning from an informant's language
and based on evidence plausibly available and in principle publicly accessible to a
genuine investigator, who does not know in advance how to interpret the utterances the

theory is designed to cover (see "Radical Interpretation, p. 125, 128, "Inscrutability of

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Reference", p. 23 5). This concept of radical interpretation provides an account of
translation relative only to the understanding of situations in which languages are actually
interpreted. Davidson maintains that "the correct interpretation of one person's speech by
another must be in principle possible" ("The Structure and Content of Truth" in Journal
of Philosophy, 87, 1990, p. 314, also J. F odor, E. Lepore, "Is Radical Interpretation
Possible?", in Reflecting Davidson, 1993, p. 72) A speaker's intentions, desires, attitudes
or meanings may remain opaque at times even to the most skilled and knowledgeable
listeners, but a correct understanding based upon the available evidence for the
interpretation of speech and truth conditions must be possible most of the time.

Although Quine, in the tradition of Wittgenstein, Mead, and Dewey, insists
sometimes that language is intrinsically social, Davidson emphasizes that this simply
involves for Quine the empiricist assumption that language is "entirely determined by
observable behavior, even readily observable behavior". Davidson argues against this
limited interpretation that, as far as "public availability is a constitutive aspect of
language", meaning is not just a matter of one's lucky guesses ("The structure and content
of tru ", p. 314, F odor, Lepore, "Is Radical Interpretation Possible?", p 72). On his view,
Quine becomes liable to the objections against private languages. Here Davidson draws
on Wittgenstein's famous private language argument to demonstrate the Cartesian aspect
of Quine's subject.35

In two passages from Philosophical Investigation (1953), "the diary keeper" (sec.
258) and "the beetle in the box" (sec. 293), Wittgenstein illustrates how the absence of
any public criterion makes it impossible to learn ostensibly the names of sensations and to

use language to describe subjective states of mind. His attack is designed to preclude the

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logical possibility of a language which is accessible only to one isolated subject and is
used to describe internal experiences. Davidson's contention that Quine's Cartesian
vision arises from the presupposition that the reality revealed by the sensory evidence is
structured within conceptual schemes by the language or the mind can be seen as a
continuation of this line of argumentation. Davidson admits that Quine salvages the
philosophy of language from a dogma of empiricism by purging the distinction between
analytic and synthetic - that is, between the “architectonic structure of thought” and its
“empirical contents”. Nonetheless, Davidson thinks that Quine is himself committed to a
third dogma: that of the privacy of the mind, which is even more dangerous for its
perceptive solipsist character. From Davidson’s point of view, Quine is seen as the heir of
a philosophical tradition which attempts to rebuild the picture of the world by giving
grounds in whatever reliable evidence we can ﬁnd. Unlike Descartes, who emphasizes
the trustworthiness of the rational intuitions, Quine relies on stimulus meanings and
requires a logical structure of the propositions describing sensory data.36

Wittgenstein's arguments on the unintelligibility of private language challenge in
general the subj ectivist scenarios which purport to arrive at knowledge which can be
formulated in an universal language or at least shown and perceived (like one calling "his
beetle" or one pointing by ostension to an occurring sensation associated with the sign "S"
in the diary). Henceforth, he denounces the perennial dream of philosophers to determine
a kind of primitive evidence which is expressed by some objective categories. He argues
that it is senseless to look for the ultimate bottom of language games since there are no
intuitive and incorrigible foundations of knowledge, neither perceptive (raw experience,

sense impingements, stimulations of our nerve endings) nor rational (the immediately

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striking certainty of reason). We have seen that Wittgenstein contends that meaning of

words also lies in the intersubjective use of language within a community. On his view,
there are striking differences between the actual multiplicity of kinds of words and
sentences and the singularity of what philosophers have assumed about the simpliﬁed
structure of language. Although he was aware that one could look at the world only
through the Single window of one's home-language, he avoided reducing the complexity
of the forms of life to the ﬁctive rational simplicity of the Cartesian subject.

From such a tradition, to which Quine himself belongs, Davidson generalizes the
interpretation expressed by the metaphor Cartesian vision. Quine is seeking to rebuild
the world image and, inherently, the understanding among people on what everyone
should undeniably accept. His reliance on overt behavior and stimulus meaning parallels
Descartes's appeal to the certainty of his cogito. In this respect, Davidson can justiﬁably
claim that although Quine, unlike Descartes, is committed to empiricism, he still bears
the Cartesian hallmark typiﬁed by the belief that a subject alone can develop a picture of
the world all by himself, and he "could do so even if there were nobody else in the world"
("Post-Analytic Vision", interview, p. 50). For this reason, according to Davidson,
Quinean subject still operates in a Cartesian context.

In contrast to this tradition, including Quine, Davidson repeatedly claims that
language is inherently intersubj ective and must be interpretable. His criticism against any
Cartesian voyage in the "privacy of the mind" conveys the thesis that "nothing is hidden".

It requires that "the evidence be publicly accessible" and, according to Davidson, this is
not due "to an atavistic yearning for behaviorist or veriﬁcationist foundations, but due to

the fact that what is to be explained is a social phenomenon" ("The Structure and Content

133
of Truth", p. 314, see also Davidson, "Inscrutability of Reference", p. 235; F odor, Lepore,

"Is Radical Interpretation Possible?", p. 72). His radical interpreter does not know how
to read minds and hasn't learned what someone, intends, believes, wants or means "by
opening up his brain" ("Reply to Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore", p. 81). He claims that
subjects have no possibility of analyzing thinking or perceptive behavioral dispositions in
strictly subjective sense, but only "events" that depend on the subject being in permanent
exchange with other speakers and communicating and interacting with them in a common
social environment. If we are to understand a speaker we must know how his words are
connected with what happens in the world, but Davidson does not imply that the mind is
provided with a universal grammar or linguistic universals, as Chomsky once suggested.
The connections between language and reality are established both for the speaker and the
interpreter in a public context in which people share meanings and interact socially. On
this view it is a matter of principle that

meaning, and by its connection with meaning, beliefs also, are open to

public determination... What a fully informed interpreter could learn

about a speaker means is all there is to learn; the same goes for what the

speaker believes (F odor, Lepore, "IS Radical Interpretation Possible?", p

70).
He admits that we can be wrong sometimes in interpreting utterances or other pieces of
behavior, but if we always fail in understanding anyone then "the concepts of language,
understanding and thought would have no application to us" ("Reply to Fodor and
Lepore", p. 82). Had we been always mistaken in interpreting one's speech, it would
make no sense to say, for instance, that one has been "misled" by evidence or to talk

about one going astray in coming to grip with meanings. Therefore, he holds that the

primary and only source of understanding meanings lies in "successful interpersonal

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communication" (Quine would say “smooth communication”). To accomplish that,
although we could misinterpret some particular persons or utterances, we cannot always
be wrong in understanding others (see "Reply to F odor and Lepore").37 And Davidson
assumes that if we are to build a conceptual bridge between different language users, the
principle of charity provides the way.

4.2) THE NEED FOR CHARITY IN RADICAL INTERPRETATION

In what follows, I will consider Davidsonian version of the principle of charity by
exploiting another suggestion made by Wittgenstein in his woodcutters' metaphor. The
moral of his story is that to understand what seems to be odd or irrational people is made
possible only by a charitable interpretation of their behavior, that is, to ﬁnd them
reasonable within their speciﬁc cultural context. Davidson criticizes the relativist
implications of the idea that rationality is relative to a conceptual scheme. We will see
that he attempts to overcome self-refuting cultural relativism and to devise a strategy for a
new explanation of understanding between people. His conception of radical
interpretation points to observable aspects of verbal behavior, which should be taken, on
the one hand, as evidence for a theory of truth, and, on the other (when combined with a
version decision theory), as evidence for a uniﬁed theory of belief, meaning, and desire.
Davidson says that "the evidence assumed available plus the constraints on the structure
of the pattern of a person's beliefs, values and language, sufﬁce to yield an interpretive
theory for understanding a person" ("Reply to Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore", p. 84).
However, Davidson admits that successful interpretation is possible only on the basis of
the principle of charity and so depends on the condition of having a non-private language,

that is, a language understood by more than one person. We shall see next how Davidson

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tries to accomplish this goal.

4.21) CHARITY AND REASONABLENESS

What is the principle of charity after all? We have seen that Quine's maxim of
charity is a methodological requirement to understand people as presumably reasonable.
Drawing ﬁom Quine, Davidson admits that the idea of charity is an injunction to
maximize or optimize agreement in the process of conversation. As such, it is a
precondition that provides for the possibility of interpretation of alien behavior by social
scientists in the course of dialogue with a speaker of unknown and non-familiar language.

One can identify or understand the beliefs of a native or of a different ethnic group only
if they are interpreted as reasonable in their own world. If this is what is meant by being
charitable in understanding others, such an idea was, in fact, ﬁrst suggested by
Wittgenstein in the woodcutters' story.

He imagines an anthropologist who finds himself in the problematic situation of
interpreting the activity of some natives that appear irrational. Such people are supposed
to pile "timber in heaps of arbitrary, varying height and then sell it at a price proportionate
to the area covered by the piles". If asked, they can even justify this by saying: "Of
course, if you buy more timber, you must pay more" (Remarks on Foundations of
Mathematics, 1956, sec. 44c, pp. 142-51). We must recognize that, since there is no
conceptual match between us and that imaginary society, "our own familiar ways of
thinking are subtly distorted" (see Winch, "The Idea of Social Science", in Rationality,
1970, p. 8). The difficult question we must face is in what sense one can claim that one
had understood the behavior displayed by the natives described by Wittgenstein.

Obviously, they expect to get more payment, not for a larger quantity of wood, but for a

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pile covering a bigger area. Nevertheless the researcher in the ﬁeld cannot simply
suppose that these natives are stupid or foolish because by doing so his explanation would
obscure the reasons which might motivate their behavior. If the subjects under study
were thoroughly irrational, would there be anything left for the social scientist to
understand? Since their reasons or causes of their behavior would not make sense to the
ﬁeld researcher, how could he explain their means of survival or the meanings of their
customs? It is more likely that the seemingly irrational woodcutters are being
misinterpreted: the scientist may be wrong about what they mean by quantitative
attributes ("a lot of wood" and "a little wood") and he may fail to understand their system
of payment. Were we to think that these woodcutters irrationally pursue a trade on self-
defeating terms, we would be vulnerable to the criticism that we are confusing their
market rules with ours. To avoid such an epistemic pitfall and describe these natives as
reasonable, Wittgenstein recommends, "We should presumably say in this case: they
simply do not mean the same by 'a lot of wood' and 'a little wood' as we do; and they have
a quite different system of payment from us" (Remarks, sec. 44c). By adopting this
attitude, his strategy introduces the charity of interpretation in a way which recalls
Quine's advice to revise the translation schemes in order to preserve the rational character
of behavior under consideration.

However this is not the end of the matter. The question is what standpoint guides
the investigator's understanding when he changes his mind and decides that some
apparently irrational practice is really rational after all. Wittgenstein is silent about this,
though his conclusion seems to suggest abandoning the claim of value freedom in social

science. His argument prompts us to consider two cases: ﬁrst, if the anthropologist ends

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up by being converted to the system of beliefs he investigates, then these beliefs can be
understood from within and judged reasonable by his own standards. But, this is a
possibility not easily accepted by the relativist who claims that social scientists
supposedly cannot get out of their own cultural frameworks and are bound to use their .
own values and principles when interpreting others. Second, if native beliefs are not
shared by the anthropologist caught in his own conceptual scheme, then he must make the
difference intelligible by showing how the context features that he detects make those
beliefs reasonable.38

The difﬁculty is not solved, but simply postponed since we are further prompted
to ask to whom must the behavior be shown to be intelligible or reasonable? Since the
natives have no problem in ﬁnding themselves intelligible, the obvious answer would be:
the interpreter. Wittgenstein, Winch, Davidson, and Taylor, among others, suggest that
making sense of a range of behavior implies ﬁnding rationality in the behavior at issue.
This is consistent with the principle of charity, which states that understanding people
from other cultures is feasible so far as they can be interpreted on the whole as
reasonable, that is, to assume that they genuinely prefer true and right beliefs above all.

Ifto achieve a correct representation of those interpreted, one is bound to treat
their thoughts and deeds as predominately rational, it is possible that the entire problem
of irrationality could be simply discarded as a faulty understanding. The burden of proof
would be on the anthropologist's ability to reconcile his linguistic hypotheses to whatever
behavior displayed by his subjects. But a too charitable insight into others' minds may be
inaccurate and potentially distorting. The social researcher has to know to what extent

the humble search for justiﬁcations of natives' behaviors may end up with implausible

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rationalizations of their intentions and their particular actions. Some people may appear
in the investigator's descriptions more reasonable than they count in reality even for their
own community. But one must not forget that subjects may be dishonest, and one should
not ignore the hypothesis that it is human to easily accept a self-gratifying behavior.

In addition to such confusing behavioral ambiguities, the anthropologist faces an
insurmountable ambivalence. In the light of his experience, he might have learned that
"on the one hand, there is no notion of reasonableness without cultures, practices,
procedures; on the other hand, the cultures, practices procedures, we inherit are not an
algorithm to be slavishly followed" (see H. Putnam, "Reason Can't Be Naturalized" in
Philosophy - End or Transformation, 1987, p 228).

The anthropologist must acknowledge that there are two different kinds of
rationality at stake: the one that makes sense for the members of his discipline and the
other that is shared by natives. In the ﬁrst place, when he returns from the ﬁeld, his
account of the intelligibility of native behavior is designed to convince his fellow
practitioners that his research report is accurate and up to scientiﬁc standards. In the
mean time, he is aware that what appears as reasonable for native inhabitants is ultimately
what is to be agreed upon by themselves, not only by his fellow researchers. In this
respect, he may have learned during his scientiﬁc training that behavior and beliefs can
get fully meaningful and understandable only when they are seen from within the cultural
context. The world-image shared by people living in distinct forms of life is a man-made
fabric that depends on the cognitive abilities and speech competence varying from culture
to culture. For example, Rom Harre demonstrates that Eskimos' psychological structures

and their notions of social virtues related to collectivist values, which serve them better in

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their struggle to survive a harsh environment, are quite incompatible with Maori's theory
of the self centered on magic powers, and their principles of acting which exhibits an
extreme form of individualism. However, when a Westemer describes this wild form of
individualism, he may be tempted to recall features of the culture displayed by the courtly
Middle Ages of Europe (see Rom Harre, "The 'Self‘ as a Theoretical Concept", in
Relativism, Interpretation and Confrontation, 1989 pp. 397-403). Such a tendency to
gravitate toward the examples of a familiar history is not due to the fact that our
"objectifying pattern" would supposedly be an invariable trait of human nature. Rather,
as Quine once points out, "[i]t is hard say how else there is to talk,..., because we are
bound to adapt any alien pattern to our own in the very process of understanding or
translating the alien sentences" (Ontological Relativity, p. 1). Thus, a social scientist, in
tailoring native beliefs and acts to correspond more "smoothly" to his own meanings and
criteria of rationality is inevitably inclined to reconstrue their way of life to ﬁt the
interpretative scheme learned from his own culture and typiﬁed by the disciplinary
textbooks which guided his intellectual formation. If the investigator could have still
preserved something linguistically virgin in his self, that is, not spoiled by upbringing or
tainted by prejudices, his ingenuity could not have survived the systematic corruption of
graduate school. The mission of education is after all to shape one in the spirit and
standards rooted in the culture, and language itself can be envisaged as an enclosed
articulated world.

Davidson refers to such closed linguistic framework in terms of conceptual
schemes, which provide common ways of structuring and classifying the "furniture" of

the world. 39 Presumably, what counts as real content, and as reasonable to believe,

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varies dramatically from one scheme to another. These different perspectives from which
cultural groups or ages "survey the passing scene of the world" are regularly described as
"non-corresponding" ways of seeing the world, in which the beliefs, desires, hopes and
knowledge Shared by a members of a culture have no counterparts for an inhabitant of
another culture. On such a relativistic view, judgements of evaluation and reasonableness
are relative to their intellectual and linguistic background.

This relativist conclusion is challenged by the argument that relativism is self-
referential and ultimately refutes itself, and by Davidson's anti-representationalist critique
of conceptual scheme. 1 will brieﬂy describe the ﬁrst view (found in M. Hesse's critique
of strong programmes in sociology of knowledge) and I will analyze the latter in more
detail in the next subsection.

The argument that relativist programmes are liable to the strong accusation of
self-refutation can be reconstructed as follows: Let us consider the proposition (1) as
typifying the claim of relativism and consider that the judgement can be similarly restated
about meanings and values:

(I) " All criteria of truth are relative to a local culture"; Therefore nothing can be known
except in the senses of knowledge and truth found in that culture. Hence asserting that,
(2) "Propositions (1) is true" - implicitly means, if we apply (I) to itself, that,

(3) "Proposition (1 ) is true only relative to a local culture". In conclusion, there are no
objective or extra-cultural grounds for supporting (1). Therefore it is fallacious to ask for
reasons to support (I) in absolute sense. Consequently, the cognitive vocabulary needs to
be redeﬁned in order accommodate to the postulate that truth criteria are contextually

dependent. If relativism is accepted, then its claims must apply to itself and also be

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relative to a conceptual scheme. The statement that the criteria of truth or meaning are
relative to a culture receives a circular support being itself bound to a linguistic
framework. As meanings vary across cultures, any sentence is no longer meaning or, at
best, would have changed the signiﬁcance of its terms outside its language-context. In
sum, if the claim of relativism is true, it must apply to itself, in which case it is self-
refuting. If it makes itself an exception from what itself requires (that "all criteria of truth
and meaning be relative to a local culture"), then it is false. Therefore, the idea that
knowledge is what is Shared only within a local culture is implausible and amounts to
nothing more than a strategy of epistemic self-immunization.

To be sure, an anthropologist has to acknowledge that the difﬁculty of
interpretation tests our ability to understand remote and different forms of life and to
bridge the gap between different notions of rationality. Nonetheless, the extreme case of
a complete failure of translation, and the corresponding thesis of world-
incommensurability, leads to a vicious circularity between rationality and understanding:
inhabitants of different worlds, on the one hand, cannot understand each other just
because they share incompatible standards of rationality which are culturally speciﬁc; on
the other hand, contrasting patterns of rationality are sui generis a result of idiosyncratic
structures of understanding.

In conclusion, the foregoing discussion has been twofold. First, the story of
Wittgenstein's apparently strange woodcutters has shown that being charitable in
understanding people from other cultures often means seeing them as reasonable within
their own form of life. This view implies that reason ceases to transcend cultures and

becomes relative to a speciﬁc context of a form of life. However, the problem is that

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"standards" immersed in a cultural framework cannot tell what reason is Since
reasonableness is already presupposed for their very interpretation and acceptability.
Secondly, this kind of consideration reveals an antirelativist aspect, which anticipates
Davidson's criticism of conceptual schemes: we realized that rationality cannot simply be
relativized to a cultural framework since relativism itself is self-refuting. As we Shall see,
this line of attack against relativism of rationality and understanding is elicited by
Davidson's objections to representationalism (see Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation,
1984, esp. "On the Very Idea of Conceptual Scheme", and "The Myth of the Subjective"
in Relativism-Interpretation and Conﬁontations, 1989). This will be the subject of the
next section.
4.221ANTI-RELATIVIST CONNOTATIONS OF DAVIDSON'S CRITIQUE OF
THE IDEA OF CONCEPTUAL SCHEME

This section is designed to take us to Davidson's criticism of the idea of
conceptual scheme as it bears on cross-cultural understanding. The main target of
Davidson's criticism is a conceptual relativism which precludes understanding between
different groups and cultures and which considers experience only within given
frameworks as ordered by means of speciﬁc and unique set of concepts. In consequence,
different peoples have radically different frames of mind and ultimately belong to
"different worlds" because the reality they live in is itself relative to contrasting
conceptual schemes. The notion of "conceptual scheme" is deﬁned by Davidson as a
linguistic system of categories which provides grids on which to base beliefs and which
structures the data of sensation ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p 183).

Such a tenet recalls the Kantian distinction between what is given to the mind

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through the senses and the intellectual forms used to reshape the perceptual content.

However, the kind of conceptual relativism Davidson has in mind is more recent and is
illustrated by Carnap's theory of internal questions and external questions which has been
mentioned already in the previous chapter. We have noticed that it is also found in
Quine's ontological relativity. Though they both deal with the way we talk about objects,
their projected solutions follow divergent paths.

Davidson challenges a version of conceptual relativism which associates "having
a language " with "having a conceptual scheme" on the basis of their co-related variation:
"Where conceptual schemes differ, so do languages." ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p.
184). In this respect, he targets Carnap and Quine. In order to substantiate the notion of
conceptual scheme I need make a digression and refer again to Carnap’s theory of internal
and external questions.

Carnap thinks (see "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" in Linguistic T urn,
1967) that since the logical empiricist goal of reducing the theoretical vocabulary has
proven unfeasible, the best we can expect is to prove that abstract terms can be partially
deﬁned on the basis of correspondence rules and to Show that they could be included in a
conceptual system which has "empirical signiﬁcance". To decide whether claims
containing enduring non-empirical terms are true or false, a scientiﬁc theory should
provide ways of talking about them in two different idioms. One way is to raise internal
questions by using the apparatus of a particular theory to address the problem of what
there is. (For example, to ask "Is there a prime greater than 100?" is answerable by using
the internal methods of elementary number theory). On this basis the solution can be

shown to true or false and the question to be meaningful within the theoretical context.

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By contrast, external questions ask about features of the theory without depending on its
theoretical terms or principles, and it is tinged by a metaphysical ambition. (For example:
"Are there numbers?"). Since such problems are external to any theoretical framework,
there is no methodological procedure that would allow them to be decided and, so they
are doomed to remain unanswerable and be ruled as senseless. The only meaningful
external questions are ones referring to the pragmatic choice between different conceptual
systems on the basis of criteria like simplicity or predictive power, or recommending the
use of a linguistic framework given the purposes which are to be accomplished.
Therefore, Carnap concludes, on the one hand, that ontological questions are answerable
only within a particular theoretical scheme, and, on the other hand, that existence claims
are relative to a choice of conceptual scheme. On his view, there are different types of
schemes, for instance the material idiom - that is, talk of material objects like roses or
stones as opposed to the theoretical vocabulary which involves talk of quarks, tahions,
glueons, etc. In the end, he holds the conventionalist principle of tolerance: we should be
tolerant rather than restrictive or eliminative with respect to the proliferation of the
different theoretical framework with their ontological commitments. Once they are
articulated we can discriminate and choose between them according to our needs or
interests.

Carnap's elegant solution regarding the distinction between internal questions that
make sense inside of a linguistic framework and which present the genuine problems of
science, and external questions with regard to the philosophical aspect of theoretical
choice, which are seen as pseudo-problems, has no appeal for Quine. Quine treats all

questions as internal, making all philosophical matters collapse into naturalizing science;

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translation of one theory into another hinges on the notion of overt behavior in observable
circumstances. What counts as the same empirical evidence, i.e. stimulus meaning,
would be consistent with different linguistic behavior and consequently, no ostensive act
could distinguish between sets of ontological commitments. For Quine, reference is
inscrutable precisely because there is nothing out there in the world to ﬂesh out in the
same ways conceptual schemes which differ one from each other, or, in other words,
there is no fact of the matter to which the terms refer (see Word and Object, chap. 2). As
I have analyzed this issue in relation to the impossibility of translation in the previous
chapter, I will not develop it here again.

Davidson thinks that if such linguistic frameworks are to preclude any way of
translating one language into another, as Quine agrees, then the problem is needlessly
complicated, "for then we have to imagine the mind, with its ordinary categories,
operating with a language with its organizing structure" ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p
184). The question is, how could one ever determine that a conceptual scheme is
different from our own? Davidson's answer is that there is no meaningful way to ﬁnd that
a conceptual scheme embodied in one's home-language is different from the one
embodied in languages spoken by other people, except when we consider a partial rather
than a total failure of translation. In order to assure a basis for comparability" for
conceptual schemes, their partial translability is a necessary condition to prove the
difference between them. However, the complete failure of translation makes no sense
for Davidson since it requires the impossibility of equating any signiﬁcant range of
sentences between languages. Since understanding cannot break down completely, and

the radical failure of translation may be rejected as meaningless, Davidson remarks that

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we may expect that in the process of interlinguistic mediation "some range of sentences
could be translated and some range not" ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p. 185). He
suggests that Quine can posit complete non-translability and backs up the radical claim of
world-incommensurability only by ignoring the actual relationships between different
languages. As a matter of fact all human languages can easily be shown to be partially
translatable.40 In addition, the very idea of a conceptual scheme, which is central to this
kind of conceptual relativism cannot be clearly articulated. For this reason, Davidson
concludes that the notion of conceptual scheme is empty and meaningless and must be
given up. In consequence, in contrast with Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of
translation, Davidson's strategy will focus on the possible if limited, linguistic
interpretation. But, insofar as speech requires a culture-laden network of ﬁnely
discriminated desires, beliefs and intentions, the inter-scheme translability involves an
ability to describe attitudes and meanings.

At this junction the question that arises is whether translability can be a universal
criterion of languagehood. Davidson imagines a situation in which a Saturnian language
may be translatable into English, while another language, Plutonian, may be translatable
into Saturnian, though it is totally resistant to translation into English. Therefore, since
translability into a familiar language is not a transitive relation it cannot function as a
universal criterion. In this case, the question is how could we recognize that the
Saturnian was actually translating the Plutonian system of concepts which is so alien
and idiosyncratic to us? We may listen to what the Saturnian speaker tells us about what
he is allegedly doing, but "then it would occur to us to suspect whether our translations of

Saturnian were correct" ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p. 186). Had translation been

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totally impossible, we may justiﬁably wonder if the Plutonians have a language after all.

For this reason, Davidson stresses that the dominant metaphor of incommensurable
worlds seems to reveal an unintentional paradox. Points of view and conceptual schemes
can be recognized as different only if there is a neutral "common coordinate system" or a
universal criterion of languagehood "on which to plot them" (“Idea of Conceptual
Scheme”, p. 186). But Davidson concludes that these are not possible.

One may claim that had Descartes's pursuit of a neutral standpoint in his solitary
voyage beyond custom and example been plausible, he would have been able to divest
himself of his own cultural heritage, and from the vantage point of a value-free position
he could have compared different conceptual schemes. Feyerabend assumes that there is
still human experience independent or free of any cultural imprint and hence that we may
compare contrasting schemes by "choosing a point of view outside the conceptual scheme
or the language"(Problems of Empiricism, p. 214, after Davidson, "Idea of Conceptual
Scheme", p.191).

Davidson regards this procedure as impossible. First, he argues that a "neutral
common coordinate system" belies the claim of dramatic incommensurability. He
contends that the idea of translation makes no sense apart from truth, and truth is truth
only within a language. Second, he argues that conceptual schemes are identiﬁed with
languages and therefore to divest oneself of all conceptual schemes would require the
abandonment of the use of language. But one simply cannot give up language Since it is
necessary for thought and is inseparable from what we are. And yet, language is bound to
a concept of truth that can be understood only within a linguistic framework. Since we

cannot speak about absolute Truth (with a capital T) as Descartes imagined, the notion of

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truth does not make any sense for Davidson unless we are considering it within a
language. Hence, if one gives up the use of language, one would never be able to
compare conceptual schemes and thus see in what sense they differ one from each other.
Moreover, the criteria of identity and individuation of a thing are an essential part of one's
having the concept of that thing given in the linguistic network which covers the world.
For instance, if two observers ﬁom Quine's "Gavagai-Rabbit" example cannot determine
whether they see the same thing or two different things, i.e., if they do not have a concept
about what appears to their eyes, there is no way of knowing what that thing is.
Similarly, Davidson argues that if no criteria of individuation for conceptual schemes are
available, then the very idea of conceptual scheme is rendered unintelligible and
conceptual relativism collapses.

In this respect, Davidson refers to two somewhat different assumptions, one made
by Kuhn, who states that scientists engaged at work within different worlds set up by rival
paradigms are subjected to the breakdown of communication, the other made by
Strawson, who imagines possible non-actual worlds very different from the one we know
and that can be described by using our system of concepts only by changing the familiar
pattem of distribution of truth values over sentences. And Davidson argues that since
“there is at most one world, these pluralities are metaphorical or merely imagined" (my
emphasis, "Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p. 187).

Ontological views are structured by conceptual schemes inherently tied to a
speciﬁc language and treated as distinct from the corresponding things that ﬂesh them
out. A conceptual scheme is applied to systematize, organize, and divide up a given

content and to face the tribunal of existent entities in terms of predictive power or ﬁtness

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with what counts as the reality on a wide range of interpretations from passing show of
experience (sense-data, sensory promptings, surface irritations, etc) to the world (the
universe or nature) ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", pp. 191-192). In consequence, were
reality relative to a scheme, there would be as many realities as there are schemes, rather
than the one reality that we commonly share. And yet, Davidson contends that such
relativist conception which assume the plurality of worlds there have no way of selecting
a single linguistic pattern because we never know which scheme covers or represents
reality correctly. The point is that ontologic models competing each other are just
mistaken "metaphors" because they emphasize the idea of structuring according to a
conceptual scheme. Davidson contends that it is hard to make sense of the notion of
organizing the world seen as a "single object", unless it is understood to be ﬁlled up like a
closet where we keep our clothes in a speciﬁc order. Were one required to put order in a
closet, one must rearrange the things in it. Be we would be bewildered by the question,
"how would you organize the Paciﬁc Ocean?". Davidson rhetorically responds,
"straighten out its shores, perhaps or relocates its islands, or destroy its ﬁsh" ("Idea of
Conceptual Scheme", p. 192). Obviously, it makes no sense to think that the stuff of the
world as a whole can be treated like this, though this is precisely what conceptual
schemes are claimed to do while structuring things. Analogously, the failure of
translation is intelligible only when it refers to some local breakdown in the process of
matching some range of extensional predicates, and presupposes a general comprehensive
background of successful linguistic calibration is in place. Were we unable to translate at
all, either because of cultural idiosyncrasy or linguistic indeterminacy, we simply could

not make sense of there being a language. And Davidson concludes that the metaphor of

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organizing the closet of nature will not supply a "criterion of languagehood that does not
depend on, or entail the translability into a familiar idiom" ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme",
p 192).

An even more obvious difficulty occurs when we shift from the metaphysical
collection of world-irnageries to the problem of experience. The question becomes "how
could something be a language that organizes only experiences, sensations, surface
irritations, or sense-data? And Davidson ironically added, "surely knives and forks,
railroads and mountains, cabbages and kingdoms also need organizing" ("Idea of
Conceptual Scheme", p.192). Undeniably, the idea of facing the tribunal of experience in
terms of being true or false about facts expresses a different view on the nature of
evidence. Though, Davidson argues that such empiricist expressions designed to bring
about a merely perceived reality are as irrelevant as the rationalist concepts, since they
add nothing to either test a conceptual scheme or render it more intelligible.

The dualism between conceptual scheme and empirical content, world-views and
cues or, simply, theory and data is described, by Davidson as irremediably impregnated
with the foundationalist thesis that we can "uniquely allocate empirical content sentence
by sentence", and is utterly rejected as a dangerous dogma of empiricism ("Idea of
Conceptual Scheme", p. 189, see also "The Myth of the Subjective", in Relativism,
Interpretation and Confrontation, 1989, p 162). It is called the third and, perhaps the
last dogma, and appears to him as the distinctive bastion left to empiricism. This dualism
follows from the thesis that our knowledge of the world is mediated by such
epistemological devices as "intuitions" or "raw feelings". Based on this distinction, one

could imagine alternative ways in which various minds and cultures rework and organize

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the neutral content which appears as the “uninterpreted given” or the ”uncategorized”
sensorial ﬂow. The knowing subject is described as a spectator contemplating and
recording the stimulating passing scenes in the show of the senses. What Davidson
denies is precisely the idea that different schemes or languages constitute different
patterns in which things given in experience are structured and may get an articulate
understanding. He alludes to Quine's conception of radical translation, which remains in
principle indeterminate despite the persistence of the same or observational evidence
reducible to stimulus meanings, and which depends on the distinction between an
organizing scheme and its matter understood as the stream of sensory impingements.41
Since this dualism is neither intelligible nor defensible, Davidson suggests renouncing the
puzzling notion of a conceptual scheme. Whereas Davidson contests the intelligibility of
the idea of a conceptual scheme, he must ﬁnd another modality to account for cultural
difference and otherness. For this he designs a twofold strategy of understanding as a
system of beliefs that points to an over-arching need for charity and that bears upon a
methodology of interpretation and a theory of truth. The discussion of his solution will
be my next topic.

4.23) CHARITY: INTERPRETATION OF BELIEFS AND

_"_I-I_Q_LI)ING TRUE SENTENCES"

In what follows, I will reconstruct Davidson's account of understanding other
people as a bridge resting on two rational footholds which are supported by the ground
provided by the charitable constraint to interpret people so as to ﬁnd them to be right in
most matters and as holding true beliefs most of the time. Davidson repeatedly

emphasizes the importance of his project for building a theory of belief, meaning and

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desires. But he also stresses the role played by the theory of truth in reattaching our

sentences to the world and in preserving truth value in the process of translation over the
linguistic divide. We can distinguish analytically between these two aspects, though they
are intricately related in his argument. Davidson takes certain observable aspects of
speech-behavior as evidence for the requirements of a decision theory (of choices and
preferences) and of truth-convention applicable to natural languages, and this brings
about a "uniﬁed theory of belief, meaning and desires". He says,

The story I want to tell how radical interpretation is possible should be

viewed as an informal proof that the evidence assumed available plus the

constraints on the structure of the pattern of a person's beliefs, values and

language, sufﬁce to yield an interpretive theory for understanding that

person" ("Reply to F odor and Lepore, p. 84).

We shall se that the successful application of his twofold strategy of interpretation prove
the thesis of a partial, rather than the total failure of translation.

1) Davidson derives from the meaning-holism a methodology which sorts out
degrees of beliefs, strength of attitudes and desires and meaning of utterances. On this
basis he provides an account of the complex ability to speak and understand a language.
His theory of meaning describes more than just a translation scheme: the meaning of
utterances consists in the shared beliefs, not schemes; and the meanings of the terms used
in the speech acts are employed to communicate messages. For instance, when we hear
one saying "Look at that handsome yawl!" as a ketch sails by, we may ask ourselves if
one is using the word "yawl" to describe something different from what we usually
understand by that concept. We may wonder if one is uttering the word "yawl" in the

same sense as we do, but that one has the false belief that a yawl is sailing by ("Idea of

Conceptual Scheme", p. 196).

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Here Davidson provides an "underlying methodology of interpretation" which is
based upon a charitable presupposition regarding belief systems. He assumes that Since
there is no neutral coordinate system, one can never be "in a position to judge that others
had beliefs or concepts radically different from our own" ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme",
p. 197), as well as one can never reach the absolute Truth (with a capital T).

The lingering question Davidson cannot dismiss is how, without refening to
conceptual schemes, we can ever determine that an anthropologist's view is different from
the one Shared by a native. In the case of radical translation understanding is doomed to
complete failure. On Quine's perspective, for example, we acknowledge that other people
have conceptual schemes different from ours if we fail to translate their linguistic
expression into our own. We noticed that the non-translability of the word "Gavagai"
into "Rabbit" is due to the impossibility of calibration between the contrasting ways in
which the two Speakers organize their perceptions within their different conceptual
schemes. Nonetheless, Davidson calls into question the adequacy of Quine's thesis of
indeterminacy of translation and argues that the weaker case of a mere partial failure of
interpretation is more appropriate and more likely to occur between languages.

To clear the way for a purely extensional language Quine barred the use in science
of sentences referring to wishes, feelings, emotions and thoughts. Davidson's holistic
account of interpretation starts from the elaboration of themes found in Quine's work, but
is not afraid to take up the issue of intentionality on the road "of darkness" excluded by
Quine in the "Double Standard". Davidson attempts to get at the meaning of the source-
language not by pairing single assent or dissent sentences to sensory promptings, as

Quine does; instead he counts on what a Speaker holds true on the basis of the available

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evidence provided by the interrelation between meaning and belief (see "Belief and the
Basis of Meaning", p 146).

In "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge" Davidson transposes the
interdependency of beliefs and meaning onto a causal ground. He says, "What a sentence
means depends partly on the external circumstances that cause it to win some degree of
conviction; and partly on the relations, grammatical, logical or less, that the sentence has
to other sentences held true with various degrees of conviction" ("A Coherence Theory of
Truth and Knowledge", in Truth and Interpretation, 1986, p 314). He agrees with
Putnam that "meanings ain't in the hea ", in the sense that they are not determined only
by conceptual or linguistic factors but also depends on the natural history of thoughts that
explains how the words were acquired. Davidson further considers it a mistake simply to
identify mental states like beliefs, desires, intentions or meanings with external things and
happenings. On his view, a belief is but a state of a person causally connected with the
evidence out-there and as interpreters we are compelled to suppose that the others' beliefs
are similarly determined as ours. This leads to a relative overlapping of states of mind
between different individuals and supplies the intersubj ective premise for their reaching
agreement. Davidson points out that "your utterance means what mine does if belief in its
truth is systematically caused by the same events and objects" ("A Coherence Theory of
Truth and Knowledge", p. 318). In order to understand others' verbal responses, the
radical interpreter must apply a charitable procedure which imposes the constraint of
belief-attribution to speakers of a source-language in a way that maximizes, or optimizes
rational agreement (see "Truth an Meaning", p. 27, "Radical Interpretation", p.134,

"Thought and Talk", p 169, "Idea of Conceptual Scheme", pp. 196-197).

155

Linguistic communication mediated by translation may be successful on two
grounds: ﬁrst, when the set of sentences held true in the source-language is also held true
in the target-language, and second, when there is a common ontological ground for the
criteria of differentiation and individuation of things. Davidson addresses the ﬁrst issue
but pays little or no attention to the latter. However, to strengthen his claim, he must
explain howl could know that the beliefs I hold true are, in fact, true. As Davidson is not
primarily concerned with empirical support, he thinks that the evidence for a belief comes
from its coherence with the system of beliefs to which it belongs. Therefore, from a
coherentist perspective, he may say that our beliefs are in general compatible with the
holistic pattern we Share. Since they fulﬁll the condition of being supported by numerous
other beliefs and there is a presumption in favor of their truth, the nature of beliefs
consists of being truthful most of the time. As he puts it, "the presumption increases the
larger and more signiﬁcant the body of beliefs with which a belief coheres..." ("A
Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge", p. 319).

2) The foregoing considerations lead us to the second foothold of Davidson's
concept of understanding which is bound to the principle of charity. In this respect,
Davidson adopts a modiﬁed version of Tarski's theory of truth which, in order to be used
in the interpretation of actual speakers' utterances, is rendered applicable to natural
languages. In fact, what speakers hold true brings about their beliefs which are conveyed
by the meanings of their sentences. One may be interested in how it is episterrrically
possible to speak in true sentences or theories about the inﬁnity of the universe, or to say
that a way of life takes a certain course or simply that I feel cold drops of rain on my

forehead. Notwithstanding, Davidson precludes any reference to conceptual schemes that

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structure the world, facts, or any piece of evidence. He thinks that no thing can make our

theories or sentences true. All we need instead is to make use of Tarski's "Convention 7"
which stipulates a condition of adequacy for formalized languages and suggests,
according to Davidson, "an important feature common to all the specialized concepts of
truth" ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p. 194-5). Hence we are urged to consider its

_ extended application to natural languages and to connect truth with fairly simple attitudes
of speakers and on this basis to extract an account of translation and interpretation
("Radical Interpretation", p. 134). An example of this sort is the sentence "My forehead
is cold" is true if and only if my forehead is cold. Or, in Tarski's own terms,

(1) "'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white."

This sentence is recognized as trivially true and therefore there is no need for recourse to
facts or material evidence. On this view, the totality of sentences like (I) uniquely
determines the extension of the concept of truth for English.

Thus, Tarski generalized this condition and made of Convention T a formal test
for theories of truth. Hence a satisfactory theory of truth for a language L must entail, for
every sentence s of L, a theorem of the form "s is true if and only if p", where "s" is
replaceable by descriptions of s, and "p" by S itself if L is English, and by a translation of
S into English, if L is not English but, let's say, Romanian. For instance the sentence:

(2) "'Zapada este alba' is true if and only if snow is white."
Consequently, a truth theory is extensionally adequate if and only if all T-sentences like
this one it entails are true.

Davidson supposes that the evidence available is that speakers of the language to

be interpreted hold various sentences to be true at certain times and under Speciﬁc

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circumstances ("Radical Interpretation", p. 135). On the one hand, the

T-sentences become:

(I) "'Ninge' is true-in-Romanian when spoken by x at time t if and only if it is snowing
near x at t."

On the other hand, the evidence is given in the form:

(E) Vasile belongs to the Romanian speech community and Vasile holds true 'Ninge' on
Sunday morning at 9 o'clock and it is snowing near Vasile on Sunday morning at 9
o'clock".

The appeal to the membership to a speech community suggests that the same theories of
interpretation work for all speakers of the same language.

In general, a (ﬁnite) theory T is a truth theory for language L if and only if, for
each sentence E of L, T entails a T-sentence of the form:

(3) "E is true-in-L if and only P"
Therefore a theory T is extensionally and implicitly materially adequate if the condition
that P translates E is fulﬁlled.”

On this point Fodor and Lepore (Holism-A Shapper's Guide, 1992, Chap. 3)
noticed a serious shortcoming. Their objection is that we can contrive cases of
extensional adequacy by pairing each sentence in L with any materially equivalent
sentence regardless of what it means. For example, a truth theory for English may entail
T sentence of the form (H9:

(It? "'Snow is white' is true in English if and only if grass is green."
To do justice to Davidson we must recognize that in "Radical Interpretation" (p.

138) he shows himself to be aware of such possibilities when he thinks of rephrasing

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Convention T without appeal to the concept of translation.43 He also agrees that a theory

of truth is still acceptable if it entails, for every sentence s of the object language, a
sentence of the form: "s is true if and only if p", where "p" is replaced by any sentence
that is true if and only ifs is ("Radical Interpretation", p 134). Hence he gives up the
requirement that what replaces p must translate s. In consequence one may also say for
instance "'Snow is white' is true in English if and only if "2+2=4", or else. Nonetheless,
Davidson is conﬁdent that a satisfactory theory of truth will not produce such anomalous
T-sentences, though they are possible ("Radical Interpretation", p 138). He demands that
the criteria of success for a meaning theory be deﬁned in terms of its adequacy
conditions. This implies that a "radical interpreter" with no prior knowledge of L must be
plausibly able to identify the adequacy of a meaning theory for L. The interdependence of
belief and meaning is assumed by Davidson in this way: "a speaker holds a sentence to be
true because of what the sentence (in his language) means, and because of what he
believes" ("Radical Interpretation", p 134). Such an interpreter should rely on evidence
that does not assume knowledge of meaning or beliefs and can a fortiori confuse an
"elephant in the refrigerator" as an orange, a yawl with a ketch, etc.). But this mistaken
pattern would be possible only if one takes T-sentences to be interpreted in isolation and
not in the holistic constraint elicited by appropriate formal and empirical restrictions,
such as the consistency of a theory as a whole and all the proofs which apply to the
particular T-sentence and to all other sentences. Then one would be able to see the place
of sentences within the language as a whole in order to understand the role of each
signiﬁcant part of the sentence and to know about the logical connections between the

sentence at stake and others. If the holistic constraint is adequate, Davidson assumes that

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"each T-sentence will in fact yield an acceptable interpretation ("Radical Interpretation",

p.139)

Henceforth, Davidson purports, ﬁrst, to reach the world via truth ftmctions, and,
secondly recommends the charity principle as the way to build a bridging understanding
between people. In the case of people from the same speech community, it is more
obvious that the same interpretations are meaningful to them. When they Speak different
languages the problems of translation complicate the conditions of agreement on
meanings. Davidson wants a theory that satisﬁes the formal constraints of a theory of
truth, and that maximizes or optimizes agreement in the sense of construing individuals as
holding true and right beliefs "as far as we can tell, as often as possible" ("Radical
Interpretation", p. 136). However, Davidson's advice is to avoid the claim that agreement
would bear upon a kind of intelligence that might turn out to be nothing else than a false
supposition. We should be aware that to consider that understanding rests on the
charitable assumption of a human intrinsic rationality is to be taken at our peril. The only
way to interpret the utterances and other behavioral aspects of an alien being as rational,
for instance, as having thoughts and commitments or as being capable of communicating
by saying something, is to reveal a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our
standards. The method is to solve the interdependence of beliefs and meaning by holding
belief constant as far as possible and assigning truth conditions to sentences of the alien
language that makes native speakers seem rational according to our own standards
whenever possible. Davidson defends this procedure by saying that "disagreement and
agreement alike are intelligible only against a background of massive agreement"

("Radical Interpretation", p. 137). When this principle is applied to language and to

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understanding native speech acts (whether or not through an interpretive inter-mediation),
"the more sentences we conspire to accept or reject (...), the better we understand the rest,
whether or not we agree upon them" ("Radical Interpretation", p. 137).

One may wonder how Davidson could reject Quine's recommendation to
eliminate the words referring to beliefs, intentions and desires whenever possible?
Davidson somewhat ironically makes the point that there is nothing to gain from the
repudiation of the idiom of "propositional attitudes". He imagines the authority of a
"Minister of Scientiﬁc Language" who demands that "the new man" talk only in
behavioral terms of "physiological states and happenings that are assumed to be more or
less identical with the mental riff and raff". The question is how could one tell if this is a
new language or the shiny new phrases about "physiological stirrings" presumably
borrowed from the old repudiated vocabulary may still "play the role of the messy"
mentalist concepts? The retention of old expressions undermines the basis of the
judgement that the new scheme is the same as, or different from the old one.

Finally, against Quine's advice, Davidson sends his radical interpreter to venture
into the "darkness" of the propositional attitude to capture the nature of meaning and
beliefs. Thus, he ﬁnds ill-suited the quasi-behaviorist notion of stimulus-meaning, and
considers that understanding must be bound by the quasi-mentalist idea of holding a
sentence true (see "Idea of Conceptual Scheme", pp. 188-189, "Radical Interpretation", p.
23 5). Insofar as he claims that a correct interpretation of one's speech must be possible in
principle and must remain publicly accessible, he insinuates that a kind of Cartesian
Vision has inﬁltrated Quine's view.

Davidson concludes that what has been presented by conceptual relativism as a

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new discovery, namely that truth is dependent upon the conceptual scheme, "has not been
shown to be anything more than the pedestrian and familiar fact that the truth of a
sentence is relative to (amongst other things) the language to which it belongs" (my
emphasis). We may generalize his conclusion saying that Kuhn's scientiﬁc practitioners
divided by paradigms, as well as natives and Winchian social scientists or Quinean
lexicographers "instead of living in different worlds... may, like those who need
Webster’s dictionary, be only words apart" ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p. 189).
Therefore, from the vantage point of a "representation-free conception of interpretation"
Davidson forces the conclusion that the relativist gallery of world-pictures, differently
systematized and structumd by conceptual frames imposed upon them, is unintelligible.
To make sense of the notion of difference or sameness, his radical interpreter must step
into the only picture everyone can afford - that is, the world (with small w) and this is as
objective as can be. Of course, this is not the ultimate Reality or the Absolute Truth, the
great Landscape contemplated by Descartes's God. The consolation is that this is all we
can get. The radical interpreter's own language is the only home-language. AS Putnam
observed, it is "one language in which he gives the truth conditions for every sentence in
every language he claims to be able to understand" ("Truth and Convention", in
Relativism, Interpretation and Conﬁontation, 1989, p. 180)."’4
334) THE VALUE AND LIMITS OF DAVIDSONIAN CHARITY

At this point, I must conclude this discussion by assessing the strengths and
weaknesses of the Davidsonian principle of charity. It was my strategy to present his way
of understanding other people as a bridge resting on two main foundations which are

supported by the ground provided by the principle of charity: the ﬁrst foundation is

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represented by a theory of truth and the second by a theory of belief and meaning. On this

basis, Davidson ﬁnds support for the thesis of a partial, rather than the total failure of
translation. Hence, on the one hand, Davidson insists that if we want to understand
others we must interpret people so as to ﬁnd them right in most matters and take most of
their beliefs to be correct. Although, admittedly, speakers may be at times mistaken (in
fact, logically, p is true only if p can be true or false), they hold true sentences most of the
time and the inferences they draw must be mainly the right or normatively appropriate
ones ("Thought and Talk", p. 168). The general policy "to choose truth conditions that do
as well as possible in making Speakers hold sentences true when (according to the theory
and the theory builder's view of the facts) those sentences are true." ("Belief and the Basis
of Meaning", p. 152) Davidson describes truth as relative to a language, and yet this is all
objectivity we can reasonably hope for. Attributions of beliefs are intersubj ectively
veriﬁable as public interpretations of the same kind of evidence available. The social
theory of interpretation is rendered possible by intersubjectively weaving a plurality of
private belief structures into a social factory of belief-network which is built "to take up
the slack between sentences held true by individuals and sentences true (or false) by
public standards" ("Belief and the Basis of Meaning", p.153). In conclusion, charity is
not an option, but a condition to have a workable theory and to construe a partial
translation bridge for interlinguistic communication ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p.
197)

On the other hand, the understanding of behavioral attitudes requires that we
interpret people's beliefs as being preponderantly rational ("Thought and Talk", p. 159) as

a preconditions for assigning a reasonable "intentional content" to one's utterances and to

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the mental states they presumably express. From this perspective, charity (molded by the

idea of rationality) is aimed at solving the problem of the interdependence of belief and
meaning. It holds beliefs constant as far as possible and explains the coherence of a
pattern of beliefs by requiring that the action to be explained must be considered
reasonable in the light of the assigned desires or beliefs which also must cohere with each
other.45 The beliefs and desires that explain an action must be such that anyone who
shares that belief and desire will have reason to act in that way rather than in another
("Radical Interpretation", p 137, "Thought and Talk", p. 159).

Davidson suggests repeatedly that successful understanding depends upon the
appropriate use of the principle of charity. This is, after all, an exercise that one cannot
avoid if one is to understand a speaker of an alien language. It consists ﬁrst, in reading
"some of the norms of the interpreter into the actions and speech of those he interprets"
(Reply to Fodor and Lepore, p. 80), and second, in supposing that on the basis of
coherence or holistic adequacy of beliefs most of the held beliefs must be generally true.

However, Davidson is fully aware that "no simple theory can put a Speaker and
interpreter in perfect agreement, and so a workable theory must from time to time assume
error on the part of one or the other" ("Thought and Talk", p 169). In order to understand
native utterances, the radical interpreter has to presume each of them to be true. Here
arises the need for charity, which directs revision of each succeeding sentence toward
maximizing agreement in conversation with the informant. This requires an
ethnographer, for instance, to justify the native speakers' holding true beliefs most of the
time. But, provided that we are willing to continue making adjustments of the

interpretive theory, the question Davidson must face is this: if we are bound by the

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methodological constraint to maximize agreement, at what point does this imply the need
to maximize the rationality attributed to other? The problem of deciding what establishes
the limit for charitable understanding, that is, when to attribute error or irrationality and
beyond what point is it fair to cease doing that, becomes a dramatically important one.
Undeniably, it would be implausible to carry charity all the way, up to the complete
elimination of attribution of error or irrationality. The foregoing considerations suggest
the necessity of setting some reasonable limits to the ascription of reasonableness".
Otherwise, whenever we observe mistakes in the speech of our informant we take them as
inadequacies of our own interpretation and we will be ready, in frustration and
humiliation, to make corrections and reﬁnement without limit in our interpretive scheme.
AS Henderson also claims "any one set of attributions of inconsistency and rationality
can be dispensed with by making sufﬁciently special adjustments in the interpretive
scheme that lead to the attribution (Interpretation and Explanation, p 35). Therefore,
after all, we must acknowledge the risk of idealizing our subjects by ascribing to them a
perfect rationality. It has been noticed that on Davidson's view, the interpreter who aims
to understand why an agent chose to act in a Speciﬁc way must suppose that the agent is a
reasonable person and this may involve an artiﬁcial and inaccurate rationalization of
thoughts and beliefs attributed to him. Root and other commentators claim a twin
justiﬁcation for doing so. Interpretation is guided by the norms and principles of a
charitable rationality and minds must be seen as rational for the most part, "because we
cannot but understand them so" ("Davidson and the Social Sciences" in Truth and
Interpretation, 1986, pp. 227-8). The idea of an intrinsic rationality of the mind would

push Davidson to a position stronger than he actually defends when he responds to his

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critics, and closer to neo-rationalist perspective on charity as transcendental argument.
As we shall see next, Martin Hollis subscribes to such an assumption in terms of
substantive rationality, which is admittedly a replica of the Cartesian autonomous reason.
In consequence, he builds up a cross-culturally bridging understanding in terms of
rational bridgeheads that guide the interpretation into the maze of native language and
anchors the translation. However, when Davidson turns to this issue, he explicitly
precludes the interpretation of the principle of charity as having a transcendental status (a
view imputed to him by F odor and Lepore in "Is Radical Interpretation Possible?"). He
contends that he never claimed "that radical interpretability is a condition of
interpretability" or "that every language is radically interpretable". He argued only that
radical interpretation is possible, not that it must be possible. This implies that a radical
interpreter is in the "epistemic position" that merely "arguably provides the sufficient
evidence for interpretation" and therefore does not exhaust the evidence available (Reply
to J. Fodor and E. Lepore, pp. 77-8). Therefore, the prerequisite of Davidsonian charity
can be seen as a transcendental constraint upon understanding others only if it is unfairly
pushed toward neo-rationalist perspective, a step he is reluctant to make.

And yet, Davidson faces a more serious objection. Given the central position held
by the principle of charity in Davidson's methodology of interpretation, it requires a more
clear articulation. Otherwise, its meaning remains too ambiguous to justify its ambition
to reconstruct the rationality of speakers. For now, let us just notice that Davidson still
owes a conceptual reconciliation of charity (most beliefs are not mistaken, but true) and a
formal condition of a theory (Tarski's T -c0nvention). Until he provides the "missing link"

between the two footholds of his methodology of interpretation, the idea of a charitable

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rationality underlying his anti-relativist program, remains just a desirable conceptual
alternative to a Cartesian neutral ground of Reason or to a metaphysical "common
coordinate system".

These problems encountered by Davidson's view of charity with its two main
facets, interpretation and holding truth regarding beliefs, justiﬁes skepticism regarding
the promise of charity for bridging between different cultures. A thinker of Humean
persuasion would surely urge Davidson to Show why it is not more likely to believe that
we are allegedly mistaken most of the time. On this View, the question is what warrants
the arguable claim that "holding true sentences" is inherent to the nature of the mind?
Moreover, on what basis could one assume that other people are more or less remote
replicas of one’s own pattern of thought? The point is that when we try to understand
foreign utterances and actions we should not impose constraints which are simply rooted
in our own biases and prejudices. And charity is no exception, unless it is justiﬁed by a
transcendental argument, a step Davidson is not ready to accept. If he would go this far,
he would still need to provide the argument. Insofar as there is no binding reason (as
Descartes's divine warrant against the evil genius) to exclude, for instance, the
assumption that beliefs are massively mistaken, instead of being true, the skeptic must be
taken seriously. Since we cannot rely on God's benevolence, we have turn to ourselves
and make our attempts at understanding as believable as we can. And if we are to be
trusted as genuinely looking for truth, the moral is that all hypotheses must be open in
principle to discussion.

In sum, the limits of the principle of charity point to the need for a kind of

philosophical commitment that Quine and Davidson are not willing to make. A stronger

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version of charity might be particularly inviting at this juncture; nevertheless, this does

not eliminate the difﬁculty since it lacks the appropriate conceptual support needed for its
defense. As we shall see in the next chapter, a move in this direction is made by Martin
Hollis who expressly aims to restore the prerogatives of the Cartesian Reason and provide
a "mental universal language" by using his transcultural concept of "bridgehead". His
universalist ground of rational beliefs anchors the possibility of interpretation of native

language and offers guidance through unknown cultural landscapes.

Chapter 5) MARTIN H 01.jpg;
THE RATIONAL BRIDGEHEADS OF UNDERSTANDING
Davidson's principle of charity is stronger than Quine's, but it remains an
empirical condition for understanding others. To overcome this weak aspect of charity
one might step back to Descartes. This chapter will take this direction by discussing
Martin Hollis's strong claim regarding the substantive notion of reason. First I will make
a brief exposition of his treatment of possibility of understanding across cultures
(including some anthropological references). Second, I will assess the strength of his
position that makes a transcendental turn and I will make clear the corresponding
implications for the argument of this dissertation. In particular, it will become obvious, I
hope, why we need to search further in the pursuit of our goal, why it make sense to turn
to Habermas. In the last section I will Show where I stand in the argument by saying what
I conclude from the earlier chapters and what I hope to get from Habermas.
5.1) REASON AND UNIVERSAL UNERSTANDING
My goal here is to present Hollis's substantive concept of rationality relative to
some innate intellectual faculties universally Shared by humans and scrutinize how he
justiﬁes his unusually strong concept of understanding. His explicit aim is the restoration
of autonomous and self-sustaining Reason in a traditional fashion, which calls to mind
Descartes's attempt to go beyond "custom and example". In the same manner, Hollis
argues that "cultural imagery" is not enough to provide knowledge and, in consequence,
he urges the abandonment of the relativist commitments lately developed in the sociology
of knowledge. In particular, he targets the so called "strong programmes", which are

intended to deprive the Cartesian Reason of its traditional prerogatives as the

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"portrnanteau for the rules of proof, which aid the mind in securing a priori knowledge,
and for the canons of empirical evidence, used in judging the truth and beliefs against the
facts of the independent world" (Social Destruction of Reality, in Rationality and
Relativism", 1982, p. 68). Winch's relativism of understanding is a possible target of
Hollis's accusation of being a "lethal dry rot" allegedly resulting in "the social destruction
of reality" (see Social Destruction of Reality").

Hollis wants to give an account of the mental life of social actors and to
understand their actions in a way which turns on the concept of rationality. In this respect
he prefers to support a stronger position regarding understanding than Davidson's view of
interpretation centered on the notion of charity. We remember that Davidson assumes
that the interpreter who aims to understand an agent must apply the constraint of charity
by rationalizing the thoughts and beliefs attributed to an agent and by treating his action
as reasonable in order to explain why he chose to act as he did. By contrast, Hollis's idea
of human understanding recalls a Kantian conception of the mind, and may be illustrated
by a metaphor suggested by Kuhn in a different context ("Social Destruction of Reality",
p. 112). People may wear different spectacles at different times and places just as
cultures may vary in their ways of categorizing experience, but we must ﬁrst have eyes
without which we could never see; that is simply to say that human reason is necessary
and universal. Thus, Hollis is close to Root and other thinkers who claim that the norms
and principles of interpretation in general are norms of rationality. On this view, minds
must be seen as rational for the most part, "Because we cannot but understand them so"

("Davidson and the Social Sciences", in Truth and Interpretations, 1986, p. 227-228). In

similar way, Hollis contends that all understanding is based upon "rationality

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assumptions" about some set of beliefs universally shared by all people irrespective to
their peculiar cultural or linguistic framework. Hence he uses a strong notion of reason
which is transculturally valid and described as an integral part of the notion of a
"bridgehead", which refers to a set of rational beliefs which are universal among mankind
and can be speciﬁed a priori. From this perspective, charity appears as a sort of
transcendental argument that suggests what Michael Root calls the "principle of
humanity". This implies that if understanding is to be possible, there has to be (and
Hollis uses Strawson's phrase) "a massive central core of human thinking which has no
history". Hence he postulates that there must be culture free "bridgeheads", which are
"percepts and concepts shared by all who can understand each other, together with
judgements which all subscribe to." ("Social Destruction of Reality", p 75).

Admittedly, Hollis supports the idea of transculturally valid judgement based
upon a concept of reason inspired by Descartes. His goal, at variance with Quine's thesis
of the indeterminacy of translation, is to revive the modern idea of a universal language of
the mind. Hollis ﬁnds the idea of intersubjectivity urged by Davidson for the success of
radical interpretation as being too weak to sustain a valid process of cross-cultural
understanding.46 In this respect, he deems it necessary to continue the Cartesian ideal of
Cartesian inspiration and quotes from Vico:

There must be in the nature of human institutions a mental language common to

all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human

social life and expresses it with as many diverse modiﬁcations as these same

things may have diverse aspects ("Social Destruction of Reality", p. 86).

Hollis claims that the idea of bridgehead refers to universal rational beliefs that

function as anchors in the development and reﬁnement of the translation scheme and

provide guidelines for the interpreter entering the "maze" of a native language. On these

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premises, an anthropologist may suppose that he shares with his subject the same
"bridgeheads" and thus he can understand them in a way consistent with the requirement
of the principle of charity. He may be willing to regard the natives’ sentences about the
surrounding environment as rational and true in the most part. Nonetheless, if the speaker
keeps quiet and refuses to make any statements "about the cat on the mat and the caw in
the corn which can be translated to yield truth, the anthropologist has no way into the
maze." ("Reason and Ritual", in Rationality, 1970, p 34). If there is no possible
conversation, charity would be of a little help to negotiate meanings or to make sense of a
linguistic behavior. Then the only way to learn what is happening in the mind of the
subjects would be for the ﬁeld researcher to ﬁnd introspectively those universally held
beliefs which can help him to set a translation scheme independent of dialog. Of, course,
Hollis admits that it would be an exaggeration to assume that all commonly held beliefs
can be a reasonable or relevant basis for translation. But those which do express the
holder's understanding of reality are "the enquirer's road into unknown territory" ("Social
Destruction of Reality", p. 76, also "Reason and Ritual", p. 222).

The anthropologist should focus his charitable treatment on the informant's
utterances, "whose situations of use" can be speciﬁed by determining some external
determinants of beliefs such as sense stimulations which prompt assent or dissent.
Further Hollis presupposes that on the basis of evidence provided in such simple
perceptual situations the anthropologist can expect that the informant is likely to hold
consistent beliefs. He says,

Formally speaking, to know on evidence e that S believes p involves knowing

that, on evidence 6, it is more likely that S believes p than S believes anything

inconsistent with p, and that e can be relied on. This requires ﬁxed rules for
judging between rival interpretations and, if e depends in turn on e', requires e' (or

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whatever e' depends on) be secure too (Social Destruction of Reality, p. 73).

Therefore understanding native beliefs is made possible by the "ﬁxed rules" of
deductive rationality which are expressed by bridgeheads in combination with a reliable
perceptual evidence described by observational sentences. The two aspects are
mentioned by Hollis in a way which would vindicate Quine's idea of translation as
referring to the empirical basis of sensory impingements and the cross-cultural validity of
logic. In this respect, Hollis assumes that the judgement of likelihood rests, ﬁrst, upon
empirical evidence consisting in the available bundles of "stimulus meanings", which
must be reliable and common for both the anthropologist and the natives. It rests also
upon the norms of rationality which are equally binding for all human minds. Hence the
anthropologist judging the probability of rival hypotheses may logically infer the
conclusion they ought to believe p and to reject non-p.

Consequently, the anthropologist must begin constructing a translation scheme by
focusing on the relation between the world and interpretations of particular utterances in
the source-language which are more reasonable in the light of his own experience. For
Hollis, charity makes the working of one's mind generalizable to others. He states this in
the so called reﬂexivity thesis according to which one can develop a sense of the thoughts
of others by introspecting his own mental structures and contents. This thesis implicitly
refers to underlying universals such as the rational principles which guide the belief
formation of natives because they are basically similar to those that guide the
ethnographer. The common codiﬁcation of thought guarantees that the social scientist
will be able to identify the norms of rationality shared by his informant, just because they

are the same as his. Henceforth, he should be able to make interpretations of the native’s

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overt behavior in a way which would prevent the likelihood of conﬂict with later
interpretations. According to Hollis, "this set consists of what a rational man cannot fail
to believe in simple perceptual Situation, organized by rules of coherent judgement, which
a rational man cannot fail to subscribe to" ("Social Destruction of Reality", p. 74).
Therefore interpretation is guided by rationality assumptions which rest on a bridgehead
and can be eventually modiﬁed or reﬁned if their change would not violate or "sabotage"
the bridgehead.

In the light of Hollis's strong claims about the rational nature of humanity,
Davidson appears needlessly cautious and too modest. Davidson admits there are cases
when the understanding between speakers of different languages breaks down, that is,
especially when one language contains "simple predicates" whose extensions are matched
by "non-simple predicates" or by "no-predicates" at all in other languages. However, he
admits that a partial translation is possible and this brings about a common ontology for
the both languages provided that we have a previous recognition of the criteria of identity
and individuation needed to identify objects and their relations of similarity and
difference ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p. 192). In consequence, given a common
basis for linguistic comparability, we are able to map sentences from different languages.

In addition, we can realize how systems of beliefs contrast with each other or are similar,
and to what extent meanings of different utterances correspond in the process of cross-
linguistic communication.

According to Hollis's neo-rationalist perspective, the notion of bridgehead
provides the culture-ﬂee framework for a translation scheme. He says, "[t]he force of

calling a set of utterances a bridgehead is that it serves to deﬁne the standard meaning of

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native terms and so to make it possible to understand utterances used in more ambiguous
situations" ("The Limits of Irrationality", in Rationality, 1970, p. 215). Therefore, an
anthropologist must discern the relations among everyday beliefs including those that
determine if the natives share and honor our notion of inferential validity (deduction and
induction), logical consistency, coherence, and the broader notion of "having a good
reason for a belief".

There seem to be two distinct concerns here: on the one side, scientists are hold
accountable to the norms of rationality which guide the research activity of interpreting
another culture; on the other side, there are local standards of rationality that are
immersed in the different ways of life being interpreted and consist in the practical
guidelines by which people live in their culttu'al setting. The ﬁrst is a problem of social
science, the latter is primarily a matter of a style of living. In this respect, Hollis (also
Steven Lukes) agrees with Root who maintains that minds are intrinsically rational and
that the criteria of rationality must be universal in order to yield understanding: "The
objects that an interpretive theory describes are objects that are held accountable to the
very norms to which the theory's descriptions are held accountable" ("Davidson and
Social Science", p. 281). If this is true, then how could we explain the strange case of
deductive irrationality revealed by Evans Pritchard's discovery of the Zande belief in
witchcraft? We remember that Winch used this example to prove the contextual
character of irrationality and to illustrate the methodological mistake of applying the rules
of our logic to natives who persist in disregarding these rules. The situation is as follows.
The Azande were convinced that all witches carried in their bellies a small blackish

substance. If someone had been accused of witchcraft and subsequently killed, the family

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of the victim could perform an autopsy to determine whether the justice has been served
properly. Had a blackish substance been discovered in the intestines of the deceased
during the autopsy, that meant that the man deserved to die. However if no "witchcraft
substance" was found that was a proof that the man was unjustly executed but he and his
family would be vindicated. Although the vindication was no consolation for him, it was
nevertheless very important for his family because the Azande also held that the
witchcraft substance was inherited from fathers to sons and from mothers to daughters.
Evans Pritchard notices that the inheritance of witchcraft substance would determine that
even a single positive result necessarily implicates the whole same-sex ancestral line. Or
there were many autopsies proving that every Azande would have either on the father line
or the mother-line one who was a witch. The logical conclusion is that all Azande are
witches. But the Azande vehemently deny that even when Evans-Pritchard showed them
the sense of the argument and made them understand that if they do not accept the

obvious conclusion and yet maintain the inheritance of witchcraft, then they will be led to

a contradiction (see Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, pp. 21-24, 42-44).

The neo-rationalist would ﬁrst check the translation, but if he discovers no
mistakes in pairing the sentences of the two languages, then charity is of no help and he
has no choice but to regard examples like the one described above as a case of genuine
irrationality. In order to preclude the serious accusation of holding contradictory and thus
false beliefs, he might have supposed in the early stages of his interpretive attempts that
the natives share another kind of logic or patterns of belief-coherence previously
unknown to us. However, the neo-rationalist thesis of reﬂexivity presupposes an identity

between the criteria of rationality shared by anthropologist and the natives. In particular

1 76
Hollis's procedure (partly endorsed by Lukes) would presumably be to evaluate actors'

beliefs on the a priori basis of "the bridgehead of true rational beliefs" to which should
provide for universal agreement. Hence, a successful translation and interpretation of
beliefs must presuppose "what a rational man" cannot fail to believe in simple perceptual
situations, organized by "rules of coherent judgement" to which a "rational man" cannot
fail to subscribe. He thinks that there are context-free "tests" for whether a belief is
objectively rational and that there is a "minimum score" which all beliefs must attain and
a "maximum score" which "good reasons" must meet. Consequently, subjective rational
beliefs may not satisfy those criteria and irrational beliefs must fail. When the
interpretation reaches the limit of intelligibility the anthropologist has to apply the label
of irrationality.

Hollis is convinced that application of his version of the principle of charity
should be enough to determine everyday life meanings used by natives in their ordinary
language and so to make possible communication with them on the basis of a set of rough
equivalences which supply a necessary common ground upon which all subsequent
translation schemes depend.“ On this view, we construct translations between different
cultures by focusing our attention on the relations between the world and a particular set
of reasonable utterances. The anthropologist should begin with the set of single
assent/dissent sentences "whose situations of use" can be speciﬁed relative to some
external "determinant" of beliefs like elementary pieces of speech behavior. But this is
not the whole story. The understanding of the Azande's irrational resistance in accepting
the obvious logical conclusion could bridge our culture and theirs only if we can tell if

source-language speakers observe the rules of deductive validity and identify the reasons

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they might have for insulating their contradictory belief in witchcraft.

In conclusion, Hollis recommends that a ﬁeld anthropologist work toward
understanding why alien people act and think as they do by following two kinds of
determinations of their behavior. One is external, consisting of a material determination
of beliefs like evidence or “the world”; the other is internal and consists in logical
demands regarding the relations among beliefs like coherence and consistency. In this
respect, the epistemic situation of the actual interpreter is described in terms of the
likelihood of accepting correct beliefs that are the bridgeheads of rationality. Thus, to
know on the evidence e that the subject S truly believes the proposition p, "involves
knowing that, on evidence c, it is more likely that S believes p than S believes anything
inconsistent with p, and that e can be relied on" ("Social Destruction of Reality", p 73).
Henceforth, understanding people from an alien culture must be possible on the basis of
what a rational person cannot fail to believe in a simple perceptual situation, organized
by the universal rules of coherent judgement, which one cannot disregard and still count
as rational. We have noted that Hollis consider that bridgeheads are just postulated like
axioms invested with a kind of intrinsic credibility. They must be taken for granted and
thereof are not a matter to be discovered.

In the next section will test if Hollis's transcendentalist convictions hold in the
light of criticism which tries to reveal some weaknesses of his strong notion of
"bridgehead".

5.2) CONCLUDING REMARKS: IS REASON A UNIVERSAL BRIDGEI-IEAD?

Hollis's claim that reason is a universal bridgehead shared by all cultures has been

subjected to scrutiny by friends and foes alike. Sympathetic critics like Steven Lukes

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accept the substantive foundations of rationality with minor modiﬁcations. Lukes shares
with Hollis this characterization of the bridgehead, but unlike Hollis, he uses the term in a
more empirical way and distinguishes between two different senses of rationality. The
one is universal and transcultural, and is minimally deﬁned as having criteria of truth (as
correspondence with reality) and logic, which are simply criteria of rationality. The other
is context dependent and varies from culture to culture. So, unlike Hollis, Lukes thinks
that only the idea that there must be a common core of agreement is a priori, but the
question of the contents of the bridgehead is an empirical one. This is because the issue
of the contents of the bridgehead can be reduced to the problem of how the principle of
charity is to be weighted, which is an empirical matter. This means that "assumptions"
regarding the agreement are subject to endless adjustments in furthering the charitable
process of understanding. Lukes insists that what makes better sense cannot be settled a
priori. Instead the empirical basis for agreements on a certain sort of sentence playing the
role of the bridgehead is guided by the selection of the translation results that are
pragmatically tested for their success in yielding meaningful interpretations. According
to him,

What we assume to be in the common core will be subject to endless correction

by the consequences of making such assumptions: evidence for any given

assumption comes from whether the translations that result make better sense of

what hey say and do than translations ﬂowing from alternative assumptions

("Relativism in Its Place", in Rationality and Relativism, 1892, p. 273).

Other critics, like Newton Smith, are more critical of Hollis's argument and reject
most of his transcendental enterprise. They argue that the presuppositions of basic

perceptual beliefs (low-level) and the logical grounding of communication is not an a

priori "bridgehead" but an empirical hypothesis, for which the predictions of our

 

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translation scheme give evidence. Therefore there is no reason to elevate reasonable a
posteriori conjectures into a priori presuppositions (see Newton Smith, "Relativism and
the Possibility of Interpretation", in Rationality and Relativism, 1982).

Nevertheless, Hollis contends that the "bridgehead of true and rational beliefs" is
rather "ﬁxed" than "ﬂoating". That means that there are some speciﬁc inferential
principles and stimulus-belief links that must be presupposed by interpreter in the effort
of translating. These are not conjectural, according to Hollis, but "universal among
mankind", or at least among that portion of mankind with whom we can understand,
interpret and communicate after all.

In sum, Martin Hollis expressly aims to restore the prerogatives of the Cartesian
Reason and provide a "mental universal language" by using his transcultural concept of
"bridgehead". He claims that there must be rational and true beliefs which every rational
mind must accept and which set the a priori limit to relativism. In consequence, the
anthropologist's paradox and the Munchausen trilemma, which the Winchian researcher
has to face, needs not arise. It would look as strange and inappropriate as an upheaval in
paradise.

Nonetheless, I am inclined to think that if Hollis's view provides for a neo-
rationalist version of charity, the stronger his concept of rational "bridgehead" in
comparison with the empirical pre-requisites of Davidson's position, the more vulnerable
to criticism it becomes. Hollis must prove the reality of a priori universals as conceptual
preconditions of any possible interpretation in the process of cross-cultural
communication. In fact, anthropology and sociology have found such "ﬁxed"

transcendental universals irrelevant for cultural practices. It has already been said (by

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Winch and Harman, among others) that the laws of logic offer no guidance for how to go
about revising our beliefs.

Hollis's positive conception of reason needs further conceptual support. He
cannot avoid explaining why his claim is preferable to the skeptical denial of any
transcendental constraints upon interpretation. To be persuasive, he must be clear about
what argument can be made in his support. One might refer to Chomsky's idea of
"universal linguistic ability" which has inspired Habermas’s concept of "communicative
competence". But for such a conception, we need to look beyond Hollis and to pursue the
idea of a discursive nature of rationality, which is strikingly different ﬁ'om Hollis's
substantive notion of reason. In order to overcome the objections to Hollis’s view, we
may need to look for a kind of dialogical and procedural rationality which underlies
cross-cultural understanding by drawing from Habermas' theory of communicative action.

Before passing to the exposition of the relevant features of Habermas's thought and to
assess its contribution to the problem at stake, let me make few a concluding remarks
which will show where we stand in the argument.

Hollis tries to revive the Cartesian tradition which emphasizes the transcendence
of reason at the expense of obscuring the particularities of cultures. According to the
diagnosis made by Wittgenstein, this type of philosophy is "Sick at its core" and needs a
therapeutic treatment since it disrupts language games that function in ordinary language
and violates the common sense that seems to work well enough in everyday life. He
hopes that the self-healing of philosophy would come from the direction he indicates, that
is, by observing the standards and the rules which govern the practice and belief-

formation within forms of life. And yet, were this cure to prove inadequate, he was ready

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to remove completely the whole body of thinking affected by conceptual distortion

through a radical "surgical" procedure. Although Wittgenstein's farewell to traditional
philosophy is particularly persuasive within the post-analytical tradition, there is a subtle
problem with his therapy, which is limited to the works of language: whereas he
contemplates "how the language destroys itself", as Putnam ironically observes, he leaves
the world "as it is".

From Hollis's perspective, Wittgenstein ignores judgements and standards of
rationality, which depend, on "a massive central core of human thinking which has no
history" (in Strawson's terms, quoted by Hollis). In consequence, he may contend that
Wittgenstein makes relativism inevitable and this leads to the "social destruction of
reality".

One may add that what has been forgotten in the surgical removal of rationality
was the fact that the issue of rationality addresses the deep philosophical concerns
regarding a possible bridge of mutual understanding and may restore hopes for our
assuming moral responsibility for the world in which we live. The alternative to dialogue
is the appeal to force. Therefore we have no other reasonable choice but to reconstruct
the meaning of rationality in a way that is sufficient to provide the conditions for the
possibility of dialogue and mutual understanding. Rationality must neither be an a priori
imperative as philosophers like Hollis believe, nor bound to the cynical silence of
Wittgenstein's Tractatus, but a rule of reaching agreement.

We shall see in the next chapter that Habermas provides support for the rationalist
argument regarding the self-refutation of relativism not from an abstract "subj ect-

centered-reason", but from a more subtle transcendentalist hermeneutics. His interpretive

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and historical methodology goes beyond the untranslability of languages or

incommensurability of ways of life and shows that cross-cultural understanding and self-
reﬂexive critiques are both possible and conceptually illuminating. In this respect,
Habermas's theory of communicative action goes far in the direction of initiating a way
out of relativism by providing a weak transcendental communicative rationality situated
at the cross-roads between the linguistic paradigm of the analytic tradition and continental

hermeneutics.

Chapter 6) J UR GEN HABERMAS:
COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF CROSS-
CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING

We have seen that Descartes tried unsuccessﬁrlly to secure a basis for universal
understanding between all rational beings against skeptical doubt by his appeal to a self-
sustaining and sufﬁcient Reason. The Cartesian project inspired Vico's hope to ﬁnd a
kind of "mental language", which is common to all individuals across cultures and
"uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life" (see Hollis,
"Social Destruction of Reality", p. 86). Our discussion has shown that the search for a
rationality that underlies understanding is much more complex than Descartes and his
followers envisaged in their attempt to transcend the peculiar worlds of custom and
example. Post-analytical thinkers like the later Wittgenstein and Winch have shown that
interpretation of people's behavior is relative to the use of language in the contexts of
different ways of living. Moreover, Quine’s arguments for linguistic idiosyncrasy and
inscrutability of reference provide for the indeterminacy of translation. These ideas have
undercut the Cartesian ambition to abstract rational understanding from cultural imagery,
though we have seen that they are unavoidably led to a linguistic and cultural relativism.
Davidson suggests that such views rely on the faulty idea of conceptual schemes, which
appear to him unintelligible and self-refuting. He attempts to rescue the concept of
understanding from the relativist wreckage by his appeal to the principle of charity,
which he conceives in terms of a theory of truth combined with a methodology of
interpretation of beliefs and desires.

Habermas is aware that his concept of communicative rationality must avoid

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extreme dangers: on the one side there is the "Scylla" of metaphysical projections of a
rationality that brings about a universal basis of understanding; on the other side, there is
the "Charybdis" of relativism and deconstructionism which stresses the
incommensurability of linguistic discourses and the idiosyncrasy of forms of life. His
account of understanding, with its pragmatics of language shares a common point of
departure with the post-analytical treatment of meaning. His analysis treats Speech acts
(or utterances) as the smallest units of language (in contrast to a semantics focused on the
properties of isolated sentences).48 But there is an important contrast between
Habermas's theoretical goals and the goals of the analytic philosophers. While an
empirical pragmatics is interested in description and analysis of speciﬁc elements of
language, Habermas aspires to a "universal" or "formal" pragmatics that connects a line of
questioning from Kantian universalism with a fallibilistic perspective drawing from a
posteriori social and cognitive sciences. In this respect, his view can be deﬁned as a
quasi-transcendental reconstruction of a universal communicative competence in terms
of pragmatic analysis of the pre-theoretical intuitions and implicit knowledge proper to
language use. Habermas's theory of universal pragmatics contributes to a sociological
theory of communicative action oriented toward understanding.

Unlike the Wittgensteinian tradition, which leaves the world unchanged,
Habermas does not limit himself to a descriptive reﬂection about language. Although he
shares the contemporary interest in linguistic analysis, he is not merely concerned with
"how language destroys itself", to use Putnam's phrase. Instead, he offers an unusually
broad theoretical perspective on "how parts of our culture hang together", on "what's

wrong with our culture and what might be done to make it better" (Putnam, "Between the

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New Left and Judaism", interview with G. Borradori in The American Philosopher, 1994,
p. 61). Insofar as Habermas looks for a linguistic "underpinning" of his critical theory of
social rationalization, he proposes to go beyond the world as it is. He builds up a more
positive and promising alternative based on the idea of a communicative rationality that
explores the conditions for reaching rational consensus. His theory raises the issue of the
rationalization of society in connection with the problem of moral responsibility for the
"great liabilities" of our time, such as hunger, poverty and war. In the context of the
pluralization of forms of life and individualization of lifestyles which increase the threat
of deepening social conﬂicts, Habermas's conceptual project addresses the issue of
toleration and communicative mediation between different societies by referring to the
bridging force of rationally achieved agreement. He suggests that rationality which
guides understanding across cultures and historical times should not be associated with
the monological character of repression, which eliminates the freedom of opinion. The
unity of a reason should be rather treated as the source of agreement, which bears upon
the diversity of its voices. He says, "[t]he more abstract the agreement becomes, the more
diverse the disagreements with which we can nonviolently live" (Postrnetaphysical
Thinking, 1992, p. 140).

In this chapter I will turn to Habermas in hopes of ﬁnding a non-metaphysical and
non-relativist solution to the issue at stake, and I will pursue my theoretical goals by
following his path between the rationalist unshakable foundations and the "slippery
slope" of relativism. While I will advance the argument by tracing the general nature of
Habermas's project and philosophical position, I will revisit the background of

contemporary debates on the notion of reason which sets the conceptual ﬁ'amework

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relevant for the development of his perspective. In section 6.1, I will sketch his main
philosophical themes in contrast with the positions presented so far, and provide an
overview of the argument. First, in 6.11, I will explore why Habermas's concept of
communicative rationality is so appealing and how it contributes to the aims of my
dissertation. These preliminary considerations will prepare the ground for advancing the
argument in subsection 6.12. There I will scrutinize Habermas's innovation of a
procedural concept of rationality which maintains a weak transcendental aspect, and
explain in what sense agreement is universally possible through communicative action.
We will notice that he makes the "linguistic turn" from the traditional monological
perspective on reason as emphasized by the Cartesian subject to a dialogical concept of
rationality based on the concept of communicative competence and tied to universal and
unavoidable presuppositions of argumentation.

In section 6.2, the question is this: can a conception of communicative rationality
provide for the universal possibility of cross-cultural understanding and yet remain
sensitive to cultural pluralism? In considering this question, I shall look through the
"spectacles" of Habermas’s universal pragmatics. We will examine the universal and
unavoidable presuppositions of argumentation, which still remain empirical in
Habermas's sense because they must be checked against different cultures. Giving
reasons makes possible the justiﬁcation of any claim to validity which is to be redeemed
and vindicated in speech acts. Having reconstructed the relevant features of Habermas's
concept of communicative competence I will examine in section 6.3 his theory of
discourse ethics, which is deduced from the analysis of the conceptual foundations of the

universal pragmatics. The discourse ethics is described as a cognitivist claim about the

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possibility of reaching consensus about tightness of moral norms. In section 6.4, I will
assess the context-transcendent force of Habermas concept of communicative rationality
and I will weigh different possible interpretations of his notion of “ideal speech
situation”. By doing so I will look closer at the merits and the strengths of his theoretical
contribution that aims to secure the conditions of possibility of cross-cultural
understanding on the counterfactual basis of idealizing presuppositions of speech.
6.1) COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY: AN OVERVIEW

In the what follows, my aim is to suggest in what sense Habermas addresses the
issue of this dissertation and describe the critical thrust of his concept of communicative
rationality. Before a detailed conceptual exposition, I will provide an overview of the
type of philosophical reﬂection we are offered.

6.11) PRELIMINARY REMARKS

To avoid the pitfalls of idealism and the perils of relativism, Habermas offers a
concept of communicative rationality that is postmetaphysical and nondefeatist. First, it
is postmetaphysical insofar as he gives up the metaphysical projection of reason of
traditional philosophy, and pursues a procedural notion of rationality which is deﬁned in
terms of claims to validity redeemed and vindicated in Speech acts. This notion is derived
from intersubj ective practices of everyday communication in changing historical and
cultural contexts and refers to a kind of knowledge which must be understood
fallibilistically (in contrast with immutable foundations) as reconstructed by the empirical
science of language.

Second, Habermas's conception is nondefeatist insofar as it contrasts with all

kinds of relativism (including versions advocated by Wittgenstein, Winch and Quine) that

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would undermine the basis of a critical theory of society (see M. Cooke, Language and

Reason, 1996, p. 43). We shall see that his notion of understanding based on the concept
of communicative rationality avoids falling prey to cultural or linguistic relativism by
asserting a context-transcendent notion of validity.

Habermas is a genuine dialectician who constructs his theory in a spirit of
rejecting what is no longer defensible in the tradition, and preserving what he still deems
valid though yet one-sided. In his vision of how understanding between people is
possible, Habermas restores the complexity of the issue by inquiring how social theory,
epistemology and theory of language all ﬁt together in a conception of rationality
conceived in terms of communicative action oriented toward reaching agreement. He
moves toward a comprehensive synthesis that attempts to provide for the universal
conditions of understanding. On the one hand, his notion of communicative rationality
invokes a notion of reason which, though historically situated, appears in everyday
linguistic practice and is based on strong "counterfactual idealizations" that are implicit in
the general presuppositions of communication in all societies. The reconstruction of
these presuppositions, which are the “universal conditions of possible understanding”, is
the goal of an ambitious program called “universal pragmatics”. Habermas's contention
that his pragmatic inquiries into linguistic universals which hold for all languages and
makes understanding possible bears on the problem of this dissertation. Communicative
rationality is not limited to the certain patterns of verbal behavior displayed by speakers
within particular societies, but refers to communicative practices across cultures. The
context-transcendent power of rationality draws upon a concept of the "ideal speech

situation", which establishes the normative counterfactual preconditions of argumentation

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and the justiﬁcation of norms. In some interpretations, the idealizing presuppositions
posit implausible normative burden on speakers and their communities and may imply a
utopian projection of the lifeworld. However, beyond some inherent ambiguities of
Habermas's project, as we shall see in section 6.4, such objections are often rooted in a
descriptivist misinterpretation of his ideas. My use of Habermas is based on the belief
that he goes a farther than others in ﬁnding an appropriate answer to the problem of
rational ground of communication across cultural and historical contexts. In this respect,
he offers promising means for recovering the grounds of rational dialogue while avoiding
the poles of skepticism and idealist transcendentalism, and sets the premises for a critical
analysis of the social pathologies of modernity.

This is the background against which Habermas pursues his empirical
reconstruction of the universal conditions of speech. His research program exploits the
combined resources of formal semantics and the pragmatic theory of language to locate
the universal and necessary presuppositions of communicative action oriented toward
understanding. Since Habermas rules out any possibility of a transcendental deduction of
his universalistic claims, he treats them as empirical hypotheses to be tested against
speakers' intuitions. His ambitious program seeks to assess "the empirical usefulness of
formal-pragmatic insights" in three areas of scientiﬁc research: (1) the explanation of
pathological or disturbed patterns of communication which are traced down to violations
of normal conditions set out by universal pragmatics; (2) the study of the anthropological
evolution of sociocultural ways of life of "socioculturally sociated individuals" that is
expected to reveal the emerging structures of action either oriented to success or to

understanding, and thereby conﬁrms the universalistic claims of universal pragmatics; (3)

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Piaget's developmental psychology and Kohlberg's theory of moral development, which

are supposed to explain the acquisition of commmricative competence and interactive
abilities that are invariant across cultures. His goal is to mark out the premises for a
general theory of socialization. Finally, on this conceptual basis, Habermas offers an
outline of a theory of societal rationalization, which is linked to a well-developed
tradition in social theory. He views this project as the conceptual reconstruction of
modern society, which draws from the sociological approaches of Weber, Durkheim,
Mead, and Parsons as well as from to historical materialism as reinterpreted by Marxists
like Lukacs, Horkheirner and Adorno (see Theory of Communicative Action I, [1981],
1984, pp. 139-41). In fact, Habermas constructs a theory of communicative action with
the intention of providing a critical theory of modemity. His ambitious project is to
comprehend social pathologies (such as loss of meaning, psychological disturbances and
anomie) as paradoxical effects of the one-sided or selective development of
rationalization processes in modern societies. In this respect, he constructs a concept of
rationalization which stands close to the emancipatory ideal of the Enlightenment and
follows his reception of Weber's theory of the differentiation of value-spheres. Though
my main concern is not with the details or far range implications of Habermas's
sociological view, I will make some reference to it so far as it is relevant to the concept of
communicative rationality.

In sum, Habermas introduces his procedural concept of reason by considering a
synthesis of a wide variety of arguments and perspectives from post-analytic philosophy
to critical theory, and from Kant to reconstructive science. He conceives the unity of

reason "in the plurality of its voices" and, by borrowing from Piaget the idea of a

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decentered view of the world, he calls attention against ﬁxation on any one conceptual
scenario. The decentering of consciousness typical of modern times implies an open-
minded, critical attitude, which enables the participant in communication to rationally
assess and take up a worldview among many possible alternatives. Notwithstanding,
some critics still charge Habermas with being "unmusical" on the theme of cultural
difference (C. Calhoun paraphrases Max Weber's self-characterization as "unmusical" in
the matter of religious beliefs; see “Introduction”, Critical Social Theory, 1995, p. xvi).
For this reason Habermas complains in a recent work that the pluralism implied by his
conception is often not properly recognized (Between Facts and Norms: Contribution to a
Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, William Rehg's translation, 1996).

Habermas also acknowledges the relevance of the language game argument and
accepts that charity is a good and useful principle, which can work to bridge different
languages. In fact, it seems to me that if we weaken Habermas's idea of understanding,
and if the orientation toward agreement regarding validity claims would be replaced with
a somewhat more vague and less compelling recognition of speakers' rational capacity as
accountable participants to communicative action, then he comes very close to the notion
of charity. We saw that Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson defend such an idea by
assuming the rationality of speakers. In their view charity provides for the possibility of
accounting for alien behavior and for the interpretation of other cultural practices.
Though Habermas does not use the term charity, and instead gives the idea of rationality
a stronger and more precise conceptualization in terms of validity claims, which are
normative requirements inherent in any meaningful speech act (see TCA I , Reason and

the Rationalization of Society, pp. 102-41). Habermas considers such validity claims

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which are universally raised in every speech act as necessary for communication and
reaching agreement. They are tied to formal commonalties that provide the internal
formal structure of argumentation and establish the counterfactual idealizations proper to
the argumentative process. One's ability to utter a coherent and meaningful statement
depends on the implementation of such rational demands, and the failure to do so raises
doubts regarding one's normalcy of mind. However, in the spirit of reconstructive
sciences, claims to validity of knowledge are not given once and for all in the manner of
Cartesian unshakable foundations. Similarly, communicative rationality must be
constructed fallibilistically as being vindicated in actual historical contexts, which are not
stationary, but are subject to change. Thus, in contrast to Descartes, Habermas argues
that rationality is not simply found in the criteria which guide the epistemic search for
truth or the purposive action oriented toward success, but it mainly refers to "the
disposition of speaking and acting subjects to acquire and use fallible knowledge" ("An
Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-
Centered Reason", in From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, 1996, p 607-8).
As a matter of fact, validity claims are raised within speciﬁc historical and cultural
situations by living individuals whose personal identities and life styles are shaped by
their own lifeworlds. In this respect, rationality is culture-bound and understanding is
relative to the communicative practices dependent on forms of life. Notwithstanding,
insofar as validity claims are tied to counterfactual idealizations which regulate all forms
of argumentation, they transcend all given contexts. Habermas contends that we cannot
make sense of other cultures unless we evaluate the universal dimensions of validity

claims that are made by members of transient and speciﬁc forms of life. In addition, the

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interpretation of meaning is actually made possible for all speaker-bearer interactions by
the rational presuppositions which must hold in general for all contexts of language-use,
even if Habermas argues that they must remain open to checking against particular
linguistic intuitions scattered across the multiplicity of cultures. He suggestively portrays
the transcendent power of validity claims as "thorn in the ﬂesh of social reality"
(Postmetaphysical Thinking, p. 47).

With this cross-cultural dimension of rationality, Habermas challenges relativism
by arguing that we can make sense of the universality of understanding on the basis of the
rational evaluation of validity claims that are made by all speakers in every utterance. His
analysis of the structures of everyday communication reveals a communicative
competence which makes possible the meaningful participation in communicative action
oriented to reaching understanding and hence points to a potential for rationality that is
implicit in the validity basis of everyday speech. This potential is referred to by
Habermas as "communicative rationality" which sets out the general premises of reaching
agreement and therefore is inherently tied to critical forms of argumentation. In the
elementary case, a speaker and a hearer caught in the process of communication enter into
a interpersonal relationship of mutual obligation: the ﬁrst is obliged to support the claims
with reasons, if challenged; the latter must accept or reject the claims if he has good
reasons to do so. This is a rational rather than a moral obligation, since the failure to
proceed in this way draws, in the ﬁrst instance, the imputation of irrationality, not
immorality (though the two may often overlap). Habermas assumes that people who
make a meaningful use of language can engage, based on the best available arguments, in

a rational dispute of the validity claims to truth, rightness and sincerity which are

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redeemed and vindicated in their utterances. As a matter of fact, speech acts are generally
put in relation to three types of realities:

l) "the" external world describable from the "obj ectifying" point of view of a

nonparticipant or the third person 's attitude;

2) "our" social life-world of intersubj ective interactions which imply the
recognition of the second person as a direct participant into dialogue; and

3) "my" own internal world of private feelings and insights expressible by the ﬁrst
person in confessions or subjective declarations.
The fully articulated theory of a comprehensive applicability of language to these extra-
linguistic orders would provide a unifying background for a meaningful dialogue of
different cultural discourses. In addition, as Thomas McCarthy points out, it can unify "a
variety of theoretical endeavors usually assigned to disparate and occasionally related
disciplines - from the theory of knowledge to the theory of social action" ("Translator's
Introduction", Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. xix). This unifying
dimension of Habermas's view on linguistic communication, which is not restricted to
cultural and disciplinary frameworks, justiﬁes the present approach in this chapter.
Brieﬂy put, the way he describes the preconditions of a reﬂective engagement in speech
bears directly upon the issue of this dissertation: the demands of rationality are not
culture-bound and must hold in all contexts wherein language is used to communicate.
Insofar as they point to the rational potential elicited by validity bases of any speech act,
and are universally compelling for all competent speakers who are able to reach a
reﬂective agreement (based on the better arguments), such conditions of communicative

rationality transcend the borders of cultures and provide an implicit ground for coming

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to an understanding between people from different lifeworlds.

The points I made above will became clearer and more obvious as they will be
further developed in the sections that follow. After these preliminary remarks, I will turn
to some arguments laid out by earlier discussions and in this context I will Specify in what
sense Habermas's idea of understanding requires a transcendental dimension of
rationality.

6.12) UNDERSTANDING AND THE NEED FOR A
TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT

This subsection aims to present the strategy Habermas follows in contrast with
different perspectives analyzed so far as my argument has progressed. Although my
discussion needs to make a step back to reveal in a broader picture some challenging
problems with understanding across linguistic and cultural contexts, it is not digressive.
References to other thinkers will be avoided to the extent they do not serve the main
purpose of helping to see what Habermas is doing and why. Thus my goal here is
twofold: a) to clarify where we are left after the previous discussion of the principle of
charity and to review the main points of my argument in an order which is insightful for
the exposition of Habermas's relation to Kant, and b) to explain why and in what sense a
transcendental grounding of understanding might have been so appealing to Habermas in
establishing the rational potential of validity claims and, inherently, of argumentative
processes intricately related to them.

a) Previous chapters have shown that Wittgenstein's plea for the abandonment of
the substantive notion of rationality makes the task assumed by Habermas's theory of

communicative action particularly difficult. The idea of understanding has been haunted

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ever since by the specter of behaviorist criteria of meaning and by doubts about the
possibility of linguistic interpretation. In the new language game where Philosophical
Investigation leaves philosophy to play a very modest and context-relative role, there is
no place, nor need for a transcendental argument. In a world emptied of gods who could
kindly back up our epistemic efforts, either by endowing us with all necessary
prerogatives to reach the truth or endlessly intervening to bring us on the right track in the
pursuit of knowledge, we are left alone to sort out the good hypotheses among many
possible alternatives. In On Certainty, the assumption that we cannot talk about certainty
since it is difficult even to recognize the extent of the groundlessness of our beliefs
suggests that the time of great metaphysical worldviews is over. Although, we may agree
with Hegel that "Minerva's owl ﬂies at dusk", the twilight of autonomous Reason which
secured the unshakable ground of our lives is sometimes seen as a tragedy of the human
condition associated with Sisyphus's relentless fatality (Camus), other times with an
heroic responsibility for avoiding roads leading nowhere (or dead ends, that is,
Heidegger's “Holzwege”) and making life meaningful. In the transition from such
existential lamentation to the issue of the epistemological challenge of interpreting an
alien linguistic behavior without a priori constraints, as Quine would presumably
endorse, I think that the situation is thus: Were we to understand an informant's
utterances, we should observe his overt behavior and bring to bear everything we
incidentally know about him or his form of life. If one happens to notice some conditions
present in the world which typically produce true or false beliefs about certain matters,
then we can interpret their utterances concerning those matters accordingly. To be

accurate, an interpreter cannot consistently impose the constraint that people are holding

1 97
mostly correct beliefs (as Davidson pretends) or, that they are typically wrong about

certain matters (because of some conditions in the world that mislead them such as
Descartes's evil genius). Therefore, if we are to get the best understanding of what others
say, this would be possible in the light of our total knowledge about their psychology,
their culture including language, and their natural habitat. There might be a wide range of
knowledge about people which would be useful for an interpreter. He may explore their
private interests or wishful thinking and the customary conditions of success which guide
their habitual instrumental action; or he may investigate, say, what conditions may
constantly produce optical illusions or delusions in people. One may consider
psychoanalytic interpretations of compulsions and ﬁ'ustrations in terms of behavioral
manifestations of repressed unconscious drives and desires or scrutinize the effects of
psychological ﬁxation on some particular world-views either rooted in scientiﬁc
representations of reality or in religious dogmas. Using all these explanatory accounts,
the best understanding should not preclude in principle the possibility that people may be
massively mistaken, as well as that they could hold true sentences most of the time.

Fair enough, a skeptic may reply. However the problem seems to be postponed
rather than resolved. First, following the exercise of doubt, we ﬁnd ourselves in a
paradoxical situation. While assuming that all hypotheses must remain open in principle,
there is at least one exception to this rule which imposes contingent boundary conditions
upon knowledge - that is, the necessarily closed pre-condition "that all hypotheses must
remain open in principle". Second, since there is no translation scheme that preserves
meaning across languages, the question becomes what warrants the uniform applicability

of the conceptual network of empirical psychology. For instance what provides for the

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consistency of behaviorist language or of Freud's distinct psychoanalytical vocabulary to

different people with different verbal behaviors and coming ﬁ'om contrasting worlds or
walks of life. On this line of the argument we have seen that it is not quite clear what can
preserve the validity of Quine's thesis of indeterminacy (if it is reﬂexively applied to
itself). Its meaningfulness beyond the borders of the language to which it is so intricately
related can be questioned, unless understanding of others may come to rest on a kind of
transcendental argument that sets up a universal and necessary common ground (a fortiori
and consistent), whatever that might be.49

We have seen that this step is precluded in Davidson’s argument, but assumed by
Hollis in the form of a universal bridgehead. Unlike Davidson, Habermas is willing to
take up the issue of understanding in a way that requires a transcendental dimension of
rationality. But he also dissociates himself from a substantive notion of reason (which
revives Cartesian connotations) as proposed by Hollis. Habermas is interested in the
general conditions which make possible linguistic exchange in the communication
between different participants to dialogue. This involves an appeal to the general and
unavoidable presuppositions of argumentation implicitly given in the use of language.
On this view, it is reasonable to accept that all hypotheses must receive appropriate
recognition and be openly assessed on the basis of reason. However, we may observe that
one can neither understand different interpretations about what's happening in the ﬁeld of
research nor be able to argue for and against different theoretical hypotheses unless one
accepts the basic rules of the game that make critical debate possible. And this is
precisely when rationality comes into play in the context of either scientiﬁc or political

disputes to make possible agreement, or eventual disagreement, between participants to

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discussion challenging each other with critical arguments. In its simplest terms, the
concept of communicative action introduced by Habermas refers to a form of
intersubjective interaction in which a speaker's utterance raises validity claims and a
bearer takes a "yes" or "no" attitude toward them. With every speech act the speaker
takes on an obligation to support with reasons his claims whenever these are called into
question, and the hearer takes on a similar obligation to justify his response.
Communicative action is thus conceptually tied to argumentation.

In the light of previous discussions, two major problems arise. First, a Winchian
(or a Wittgensteinian) may argue that the process of argumentation based on "yes" or
"no " positions is extremely rudimentary and irrelevant for everyday communication. If
we consider more complex dialogical interactions, then we may suspect that people may
have different opinions about what is an argument and which reasons should have a
prevailing force. In fact, for a Winchian, what counts as good reason is determined by
cultural tradition and normative consensus within a form of life. In contrast, Habermas
suggests a distinction between traditional cultures fostering inﬂexible personal identities
and centered on dogmatic worldviews, and cultures which can distance themselves from
themselves by taking up a self-critical attitude. The ﬁrst are comparable with
linguistically enclosed forms of life from a Winch-Wittgenstein interpretation; the latter
is connected by Habermas with a reﬂective relation to the world of "modern" societies in
which a “decentration” of consciousness is taking place. In consequence, it becomes
possible to see different dimensions of validity and to question conventions, rules and
individual identities transmitted by tradition (see Postmetaphysical Thinkers, p. 138, T CA

1, p 66-8). However, as M. Cooke observes, Habermas does not take adequate notice of

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this issue, which can be associated to the distinction between conventional and
postconventional forms of argumentation (Language and Reason, p. 13). In this respect,
Habermas focuses more on postconventional communicative action in which
argumentation is critical and open-ended: no validity claim is exempt in principle form
critical discussion, and all hypotheses may be subjected to debate.

A second problem may be revealed from the angle of a possible Quinean objection to
Habermas's idea of understanding, and this leads us to the core of his conception of
rationality. One may reply that argumentation is not possible when a breakdown of
communication occurs. As shown in the Rabbit-Gavagai example, two people speaking
different languages inherently point out different things and hence, in a way they do not
live in the same world. Nonetheless, the relativist implications of the thesis of
indeterminacy of translation do not hold for Habermas. He assumes that all languages
have a rational potential which offers “the possibility to distinguish between what is true
and what we hold to be true" (Postmetaphysical Thinkers, p. 138). He contends that all
forms of argumentation, no matter the context or complexity, are based on a set of
"idealizing suppositions" which are universally rooted in the very structure of action
oriented toward understanding.50 He considers that the formal pragmatic analysis of
everyday communication processes demonstrates that the validity claims redeemable and
vindicated in any speech act make reference to a number of unavoidable "strong
idealizations". Among them is "the supposition that all participants in dialogue use the
same linguistic expressions with identical meanings" (Postmetaphysical Thinkers, p. 47,
see also Between Facts and Norms). So far as the comprehensibility of one's language is

concerned, in a conversation the partners are supposed to use the same meanings, and

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exchange semantically equivalent expressions. But this necessary condition of
understanding has a counterfactual character in Habermas's view. In the earlier works,
(including Theory of Communicative Action), Habermas used the term "ideal speech
situation" to refer to the hypothetical situation in which counterfactual idealizations
would be satisﬁed. More recently, he regrets using such an expression which is "too
concretist" and vulnerable to "essentialist" misinterpretations (in an interview with New
Left Review, 229, and in Between Facts and Norms, 1996, see also Cooke, Language and
Reason, pp. 31, 172-3). Since I will discuss in section 6.4 the critical thrust of this
concept, I will not dwell now on this issue. My point here is that Habermas, in contrast
with Quine, assumes that we cannot engage ourselves in dialogue with other people if we
do not assume that we exchange identical meanings. Such an assmnption may appear
unwarranted to a Quinean who would be inclined to treat this as a problem of discovery
in given instances of communication, rather than a normative case of some ideally
"exacting conditions", which must be taken only as coming close to being satisﬁed, but
are never found as such in actual speech. Habermas contends that we must presuppose
that certain idealizing presuppositions are to be at least approximately satisﬁed if we are
to regard ourselves as participating in argumentation. At least this may insure that the
possible debate of theoretical hypotheses. However, it seems to me that the idealizing
presupposition of the consistency of meaning, which is not fully met by actual speakers,
is compatible with Quine's principle of charity which requires one to treat peoples as
basically rational and try to makes sense of their verbal behavior.

And yet, the question remains whether theoretical controversy is a fair critical

discussion based on arguments or a meaningless noise between partners deaf to each

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other's reasons and an irrational display of violence, in which force and authority will
have last word. In this respect, Habermas frequently mentions another strong idealization
which is related to the comment I made above to the ﬁrst objection: that nothing except
the force of the better argument will prevail, that no relevant argument is suppressed or a
priori eliminated and no participant is silenced or excluded from the process.

In conclusion, in contrast to Wittgensteinian, Winchian or Quinean relativism,
Habermas argues that validity is not reducible to the values dependent on the context of a
form of life and therefore understanding goes beyond the unquestioned and provincial
agreement of a Speciﬁc and dogmatic conventional culture. Moreover, in accordance
with the precepts of critical theory, the universal standards that permit the critical
assessment of actual judgements, norms and deﬁnitions hold within different societies.
Habermas assumes that idealizing suppositions of argumentation make possible the
critique of false, unjust and dishonest communicative practices. This counterfactual
aspect is tied to the context-transcendent dimension of rationality.

In sum, the above analysis places Habermas's claims in the context of the
considerations which concluded the argument in the previous chapter. Davidson
cautiously hesitates to accept charity as a transcendental principle. For him, charity,
which supplies the constraints on the structure of the pattern of beliefs, values and
language, together with the evidence assumed available, it is enough to tell how radical
interpretation is possible. Hence, no understanding of foreign utterances is possible if
many sentences held true by speakers are not so, but in fact false, or if we would actually
have no idea how their truth-value is to be understood. This claim for charity can be

formally reconstructed as follows: (1) language is radically interpretable if and only if our

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beliefs are mostly true; (2) an empirical argument can prove that languages are actually

interpreted by children who ﬁrst learn a language and by ﬁeld linguists and ethnographers
(like Evans-Pritchard or Frazer who succeed in translating native speech), and therefore
natural languages are radically interpretable. In conclusion, (3) our beliefs are mostly
true. Nevertheless, when facing Fodor's and Lepore's interpretation of his idea of charity
as an "argument of form T' (transcendental), as the one emphasized above, Davidson
dissociates himself from their position and argues that he never upheld that "radical
interpretability is a condition of interpretability". He says, "I never endorsed any
argument of form T" (Fodor and Lepore: "Is Radical Interpretation Possible?", p 57-58;
Davidson: Reply to F odor and Lepore, p. 77).

It is true that Hollis moves to a very strong position when he defends a substantive
notion of reason providing for the universality and necessity of any possible
understanding in the terms of the a priori basis of "the bridgehead of true rational
beliefs". However, this seems to me a step backwards since such a strong claim becomes
less defensible and more vulnerable to criticism than Davidson's moderate view.

Habermas's alternative is somewhere between Davidson's charity and Hollis's
attempt at the restoration of the autonomy of reason. Habermas accepts a weak
transcendental concept of rationality in terms of validity claims which set the universal
and necessary conditions of any possible speech act, and which are tied to the "concept of
pragmatic, yet unavoidable and idealizing presupposition of action oriented toward
reaching understanding" (Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, p. 143). On these
premises he may agree that claims to validity raised either by an utterance or a reﬂective

and specialized discourse cease to be meaningful outside of the necessary and

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counterfactual conditions of the argumentative process. Therefore, on the one hand,
Habermas rejects Hollis's substantive notion of reason by adopting a wholly procedural
perspective. On the other hand, although his concept of communicative rationality is less
strong than Hollis's bridgehead, it exceeds the empirical limits cautiously imposed by
Davidson to his principle of charity and pays no attention to his argument against the
possibility of a translinguistic "criterion of languagehood".

Habermas declares in the "Preface" of The Theory of Communicative Action,
vol.1, that his concern was to develop a concept of "communicative rationality" that is no
longer tied to and limited by the individualist-subj ective or cognitive-instrumental
"abridgements" of reason from modern philosophy and social theory. On his view
rationality is inherently discursive and refers to communicative competence. This
consists of the interactive linguistic capabilities that underlie understanding by the
inescapable reference to validity claims redeemable and vindicated in Speech acts and to
modes of their justiﬁcation. On these premises he intends to construct a two-level
concept of society that interrelates the lifeworld and system paradigms. Finally, the
theory of social action is designed to make possible the pursuit of a complex goal which
is intertwined with the ﬁrst two complex topics described above. This is to elaborate a
critical theory of modernity "that explains the type of social pathologies that are today
becoming increasingly visible" (TCA I , p XL). In this respect, Habermas suggests a
vision which is rooted in the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment.

The background of Habermas's reconstructive interests ranging ﬁom the formal
pragmatics, and cognitive universalism of developmental sciences of morality and

psychology, to the social theory of rationalization is too broad to be discussed here. I will

 

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try to approach his complex perspective within the constraints of the issue at stake.
Above all, I will make good on his concept of communicative competence as a universal
core which is invariant across cultures and consists in basic capabilities and fundamental
rules that all speakers acquire in learning to master a language. This basic insight bears
upon the nature of rationality that becomes in his interpretation inherently discursive and,
hence, linguistic and social, and provides the general and unavoidable presuppositions of
any possible processes of understanding between people caught in dialog or conversation.
In this respect, we shall see next that Habermas still works in a Kantian framework.

B) Habermas seeks to preserve the viable legacy of transcendental philosophy,
which identiﬁes the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience. As long as the
universality and necessity of conditions of understanding still hold, we may conclude that
universal pragmatics accepts the transcendental aim of tracing the conceptual structure of
reason recurring in all communicative actions. However, from Habermas's perspective,
the claim of transcendental deduction (that offers grounds for the validity in other
theoretical domains of the pursuit of knowledge and truth) has been given up. He
speciﬁes, "in place of a priori demonstration, we have transcendental investigation of the
conditions for argumentatively redeeming validity claims that are at least implicitly
related to discursive vindication" (Communication and the Evolution of Society, [1976],
1979, p 23). But insofar as Habermas's approach is essentially linguistic and his theory of
language and action has no thematic equivalent in The Critique of Pure Reason, his
recourse to the Kantian philosophy is inherently limited. Hence the relevance of the
transcendental model of justiﬁcation of turiversal and necessary conditions of knowledge

must be cautiously taken with a grain of salt. Insofar as Habermas gives up the ideal of

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deducing the pure structuring forms of understanding that make experience possible from
the "unity of self-consciousness", it makes sense to consider that he appeals only to a
weaker version of the transcendental argument.5| Whereas he seeks to provide the
unavoidable and universal conditions of possible understanding through linguistic
communication, he pays close attention to critical receptions of the Kantian a priorist
strategy from the angle of analytical philosophy and critical rationalism.

According to Strawson's minimalist interpretation, made on the premises of
analytic philosophy, the strong claim to the a priori deductive proof of objective validity
of our concepts of "objects of possible experience" is no longer defensible. Instead, the
transcendental is applicable to the extent that competent knowing subjects judge which
experiences may be called coherent and can be subjected to the universal and necessary
system of categories that implicitly organizes every coherent experience.

Although Habermas retained from Strawson the idea that a reconstruction of the
conceptual network has the empirical character of a hypothetical proposal which is not
justiﬁed a priori but must be conﬁrmed by a testing procedure, he does not further accept
the skeptical reduction to the binding limits of a logical-semantic analysis
(Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 22, "Philosophy as Stand-In Interpreter",
in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, [1983], 1990, 1991, p. 6).

Second, the critical-rationalist attitude toward Kant is expressed by Karl Popper.
He hopes that by replacing the notion of justiﬁcation with critical testing he could avoid
the three horns of the "Munchausen Trilemma" (logical circularity, inﬁnite regress, and
recourse to absolute certitude). And yet he did not break completely with

transcendentalism. As Habermas believes that Popper’s irrefutable rules of

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methodological criticism and especially the place held by modus tollens in the progress of

knowledge allow something from the Kantian mode of reasoning "to sneak into its inner
precincts through the back door" ("Philosophy as Stand-In Interpreter", p. 7).

We may observe that Habermas's critique of Popperian falsiﬁcationism applies as
well to himself. He agrees that Kant's philosophy fails to ground the pure concept of
understanding "for he merely culled them on the table of forms of judgement, unaware of
their historical speciﬁcity" ("Philosophy as Stand-In Interpreter", p. 4). Thus, he clearly
distances himself from the Kantian idea of "transcendental subj ect" that accomplishes the
epistemic synthesis by the cognitive categories of the intellect, which are prior to
experience. And yet, Habermas does not renounce the universal-pragrnatic analysis of the
constitution of experience and of the successful application of our concepts of objects of
possible experience under "contingent boundary conditions". His point is that in all
empirical situations when a linguistic exchange occurs, a speaker is engaged in a
perforrnative interaction with a hearer who tries to understand what is being said and is
usually forced into "yes and no" positions. Agreement can be reached as a result of
arguments which can be brought to provide grounds or reasons for the points being made
in the utterance. Habermas stresses that the premises for coming to a rationally motivated
understanding are inherently general and cannot be avoided by any participant in
communicative action. Therefore, the validity we claim for our view expressed in our
utterances proves the existence of an element of binding unconditionality in the structure
of communicative rationality which transcends de facto compliance with habitual
practices of a tradition as it precludes the appeal to obedience toward custom or brute

force.

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The difference between Habermas's reconstruction of the universal and
unavoidable conditions of mutual understanding and the Kantian project of transcendental
categories consists, ﬁrst, in their status and in what they are supposed to ground, and,
second, in their strategy. I will try next to make more explicit these two aspects in a way
that elicits Habermas's relation to the Kantian framework.

First, while Kant strives to establish the universal, necessary, and a priori
conditions for understanding, Habermas is content with a weak transcendental that refers
to the rational potential of validity claims, redeemable and vindicated in any speech act
which is tied to the idealizing presuppositions of argumentation. On the one side, these
validity claims are counterfactual and hence context-transcendent, on the other side,
Habermas presents them as a mere fallible hypotheses, subject to empirical conﬁrmation
or falsiﬁcation. This means that the possibility of raising claims to validity made by
speakers in their speech acts are not based on given unchangeable structures of the
Kantian intellect. In the universal pragmatic view proposed by Habermas, the one
reliable way in which beliefs can be judged valid is to base them on an agreement that is
to be reached by rational argumentation. Therefore, in contrast with Kantian
transcendental knowledge, validity of an utterance rests on "shaky foundations" insofar as
it can be heavily disputed and may be called into question all the time.

Second, the difference between Kant and Habermas is even more obvious if we
contrast their strategies. Kant believed that philosophy is the privileged discipline which
is able to describe the necessary and universal foundations of knowledge and he ascribed
to it the roles of "usher" (Platzanweiser) and "supreme judge" (oberster Richter) of

cultures. Habermas thinks that philosophy is not able to carry the task of theoretical

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reconstruction and promotes instead the reconstructive sciences (such as Piaget’s genetic
psychology, Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and Chomsky’s linguistic theory) in
the construction of his critical social theory. Although we live in an age when the process
of cultural differentiation seems to create the demand for experts and to marginalize the
need for generalists and humanists, Habermas is not ready to assume (like Rorty) that the
bell tolls for philosophy. As Habermas puts it, if philosophy has to surrender its
inspecting role as an arbiter of culture, it still "can and ought to retain its claim to reason,
provided it is content to play the more modest roles of stand-in (Platzhalter) and
interpreter" ("Philosophy as Stand-In Interpreter", p. 4). On the one hand, it sets an
interplay between the cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive
regional dimensions reason which has split as a consequence of the process of the
division of labor. On the other hand, it guides the process of giving grounds for the
validity claims we raise in ("Philosophy as Stand-In Interpreter", pp. 19-20). In this
respect, philosophy still plays a role as "guardian of rationality" which can act as a "place-
holder" or "mediator" between special Spheres of cultures which resulted in the process of
societal modernization.

However, Habermas argues that philosophy must give up its traditional pride and
humbly follow the empirical results yielded by the reconstructive sciences. The general
structures and universal conditions are hypotheses which must be subjected to usual
methods of testing. This implies that reconstructions of universal presuppositions
implicit in everyday communicative processes have a hypothetical status and hence must
be checked against speaker's intuitions and across a wide range of the sociological

spectrum. Nevertheless, Habermas's pragmatic investigations still preserve a weak

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transcendental character. Insofar as they reveal the general and unavoidable
presuppositions which make understanding possible via reaching agreement, and in a
more modest sense, they are comparable with what the Kantian transcendental deduction
of knowledge has done for cognitive processes. But his argument breaks with a priorism
and becomes the subject of a hypothetical, fallible and empirical inquiry, which must
observe the procedure of acceptance or rejection of hypotheses according to the eventual
success or failure in scientiﬁc testing. Habermas thinks that the demarcation between a
priori and a posteriori foundations of knowledge is not as sharp as Kant believes and
should be blurred. He arrives at the general and unavoidable presuppositions of
communicative action by abstracting and reconstructing in the empirical ﬁelds of research
that elucidate the learning and the acquisition of mental intuitions or rules of pre-
theoretical knowledge. Habermas's scientiﬁc references are typiﬁed by Chomsky's
linguistic theory of generative grammar centered on the notion of universal linguistic
competence, Piaget's theory of genetic epistemology which studies the formation of
psychological structures and Kohlberg's algorithm of moral development through six
stages of evolution. Nonetheless, the rational reconstructions advanced by these
reconstructive sciences that can ground the claim to objectivity must yet be distinguished
from the empirical-analytical disciplines that study a symbolical structured reality and are
directed toward making explicit the universal human competence of Speaking and
understanding. According to Habermas, the competence of Speakers is insured by the
ability to master a kind of depth grammar intuitions, which allow them not only to make
intelligible well-formed propositions, but to relate their utterances to the extra-linguistic

worlds of facts, social interactions and inner self by vindicating the validity claims of

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truth, rightness and truthfulness. Nevertheless, the linguist engaged in the inquiry of such

intuitions should naturally treat them as hypotheses in the manner of nomological
sciences and procure a knowledge a posteriori through research undertaken with actual
speakers.

In conclusion, for Habermas the scientiﬁc procedure of empirical validation is not
at all incompatible with the aim of laying the transcendental ground of the universal and
unavoidable conditions of communication. In fact, the reconstructive or redemptive
interest of his theory of universal pragmatics is precisely built upon the context-
transcendent force of communicative rationality that makes understanding possible on the
basis of validity claims thematized in every speech act and linked to idealizing
presuppositions of argumentative processes.

Apart from skepticism about Habermas's treatment of the Kantian heritage, the
question that frequently arises is whether Habermas's appeal to a transcendental argument
makes him liable to the accusations of wishful thinking or false universalism, thus
recalling the objections Hegel once made against Kant (terrorism of pure conviction,
impotence of mere "ought", excessive formalism and abstract universalism). In
particular, his attempt to redeem the philosophical project of modernity by restoring the
integrity of the "multiple voices" of reason will bring his view in the target of a ﬁerce
postmodernist attack. At the one side, drinkers who argue that philosophy outlived its
usefulness as "a privileged truth-telling discourse" (Rorty), or as a kind of "grand-
narrative" (Lyotard), criticize Habermas's program as overambitious and dispute his
assumption that philosophy still plays a role as a stand-in interpreter and in this respect is

a guardian of rationality. But such imputations made by postmodernist and feminist

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critics are not my main concern. My goal here is to sketch how Habermas tries to delimit
himself ﬁom the traditional idea of understanding which is tied up to what Habermas
justiﬁably calls "subject-centered reason". This is a kind of rationality that is measured
by an isolated subject whose mental contents are reﬂected in representational and
propositional attitudes. Such a conception that treats knowledge solely from the
objectifying attitude of the third person sets out the premises of the philosophy of
consciousness as represented by Descartes and Kant. In contrast, Habermas makes a
"linguistic turn" leaving behind the traditional conceptions of reason. On his view,
rationality mainly refers to "the disposition of speaking and acting subjects to acquire and
use fallible knowledge" and its criteria are not simply found in standards of truth and
success but in the rational potential of language. ("An Alternative Way Out of the
Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason", in From
Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, 1996, p 607-8). To make sense of meaning
and interpretation of the relationships of knowing and purposively acting subjects with
the state of affairs one has to consider the validity claims that are made by the participants
in these forms of life and to evaluate their speciﬁc forms of argtunentation. Henceforth,
Habermas assumes that anyone performing a speech act is inherently engaged in a
communicative action and raises the universal validity claims of truth, rightness,
sincerity and comprehensibility, which are built in "the intersubj ective structures of
social reproduction" and set the universal and necessary conditions of any possible
communication. Such claims are redeemed and vindicated in dialog and point to rational
potential which warrants the process of mutual understanding. The paradigmatic case is

represented by an utterance performed by a speaker who can support with reasons his

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claim to validity when challenged and a hearer who have the elementary capacity to take

an afﬁrmative or negative stance toward what the speaker says. Habermas says, "the goal
of coming to an understanding (Verstandingung) is to bring about an agreement
(Einverstandis) that terminates in the intersubj ective mutuality of reciprocal
understanding, Shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another"
(Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 3). Therefore communicative action is a
type of social interaction oriented toward reaching agreement on the rational basis of the
common recognition of the corresponding validity claims inherently implicit in every
Speech act. Habermas suggests that in empirical and contingent situations of conﬂict and
disagreement we have to move to the linguistic level of the discourse and of the
unavoidable presuppositions of argumentation in order to warrant the validity claims that
have been responsible for the breakdown of communication. If there is a prevailing force
that should Show us the paths between the horns of the dilemma of "gods and demons",
this is the force of the "better argument". Rationality should play the role of a practical
guide helping us to choose how we shall live and cut our way through the labyrinth of the
modern lifeworld.

In conclusion, Habermas hopes to build a concept of understanding on a weak-
transcendental communicative rationality which is postmetaphysical in several
interconnected ways. It is (a) conceived procedurally, (b) construed fallibilistically and
situated historically, (c) nonsubj ectivistic and abstracted from everyday practices of
communication and (d) multi-dirnensional and pluralistic. It is also nondefeatist to the
extent it escapes the charge of being both arbitrary and relativistic by (a) the refusal to

make validity culture-dependent and (b) the assertion that the idealizing standards for the

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critique of distorted communication have a context transcendent power.

On these theoretical premises, Habermas rejects Winch's claim that consensus and
understanding beyond the limits of a form of life as shown by the relation between an
investigator and his informants can be at best "occasional and fragile". In Habermas’s
view, understanding of the extreme cases of alien languages and unfamiliar cultures or
epochs remote from us is not inevitably endangered as ethnographic research does not
necessarily appear compromised in many risky circumstances. Habermas takes the
insightful lesson of hermeneutics and draws his optimism from the analysis of the
"interpretive competence of adult speakers from the perspective of how speaking and
acting subjects make incomprehensible utterances of an alien environment
comprehensible" (TCA I, p. 130). On the one side, he accepts that the meaning of a
symbolic text, either a literary work, painting or a framework of traditions, can be
disclosed only by "the background of cognitive, moral, and expressive elements of the
cultural store of knowledge from which the interpreter and his contemporaries
constructed their interpretations" (TCA I, p. 132). On the other side, his idea of
understanding inhabitants of other lifeworlds or forms of life is not simply context-bound
as relativists claim. For instance, an interpreter conring from a different historic time and
cultural space than the author considered cannot identify the universal presuppositions of
any linguistic performance without, at least implicitly, taking a position on the thematized
validity claims of truth, rightness or truthfulness connected with the text. And this
attitude towards claims to validity expressed in different cultural and historical contexts
proves the existence of an element of unconditionality in the structure of communicative

action, which is something else than a simple de facto acceptance of habitual practices of

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a tradition. To be recognizable as rational, a justiﬁcation cannot rely on appeals to
custom or brute force. Therefore, the communicative rationality can be understood as
nondefeatist to the extent it is "stubbornly critical" toward any non-reﬂective submission
to authority and rests on "strong idealizations" which are implicitly built into everyday
communication. Here lies the potentially context-transcendent power of validity claims.

In the broader perspective, the sociological intent of this ambitious program is to
engage in an emancipatory critique of dishonest, unjust or untruthful communicative
practices across forms of life. In order to be justiﬁably applied, this project of a critical
social theory requires, of course, a clariﬁcation and legitimation of it normative
foundations (see Richard Bernstein, "Introduction", in Habermas and Modernity, 1985, p.
17). However, since the main concern of this paper is with the thrust of communicative
rationality, I will pay little attention to the sociological aspect.

Habermas's construal of the universals which makes possible hermeneutic
interpretation in a way which transcends speciﬁc historical and cultural contexts is not a
task for empirical-analytical or nomological sciences, but it is to be carried out by his
theory of universal pragmatics. In order to make clear what this means, I will show how
Habermas abandoned the premises of subject-centered reason from a declining
philosophy of consciousness, and shifted to the paradigm of language, though not as a
syntactic or semantic system, but as pragmatically used in performing speech acts. In this
strategic move he draws the basic notion of "communicative competence" from Noam
Chomsky's linguistic theory and from Jean Piaget's cognitive developmental psychology.
1 will further accompany Habermas on the reconstructive path of universal pragmatics

and I will show to what extent it succeeds in overcoming the one-sidedness of formal

 

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semantics and linguistics. In his opinion, these theories are too narrowly focused: the
ﬁrst on the search for the formal truth-conditions; the latter on the ability to produce
grammatically well-formed sentences.

6.2] UNIVERSAL PRAGMATICS AND UNIVERSAL COMPETENCE

This section will present the main features of Habermas's theory of universal
pragmatics inasmuch as it is relevant to the issue of cross-cultural understanding. We are
interested in how he establishes a rational basis for reaching a universal agreement
beyond the limitation rooted in the various and peculiar contexts of ways of living. As a
matter of fact, his aim to build up a universal pragmatics of language is ultimately an
attempt at explaining how human understanding is possible. Such far-reaching
expectations of his project explain why he constantly emphasizes its importance and why
its conceptual elaboration is spread all over his impressive works.

In his essay "What is Universal Pragmatics?" (in Communication and the
Evolution of Society, 1976; English version published in 1979), Habermas introduces a
program which rests on the contention that not only phonetic, syntactic or semantic
features of sentences, but also utterances which convey the pragmatic dimension of
speech, admit of rational reconstruction of "communicative competence" in universal
terms. The main goal of his theory is to establish the rational background of the general
presuppositions of speech acts, as the elementary units of everyday communication which
universally raise intersubjectively criticizable claims to validity. His pragmatic account
of meaning is summarized in the thesis that to know what is said in an utterance is to
comprehend the claim that it makes - that is, to know the conditions of its satisfaction and

the conditions of its validation. In this respect, Habermas distinguishes between the

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cognitive use of language, where the focus is on the propositional content expressed by
constative Speech acts, and the interactive use of language, where emphasis is on the
speaker-hearer relationship established by regulative Speech acts. The intersubjective
relationship established by an utterance consists in a mutual "obligation" to take a stance
toward the validity claim and support it with reason. Hence, there is an internal
connection between language use and argumentation.

In what follows I will attempt to make clear how understanding and the rational
potential of the unavoidable and universal conditions of language-use are linked. The
intelligibility of speech is not merely dependent on or limited to the context of values
evolved by a form of life, but it must be secured by the cross-cultural power of
idealizations. It points to a shared communicative competence which makes possible the
understanding between the participants in communicative action. In this respect,
Habermas looks for a way out of relativism in a sense which seems to me very signiﬁcant
and promising.

In order to focus on the kind of language theory developed by Habermas, it is
necessary to refer to the theories from which he borrows. The exposition will proceed by
a dialectical contrast between Habermas and the drinkers who inspired his conceptual
development and from whom he draws signiﬁcant elements for his theory. Habermas's
approach to language contrasts with the logical formalist treatment of propositions and
with the too narrow character of traditional linguistics. In his View, formal semantics is
one-sidedly obsessed by truth searching and Chomsky's grammatical theory focuses on
"linguistic competence" at the expense of reductively interpreting utterances as an

empirically limited outcome of this competence. Habermas criticizes formalism for

218
abstracting semantic and syntactic aspects from the perfonnative dimension of language,

and argues that communicative competence presupposes a universal core of linguistic
competence as found in the early version of Chomsky's theory from Syntactic Structure
(1957). Habermas’s account aims at reconstructing the fundamental set of "rule
consciousness common to all competent speakers", that enables potential adult speakers
to master at least one language (L), that is, to understand and produce sentences that count
as well formed in L and to distinguish them from ungrammatical sentences in L
(Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 14).

Nevertheless, insofar as "linguistic competence" is conceived monologically, it
cannot provide an adequate account of Speakers engaged in communicative processes.
According to Habermas, the competence of the ideal speaker is not limited to the
grammatical capacity to handle a language, but also include the ability to establish and
understand those modes of communication and pragmatic rules that relate the utterances
to reality through which speech becomes possible. In being uttered, a grammatically
well-formed sentence implies that it is comprehensible to all competent hearers who can
master that language. But this is only one of the universal claims the can be fulﬁlled by a
speech act that, in addition, is situated in connection with (1) external reality, the
objective world of facts or states of affairs about which once make true or false
statements; (2) normative reality, "our" intersubjectively lived and recognized social
world of shared values and norms, roles and rules, in the face of which an act can ﬁt or
fail, and are either right or wrong, (legitimate or non-legitimate, justiﬁable or non-
justiﬁable); and (3) intenral reality of the speaker's "own" subjective world of intentional

experiences drat can be expressed sincerely or insincerely, truthfully or untruthfully.

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Therefore, speakers' participation in language is essentially dialogical and based

upon a communicative competence which endows them widr basic qualiﬁcations of
speech and of symbolic roles woven in the intersubjective tapestry of social interactions.
Communicative competence is the ability of a speaker oriented to mutual understanding
to redeem four kinds of universal validity claims. Habermas contends drat the speaker
places an utterance in relations to a three-fold reality and posits an implicit vindication of
the claims (1) that what the speaker states is true, by choosing the proposition in such a
way that either its truth-conditions or the existential presupposition of the propositional
content hold (thus, the bearer can share the knowledge of the speaker); (2) drat the
speaker is right or appropriate by performing a speech act in conformity with recognized
normative background (thus, the hearer can agree with the speaker's shared value
orientation); and (3) that the sepaker is Sincere or trudrful by expressing his intentions in
an accurate, undeceptive or undistorted linguistic self-image (thus the bearer can trust the
speaker) (Communication and the Evolution of Society, pp. 28-9). But, above all, (4) the
speaker who produces a grammatically well-formed sentence raises the claim of
intelligibility "fulﬁlled irnmanently to language"

Brieﬂy put, Habermas requires that the analysis of language be extended below
Chomsky’s idea of surface grammar, which was supposed to enable a speaker to make
well-formed sentences. Chomsky treats phonetic, syntactic and semantic properties of
sentences only as an empirical outcome of the "linguistic competence" and, consequently,
the pragmatic aspects including an investigation of the conditions for embedding
sentences in articulated speech acts was left to a theory of linguistic performance.

Habermas disagrees with such a limitation and contends drat the use of a sentence in a

220
situation of possible understanding must fulﬁll the general presuppositions of

communication. Hence, the ability to produce utterances establishes the universal
pragmatic features of concrete speech situations which should bridge with generative
competencies of speaking and acting subjects.

Habermas is aware that in the light of formal semantics his conceptual distinction
between linguistic analysis of sentences and pragmatic analysis of speech actions may
appear inadequate or at least problematic. However, he claims that with the shift of the
emphasis ﬁ'om reference to truth, the theory of meaning was established as a formal
science centered on the relation between a sentence and the state of affairs, between
language and the world. Therefore, he suggests that the "ontological turn", initiated by
F rege and developed drrough the early Wittgenstein to Dummet and Davidson,
disengages semantics "from the view that the representational function can be clariﬁed on
the model of names that designate objects" (T CA I , p. 276, see also Communication and
the Evolution of Society, pp. 29-32). In consequence, speakers and hearers understand the
meaning of a sentence when they know under what conditions it is true, and, hence, they
cannot dissociate the meaning of the sentence from its inherent linguistic relation to the
truth-validity of the statement. Correspondingly, they understand the meaning of a word
when it becomes clear what contribution the word makes to the truth conditions of the
sentence that contains it. The limits of traditional semantics, which developed the
representational model, prompted Frege to make the distinction between "the assertoric
and interrogative force of assertions or questions and the structure of the propositional
sentences employed in these utterances" (T CA I , p. 277). This demarcation opened the

door for the extension of the sentential semantics to the formal pragmatics, which

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elaborated a dreory of speech acts and analyzed the illocutionary force of language. Such

perfonnative aspects of speech have been explored by Habermas after the model provided
by "ordinary language" philosophers, particularly, the later Wittgenstein, Austin and
Searle. But these starting points for his conceptual programme are criticized because they
do not generalize "radically enough and do not push drrough the level of accidental
contexts to general and unavoidable presuppositions" (Communication and the Evolution
of Society, p. 8).

A closer look reveals to what extent Habermas is in debt to the premises which
inspired his theoretical development. First, Habermas drinks that all considerations
gravitating around the construction of formal pragmatics are dominated by the premise of
the illocutionary force of speech acts, which can be distinguished from the propositional
dimension of language. In this respect, he is sympathetic with the later Wittgenstein's
examination of the ways expressions are actually used in everyday language games,
drough he criticizes Wittgenstein's pragmatic analysis of language for remaining too
"particularistic" and for its incapacity to develop properly a complete theory of language
games.

Second, the elements of a more general theory are found by Habermas in various
writings on the theory of language, which take the notion of speech act as a basic unit.
Thus, Austin distinguishes between illocutionary acts, through which the speaker
performs an action and establishes the mode of a sentence (statement, promise, command,
etc), and perlocutionary acts, through which the speaker produces an effect upon the
bearer that he himself cannot foresee. On this view, every Speech act is always performed

by a speaker as an action with a communicative intent in such a way that the bearer may

 

222
understand and accept what the speaker says, and has an illocutionary and propositional

component.

Habermas pays special attention to Austin's idea that a person uttering a sentence
for reporting or describing an event is performing an action. Furthermore, Austin's
distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts allows Habermas to draw his
basic conceptual distinction between action oriented to reaching understanding and action
oriented to success in a purposive-rational manner. The analysis of the illocutionary force
of an utterance points to the validity basis of speech. He argues that "institutionally
unbound speech acts owe their illocutionary force to a cluster of validity claims that
speakers and hearers have to raise and recognize as justiﬁed if grammatical (and thus
comprehensible) sentences are to be employed in such a way as to result in successful
communication" (Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 65). A participant in
communication is oriented toward reaching understanding only if in employing well-
formed sentences he assesses the three other validity claims in an acceptable way: truth
for propositional content, rightness for norms and values, and truthfulness for the
intentions expressed. As we have already mentioned above, the three kinds of validity
claims conﬁgure three distinct modes of using a language: cognitive for objectivated
reality ("the external world"), interactive for the symbolically prestructured reality of
interpersonal relations, cultural values, traditions, institutions, etc ("our social world"),
and expressive for the internal world of the self (my "particular inner world"). Coming
to an understanding is deﬁned as the process of reaching agreement among speaking and
acting subjects. In the process of communication, grammatical sentences are embedded

in three relations to reality by way of validity claims, thereby assuming the corresponding

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pragmatic functions of representing facts, establishing interpersonal relations, and

expressing one's subjectivity (TCA I , p. 286, Communication and the Evolution of
Society, pp. 3, 67).

Third, from Searle, Habermas borrows the idea that linguistically mediated
interactions of reaching understanding involve the "literal meaning" which explicitly
conveys the message communicated by an utterance, what is to be understood. The idea
of a speaker’s expressing personal intentions "precisely, explicitly and literally" derives
from the underlying "principle of expressibility" used by Searle to insure a possibility "in
principle for every speech act carried out or capable of being carried out to be Speciﬁed
by a complex sentence" (Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 39). In the end,
although Habermas does not deny the "literal meaning", he weakens this thesis by
emphasizing the implicit stock of knowledge embedded in culture which supplies the
participants who enter into the process of reaching mutual understanding with
unproblematic, common, background convictions that remains mostly tacit and are
assumed to be guaranteed. For instance, Searle has shown that even in simple assertions
(e. g. "The cat is on the mat") and imperative sentences (e. g. "Give me a hamburger!") the
truth conditions cannot be completely determined independently of the implicit
contextual knowledge that the participants normally regard as trivial or obvious.

Habermas agrees with Searle that this background knowledge is implicit; it is
holistically structured and does not stand at our disposition insofar as "we cannot make it
conscious and place it in doubt as we please" (T CA 1, p. 336). He notes that Wittgenstein
similarly points to common sense certainties which escape doubt and are "anchored in all

my questions and answers, so anchored that I cannot touch drem" (TCA l , p. 336). In this

 

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respect, Searle's literal meaning has to face this layer of "worldview" insights which are
"deep-seated" in tacit knowledge and "do not pass the drreshold of communicative
utterances that can be valid or invalid" (T CA I, p. 337). Naturally, one must be familiar
with the taken for granted background, which is already there in every day life, if one is to
be able to come to grips with the literal meaning of speech and to act communicatively -
drat is, to engage in a dialogue in meaningful and effective sense.

In relation to this stock of implicit knowledge, which provides patterns of
interpretation linguistically organized and culturally transmitted, Habermas introduces the
phenomenological concept of "lifeworld" (Lebenswelt). Widrin this ever-present horizon
of social action, which bears the hallmark of language and culture, agents interactively
negotiate their discursive meanings in every-day conversation and Share common beliefs,
institutional structures, personality patterns and criteria for success. From this view,
Descartes's solitary subject-centered reason, conceived independently of the lifeworld, is
just an implausible metaphor. The subjectivist orientation of the Cartesian paradigm and
in general the "monological" character of the philosophy of consciousness is again
radically challenged by the thesis of historical and cultural variability of thought and
action.52 In Habermas's view, communicative action has two functions. First, by aiming
at reaching understanding, it serves to perpetuate and renew the cultural framework of
knowledge and traditions and to explain how children internalize drrough upbringing and
social interaction the value orientation of their community and acquire general pre-
theoretical, moral and epistemic intuitions which underlie the capacity for agency.
Second, by coordinating actions, it provides for social integration as reﬂected in group

solidarity and socialization and contributes to the formation of personal identities.

 

225
Habermas admits that cultural values reproduced and transmitted Widrin the life-

world do not transcend local boundaries. Hence they do not count as universal in the
same way as moral norms. He argues that values are inherently located Widrin the
horizon of lifeworld of a speciﬁc group or culture and are more plausibly understood
within a particular form of life. From this perspective, “the critique of value standards
presupposes a shared pre-understanding among participants in the argumen " that
constitutes the background of the thematized validity claims (T CA I, p. 42). This calls to
mind Wittgenstein's idea of “worldview”, which, being deep seated in tacit knowledge,
remains not questionable and taken for granted by participants in the discursively
mediated dispute.53

Habermas argues in Theory of Communicative Action 1, (part 1, chapter 2: "Some
Characteristics of the Mydrical and the Modern Ways of Understanding the World") that
the case for relativism is not conclusive. He drinks that even the critical discussion of
values is not possible without hinging on the standards of rationality which provide the
basis for argumentation. Through speech acts, the thematized universal validity claims
are tested in dialogue by calling into question the comprehensibility of speech-mearring
which must be carried by grammatically well-formed propositions, the truth of
statements, the tightness of moral norms, and the sincerity of personal expression.
Therefore, the particularity and concreteness of "forms of life" are contrasted widr the
trans-contextual and counterfactual conditions of an ideal speech situation. These are
idealizing presuppositions which provide the rational demands to be satisﬁed to a
sufficient degree of approximation in theoretical, practical, and expressive discourses

corresponding to the three types of validity claims (of truth, tightness and truthfulness)

226
that inﬁltrate the threefold world spheres (the objective, intersubj ective, private-

subjective).

In sum, here are roughly the tlrree main stages of Habermas's strategy for building
the theory of universal pragmatics. They may appear distinct from one another in
analysis, but in fact they are closely interrelated in the construction of the theory of
communicative action:

I) A speech act in standard form with illocutionary and propositional components
is regarded as a social action oriented toward reaching understanding and this is treated as
different from a purposive-rational action oriented toward success or the efficient
achievement of an end. The double character of a speech act reﬂects the level of inter-
subjectivity upon which the speaker and the hearer must move in order to communicate,
and the level of objects about which they come to an understanding. The simplest case
occurs when a speaker and hearer are oriented to mutual understanding and have a
capacity to take an affirmative or negative attitude toward a validity claim which has been
called into question. Such claims drematized in communication have a cognitive
character and can be checked. Habermas's thesis is drat "the speaker can illocutionarily
inﬂuence the hearer and vice-versa, because speech-act—typical commitments are
connected with cognitively testable validity claims - that is, because the reciprocal bounds
have rational basis" (Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 63).

The undisputed recognition of four types of validity claims, which every
competent Speaker must observe with every Speech act, represents the background
consensus of normally functioning language games. In Habermas's formulation,

the goal of coming to an understanding is to bring about an agreement that
terminates the intersubj ective mutuality of reciprocal understanding,

227
shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another. Agreement

is based on recognition of the corresponding validity claims of

comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness and rightness (Communication and

the Evolution of Society, p. 3).

However, consensus can break down or be challenged by one of the participants to the

dialogue. Habermas stresses that acting communicatively must raise universal validity
claims drat are vindicated or redeemed discursively. These claims are implicit in every
speech act which, in turn, can be contested under the three different aspects of validity.
The hearer could reject completely the utterance of the speaker

by either disputing the truth of the proposition asserted in it (or of the

existential presuppositions of its propositional content), or the rightness of

the speech act in view of the normative context of utterance (or the

legitimacy of the presupposed context itself), or the truthfulness of the

intention expressed by the speaker (that is, the agreement of what is meant

with what is stated) ("An Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the

Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason", pp. 604-5).

2) The next stage which can be elicited from Habermas’s writings refers to a
series of pragmatic or "dialogue-constitutive universals" that communicatively competent
speakers have at their disposal. These universals are intersubjective, "a priori linguistic
elements which enable the speaker, in the course of producing a speech act, to reproduce
the general structures of the speech situation" (John Thompson, "Universal Pragmatics"
in Habermas - Critical Debates, p. 122). This aspect bears upon the notion of
"communicative competence". First of all, the ability to participate in a conversation
depends on the speaker's ability to perform constative, regulative and expressive speech
acts, which correspond to the three kinds of validity claims, as we have shown already
above. The claims to objective truth are related to an objective world of facts or state of

affairs and are made form a third person perspective (an objectifying discourse of a non-

participant). The claims to normative tightness are corresponding to the intersubjective

228

or social world of interpersonal relations (which legitimate Speech interactions). Finally,
the claims to subjective sincerity or trudrfulness are associated with the subjective world
of private experiences. In this respect, Habermas contends that the perfonnative ability
presupposes drat the speaker has a mastery of personal pronouns and their derivatives (1,
you, etc.,), "deictic expressions" of space and time and demonstrative pronouns, and
performative verbs and certain intentional expressions. The correct usage of such
pragmatic universals in conversations deﬁnes speakers’ communicative ability.

3) The drird stage of Habermas's conceptual project asserts that there are
idealizing presuppositions which point to an ideal speech situation which is a necessary
counterfactual condition yielded by everyday communication processes. From this angle,
if understanding breaks down, we can move to a level of discourse and argumentation
where we seek to explicitly warrant the validity claim drat has been responsible for the
failure of communication and to distinguish between a genuine and a deceptive
agreement. The ideal case occurs only when the force drat prevails in rational
deliberation is the force of the better argument alone. This means drat justiﬁcation
process should be not hindered by external and internal constraints and implies a
symmetrical distribution of chances to select and employ communicative, constative,
representative and regulative speech-acts. These are the prerequisites of an ideal speech
Situation which describes in a counterfactual way an “ideal-type” for a rational use of
language. Habermas maintains that participants in communicative action are, in the ﬁrst
place, oriented to reach agreement. This implies the possibility of a dialogue governed by
sincerity, rightness and truth under conditions of an intersubj ectively comprehensible

language. However, he seems aware that such conditions are unlikely or improbably met

229

in many historical and cultural contexts, when judgment is coerced by force or strategic
manipulation of others people as mere means. Habermas describes such linguistic modes
which have lost their genuine communicative intent as "parasitical" on the use of
language oriented toward understanding. For instance, speech is distorted when people
are primarily driven by power and self-interest derived from an instrumental rationality
and are engaged in strategic or purposive action, which is narrowly focussed on success
and efficiency.

Though the major cognitivist thesis Habermas advances is that whenever validity
claims are disputed and even may break off communication, they are unavoidable
presupposition of argumentative action and are built in the general structure of any
communicative action oriented toward reaching understanding. The point is drat no
dispute is beyond rational argumentation. Therefore, validity claims are redeemable in
principle not only in constative propositions, but are also implicit in practical disputes
(eidrer moral or legal) as well as in controversies on aesthetic judgements. A rational
consensus on obj ectifying representations, normative matters and expressive arts is to be
attained under the conditions of an ideal speech situation.

It seems to me that the questions that could challenge this idea of rational
argumentation driven only by the better argument are what is an argument, in the ﬁrst
place, and what makes an argument better or preferable to others? The fact of the matter
is that what constitutes "the better argument" may be rationally arguable or at least
negotiated in empirical situations. For such cases, if Habermas's conceptual project
would be interpreted as having a descriptive and not just a normative character, one may

contest the presupposition of a noncoercive and undistorted argumentation allegedly set

230

in every day pre-theoretical communicative action. It is debatable whether or not the
aspect revealed above may bring Habermas's universal pragmatics to bear upon an
implausible idealization of speakers comparable in some respects widr the subj ect-
centered-reason he wants to abandon for good. Adnrittedly, the counterfactual
presupposition represents a kind of "ideal type" for what should be the case in perfectly
rational situations with perfect rational agents but such conditions are never fully met
when they are tested in discourse. Habermas clearly speaks of "discourse" when the
counterfactual presuppositions of an ideal speech Situation are satisﬁed to a sufficient
degree of approximation and "the meaning of the problematic validity claim forces
participants to suppose drat a rationally motivated agreement can in principle be
achieved" (my emphasis, T CA I, p. 42). The idealizing prerequisite is embedded in the
formula "in principle", which entails that this might be the case only if the argumentation
process would be "long enough" and conducted "openly enough" (whatever these
expression may suggest). Habermas is aware that the claim to universality does not
consistently apply to moral values, which are candidates for interpretations made by those
affected by them, and are used to describe and nonnatively regulate common interest (if
occasions arise). However, the fact that they may receive intersubjective recognition does
not imply that they will get general assent Widrin a culture and hence, the arguments that
justify standards of values does not satisfy the condition of discourse (see T CA I , p. 20).

I will later return to this issue regarding different controversial readings of
Habermas's concept of ideal speech and I will argue for what seems to me an
interpretation consistent with Habermas's conception of discourse. But before that we

must clarify the implications for the universal conditions of understanding of his program

231
of philosophical justiﬁcations of norms as provided by his dreory of the discourse edrics.

6.3) DISCOURSE ETHICS AND THE UNIVERSAL CONDITION OF
REACHING CONSENT

The aim of this section is to scrutinize Habermas's conception of discourse ethics
insofar as the issue of moral consent points to a way of addressing the more general
concern of how understanding can be cross-culturally possible. In this respect, I will
emphasize in what sense the idea of rationality has to do widr the question regarding the
possibility of reaching a universally motivated consensus as carried drrough Habermas's
dreory of discourse by developing the argument in three inter-related steps. (A) I will
begin with a presentation of the idea of discourse in general, then I will focus on the
theory of discourse edrics in connection with what makes norms applicable. (B) Next, I
will Show how Habermas differs from Kant in matters of moral justiﬁcation by
comparing their arguments in a dialogical manner. (C) Finally, I will explore the
postconventional status of the discourse in conditions of a growing gap between the
traditional forms of life and the critical reﬂective modes of argumentation. I will contrast
Winch's view on cultures with Habermas's account of traditions and I will then describe
the three split moments of reason and their implications upon the discourse in the process
of cultural differentiation in modern times. This theme leads us to Habermas's attempt to
redeem the project of modernity.

I will proceed now on the three lines of discussion mentioned above.

(A) The theory of the redemption of truth claims and normative tightness claims
belongs to Habermas's conception of discourse, which is analytically distinct from though

theoretically related to the theory of universal pragmatics described above. The same

232

methodology of reconstruction operates in both, but the discourse edrics is more narrowly
focused than a communication theory on the validity claims of rightness and the
possibility of reaching consensus in normative matters. The medium that can test
hypothetically the recogrrizability or justiﬁability of a norm is called by Habermas
practical discourse or discourse ethics, that is deﬁned as "the form of argumentation in
which claims to normative rightness are made thematic" but which open the possibility to
achieve a grounded consensus between all those affected by the norm under debate (TCA
1, p. 19). Although Habermas maintains that universal validity claims are drematized in
general by the action of reaching understanding, he distinguishes between "naive" and
"reﬂective" forms of thematization of validity claims. This delimitation is matched by
the differentiation between everyday communicative practices and specialized forms of
argumentation developed in "expert cultures". The term discourse, which applies to the
reﬂective forms of communication, is typical for the latter. Whether theoretical or
practical, discourses are ideal forms of argumentation, which should be understood as
"islands in the sea of practice", improbable because of their idealizing character and yet
possible since they are elicited by everyday appeal to validity claims (see "Discourse
Edrics", in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 1991, p. 106, see also
"Questions and Counterquestion", in Habermas and Modernity, ed: R. Bernstein, 1985).
This means that the formal and counterfactual basis of speech acts, which Habermas
abstractly elaborates in his universal pragmatics, becomes part of the idea of "discourse".
Considering the propositional content of constative utterances, the rational agreement
between speakers redeeming the claims to truth points to a consensualist theory of truth

(which remains controversial as we shall notice later). Considering the practical claims

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to normative rightness and appropriateness, Habermas faces the Kantian question of what
makes norms applicable. His reply is provided by the discourse edrics which attempts to
specify the conceptual basis for normative consent to be reached by all those affected by
the norms under debate. He says,

in practical discourse we thematize one of the validity claims that underlie

speech as its validity basis. In action oriented to reaching understanding

validity claims are "always already" implicitly raised. These universal

claims (to comprehensibility of the symbolic expressions, the truth of the

propositional content, the truthfulness of the intentional expressions, and

the rightness of he speech act with respect to existing norms, and values)

are set in the general structures of possible communication

(Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 97).

Whenever and wherever there is to be a consensual communicative action, a "gentle but
obstinate, a never silent although seldom redeemed claim to reason" can be located in
these validity claims (see idem). For instance, in cases of conﬂict regarding what is right
to do, consensus can be reached between rational persons who can justify all their actions
with reference to existing normative contexts. The only concern is to judge the dispute
from a moral point of view and to judge it in a consensual manner. Norms under debate
which are acceptable to all people who are affected by their consequences deserve general
recognition.

Whereas cognitive interpretations, moral expectations and evaluations are
overlapping in everyday communication, Habermas's discourse edrics is relevant for a
broader theory of communication which is built on the supposition of rational
understanding. Provided that in conversation an agreement or disagreement must be
based on reasons, then assessment of the grounds of validity claims is not a function of

force, habit or custom (as the relativist yields to the skeptic), but a rationality problem.

Therefore, when dealing with the social practices of justiﬁcation, discourse edrics may

234

overcome the relativist troubles rooted in the scientiﬁc descriptivism of Winchian social
science, and could accomplish the philosophical role of "guardian of rationality" for
normative contexts of justiﬁcation of norms. In some conditions, conﬂicts in the
regulative ﬁeld of social interactions may be a Sign of a disruption of normative
consensus. In such cases a new consensual balance can be reached by the intersubj ective
recognition either by the restoration of the old validity claim that became controversial or
by assuring a new validity claim. Habermas contends that agreement of individuals
regarding a norm that equally affects drem expresses their "common will" ("Discourse
Edrics", p. 67). Metaphorically put, that means that if we may see a pluralistic world, at
least we all look through the same window of a generalizable interest. And for this reason
his edric may suggest a way out of the Hellenistic fragmentation of reason and the
cynicism of our times.

We have seen that Habermas distinguishes three different world relations and
validity claims that differentiate rationality in three values spheres. For instance, the
world of objects refers to objective relations described in factual judgements where
seeking for truth reveals a cognitive-instrumental dimension of rationality; the social
world formed by social interactions (which raise the "other mind" issue), assesses the
validity of values of actions in terms of normative rightness, based upon a moral-practical
rationality; the selfs world incorporates subjective relations and psychological
experiences deﬁned by aesthetic-expressive rationality.

A possible question is how can a new balance between the divided moments of
reason (cognitive-instrumental and moral-practical) be reestablished in lifeworld

communication at the discourse level? The fragmentation of reason raises the complex

235

problem of mediation between separated value spheres. In this respect, Habermas's
answer makes reference to his recurrent theme of the three world relations correlated with
the tlrree dimensions of rationality and their corresponding types of speech acts
(constative, regulative, expressive). His position is that an understanding is rendered
possible where cognitive interpretations, moral expectations and evaluation overlap in
everyday communication. Validity claims are set in the structure of any possible
conversation between a speaker and a hearer who have the elementary capacity to redeem
and vindicate such claims in speech acts and to challenge them by take an afﬁrmative or
negative stance toward them. The eventual agreement brings about "the intersubj ective
mutuality of reciprocal understanding, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with
one another" (Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 3). Therefore, Habermas
suggests that in empirical and contingent lifeworld situations of conﬂict and
disagreement, we have to move to the linguistic level of the discourse and of the
unavoidable presuppositions of argumentation in order to warrant the validity claims that
have been responsible for the breakdown of communication. If there is a prevailing force
that should Show us the padrs between the horns of the dilemma of "gods and demons",
that is the force of the "better argument".

By stressing the dialogical character of communicative rationality, Habermas
escapes the monological perspective of the philosophy of consciousness typiﬁed by
subject-centered reason. Action oriented to communication is treated as a kind of social
interaction designed for reaching agreement on the rational basis of the common
recognition of the corresponding validity claims inherently implicit in every speech act.

Hence it is treated distinctly from the purposive action centered on "success" or the

236
"efﬁciency" in the achievement of ends. Rationality should play the role of a practical

guide helping us to choose how shall we live and to cut our way through the labyrinth of
the modern lifeworld. In this respect, Habermas considers there still is a job to do for
philosophy as a guardian of rationality which should act as a mediator between
specialized domains. This role is more necessary now when we have forgotten the insight
of the totality of culture as shown by the conceptions of Kant and Hegel. The
modernization of society led to the fragmentation of three distinct dimensions of
rationality: the positive science, the post-traditional edrics, and the autonomous art and
institutionalized art criticism. Although many claim that these segmented areas can
manage without recourse to philosophical justiﬁcation, Habermas believes that the very
existence of the gaps posed by cultural differentiation poses problems of mediation
between separated value spheres. In relation to this aspect there arise two kinds of
questions. One the one hand, the question is about the possibility of a balance between
separated moments of reason in the horizon of the impoverished traditions of the
lifeworld. The challenge is how can we rejoin, without altering their regional rationality,
the isolated the scientiﬁc moral and aesthetic discourses resulting ﬁom the ever-
deepening division of labor. In other terms, this problem refers to the inter-relationships
between the three ﬁelds of expert cultures typifying esoteric and abstract forms of thought
which speak intricately about the process of everyday communication. In this respect,
Habermas assumes that instead of playing the presumptuous role of an arbiter of cultures,
philosophy can be a translator standing in and mediating between the everyday world and
the autonomous sectors of cultural modernity.

In the context of Habermas's ambitious attempt to redeem the project of

237

modernity, discourse edrics is meant to offer a weak transcendental program of
justiﬁcation of norms that can be formulated in terms of universal pragmatic analysis of
communicative action in which those involved are oriented to validity claims. In this
respect, Habermas defends a cognitivist approach to ethics against the skeptical tactics of
metaedrics and aims at laying the universal ground for answering the question "in what
sense and in what way moral commands and norms can be justiﬁed" ("Discourse Edrics",
p. 57). In consequence, a useful question to consider in the construction of discourse
edrics is to what extent Habermas’s project of a general theory of the justiﬁcation of
norms begins from and differentiates itself from the Kantian a priori reconstruction of
practical reason. To answer, I will outline a comparison between Habermas and Kant.
(B) Both Kant and Habermas ask what makes moral law applicable to real people
living in historical and concrete worlds. The ﬁrst responds in terms of the categorical
imperative and appeals to transcendental justiﬁcation. The latter maintains drat the
discourse edrics rests on two basic assumptions: "(a) that the normative claims to validity
have cognitive meaning and can be treated like claims to trudr and (b) drat justiﬁcation of
norms and commands requires that a real discourse be carried out and thus cannot occur
in a strictly monological form, i.e., in the form of a hypodretical process of argumentation
occurring in the individual mind" ("Discourse Edrics", p. 68). So, he preserves some
transcendental character of moral norms, but in a weaker version which surrenders the a
priori justiﬁcation of Kantian moral laws and, instead, grounds them in linguistic
communication. Discursive contexts presuppose certain inescapable presuppositions o
arguments which make possible the derivability of moral rules. Habermas suggests that

arguments are called transcendental if they deal with competence which make possible

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the engendering of discourses. Thus, the difference between Kant and Habermas can be
sketched as follows: On the one hand, Kant limited morality to the subclass of justiﬁable
normative judgements and to the problems of right or just actions that can be settled on
the basis of rationally motivated agreement. His notion of practical reason is
deontological, cognitivist, formalist and universalist and serves to justify actions in terms
of valid norms and to justify the validity of norms in terms of a priori principles worthy
of recognition. On the other hand, although Habermas holds that normative rightness
must be regarded as a claim to validity that is analogous to a truth claim and hence meets
Kantian claims half-way, he replaces the categorical imperative widr moral argumentation
within discourse edrics. On his view, validity is based upon the achievement of
agreement in the process of communicative action.

Nevertheless, since Habermas still accepts the principle of universalization as a
rule of argumentation his discourse edrics shares with Kantian practical reason the
universalist feature. However Habermas does not refer to an a priori structure. One who
participates in argumentation is implicitly committed to pragmatic presuppositions drat
have normative content (otherwise, as we showed above, one is led to perfonnative
contradictions). The moral principles can be derived from the content of these
presuppositions whose validity is beyond the context of their concrete applicability.
However, the discourse edrics tries to overcome much too narrow limitation to theory of
duty and responsibility and prefers a move to the side of moral tradition merely concerned
with the theory of good, emphasizing the common weal. In this respect, Habermas learns
from Hegel's critique of Kant to make a distinction between the edrical questions, which

refer to the value of the good life, and morality, which is centered on the value of justice.

239

Edrical agreement is not a recognition of the universal validity which is aimed for moral
judgements (that is, for everyone), but, at most, an acknowledgment of individual and
group preferences regarding values and life choices Widrin particular historical and
cultural contexts.

In sum, beyond its affinities with Kant's moral theory of justiﬁcation, Habermas
departs from Kantian morality in some major respects. Discourse edrics gives up the
dichotomy between intelligible (duty, free will) and phenomenal (subjective motives,
inclinations, political and social institutions, etc. This unbridgeable gap becomes in
discourse ethics mere tension, which is a factual outcome of the normative force of
counter-factual prerequisites of speech in everyday communication. Hence, the quasi-
trarrscendentality of validity claims as reﬂected in idealizing counterfactuals of speech
and action is deﬁnitively preferred to the Kantian nomological approach. Habermas
prefers to explain reaching understanding about the generalizability of interests as the
result of an intersubj ectively mounted public discourse. "There are no shared structures
preceding the individual except the universals of language use". (Habermas, "Morality
and Ethical Life", in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 1991 , p. 203).
Furthermore, "facts of pure reason" become impotent and the effectiveness of the "ought"
is not an a priori categorical imperative, but simply a matter of experience.

Habermas introduces the principle of universalization (I!) as a bridging principle
that enable us to reach agreement on practical matters. However its justiﬁcation is not an
a priori "ought", but is derived from general presupposition of argumentation and the
universal condition for validity which may be checked out across cultures. A norm is

justiﬁable provided that

240
(ID All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its

general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of

everyone's interests (and these consequences are preferred to those known

alternative possibilities for regulations) ("Discourse Edrics", p. 65).

If this principle of universalization assumes requires a norm be "equally good" for every
moral agent, the principle of discourse edrics (D) establishes the intersubjective ground
for the validation of a norm in terms of approval of all those affected and necessarily
involved in its rational debate.

(D) Only those norms can be valid that meet (or could meet) with approval

of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse"

("Discourse Ethics", p. 66).

This principle (D) has a procedural character referring to the discursive redemption of
normative claims to validity and not to substantive guidelines. "Practical discourse is not
a procedure for generating justiﬁed norms but a procedure for testing the validity of
norms that are being proposed and hypothetically considered for adoption" ("Discourse
Ethics", p. 103).

If we admit that there is a set of reasons the participants in discourse may
commonly agree upon, then justiﬁcation and assessment is not a function of habit and
custom but becomes a question of rationality. Henceforth everyone disputing a norm
must provide a good reason for doing so. Yet the moral decision is to be based on an
unrestrained competition for "better arguments" and in this light and should be open to
criticism and eventual reorientation or change of beliefs and actions. At this point arises
what Habermas calls “the ideal speech situation” that is described by Habermas as an
implausible logical ﬁction applicable in counter-factual way, though its meaning may

vary as it is used in different contexts. For instance, we may ﬁnd three semantic

connotations of this expression. (1) It is presented sometimes as a form of ideal

 

241

communication that approximates an ideal-type for the improbable conditions of reaching
rationally motivated agreement drrough argumentative speech. (2) In an earlier analysis
which still holds, it points to the reconstruction of " general symmeny" conditions in
regard to their rational competence that every competent speaker must fulﬁll adequately
in order to be able to participate in argumentation. (3) Finally, this is an idea Habermas
borrows from Apel who wants to point out an "unrestricted communication community"
that implies, perhaps, that rationally motivated agreement can be reached in principle only
if the communication process continues long enough and is open enough to force the
better argument alone to the fore (see "Discourse Ethics", p. 88; TCA I, p. 42).

Habermas claims that his participants to discourse are not Kantian intelligible
characters, but real and complex hmnan beings who are driven not only by the search for
truth. In order to neutralize their empirical space-time limitations to which they are
inherently subjected, the "idealizing proviso" establishes a reasonable expectation that
counterfactual conditions can at least be approximated to some satisfactory degree. As a
matter of fact, the rules of discourse are inescapable presuppositions and not mere
conventions rounded by traditions.

The presuppositions themselves become obvious as necessary rules of the game of
argumentation in the case when one is caught in a performative contradiction.
Nevertheless, such presuppositions that cannot be avoided or substituted are not justiﬁed
in the strong sense of Kantian transcendental deduction. They are established by being
accepted as a fact of reason in setting out to argue for or against a validity claim called
into question. In this process one must appeal to the competence in speech and action

that rests on intuitive pre-understanding, which makes possible the participation to

242

argumentation process and consensus that can be attained discursively. Here is
Habermas's example ("Discourse Edrics", pp. 90-1):

(1) "Using good reasons, I ﬁnally convinced H that p. "

By this statement the speaker by using good reasons, convinced the bearer to accept the
truth claim connected with the assertion that p is true. The emphasis is on the idea of
good reason which must be compelling not only for that particular hearer, but for every
subject. That is why it would be nonsensical to say

(2) "Using lies, I ﬁnally convinced H that p";

Statement (2) can be revised by emphasizing the linguistic interaction and belief
formation,

(3) "Using lies, I ﬁnally talked H into believing that p"

It implies that H has been motivated to believe the p is true under the conditions that do
not permit the formation of convictions because lies cannot be good arguments and
therefore contradict the pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation that hold for all
instances. Contradiction is evident if one defends the truth of statement (2) and is aware
that one’s conviction is based on the false beliefs induced by lies. As Habermas puts it,
"for as soon as he cites a reason for the truth of (2), he enters a process of argumentation
and has thereby accepted the presupposition, among other, that he can never convince an
opponent of somedring by resorting to lies" ("Discourse Edrics", p. 90). Talking one into
believing that a statement p is possible in some rhetorical contexts, which are not based
on the pursuit of truth but in persuasion, though in such cases the justiﬁcation of p is
weak and fails the test at the critical examination of propositional or normative content of

drat statement. We may contrive some shorter examples such as,

243
(4) "Stalin excluded person A, B, C, from the vote and obtained the unanimity" (as he

actually did by killing the opponents)".

In such a case silencing the voices of those who are affected by the law, Stalin cannot
convince anyone that a unanimous vote is justiﬁed as an expression of reasoned
agreement and the conviction to adopt the law rest not on consensus motivated by reasons
but imposed drrough terror.

An even simpler case of perfonnative contradiction is this:

(5) "I don't drink".
The inconsistency of the situation is evident since, by uttering the constative statement
(5), it is inevitable to do exactly what is being denied, namely to drink.

Such a form of the argument is applied (by Apel) to the Cartesian cogito by

reconstructing the judgement as speech act as follows.

(6) "I do not exist (here and now)"

One uttering (6) ineluctably makes an existential assumption that
(7) "I exist (here and now)"

In conclusion, the statements ( I )-( 7) prove that "a performative contradiction
occurs when a constative speech act km) rests on noncontingent presuppositions whose
propositional content contradicts the asserted proposition p" ("Discourse Edrics", p 80).

The universal foundations for the pragmatic justiﬁcation of discourse edrics are
set by Habermas’s deﬁnition of the universalization principle as a rule of argumentation
which backs up moral deliberation of norms Widrin the community of all those whose
lives are affected by them. So, the idea of justiﬁcation of norms has nodring to do with

transcendental deduction but depends on identiﬁcation and observance of general and

244

unavoidable pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation that have a normative content
and drereby function in the form of discourse rules ("Discourse Edrics", pp. 96-7). In this
respect, we are urged to distinguish between "is" and "ought" in the form of contrast
between actual communication practice and ideal speech situation. The ﬁrst bears upon
the historical and cultural contingencies in a real community of speakers, the latter can be
attached to lifeworld via counter-factual constraints.

Discourse edrics is a general theory of justiﬁcation of norms which seek for the
universal validity drat everyone is bound to agree on, and hence the particularity and
concreteness of Wittgenstein's and Winch's "forms of life" is contrasted with the context-
transcendence of counterfactual conditions of speech. Habermas accepts other conceptual
alternatives for expressing "our" cognitive achievements. He believes that it is not
important whether we use the notions of "form of life" and "language game" or we use
other expressions such as "practice", linguistically mediated interaction", "convention",
"cultural background", "tradition" and the like. What counts is the fact that these
"commonsensical ideas" attained a status of basic concepts in epistemology.
(“Communicative versus Subject Centered Reason”, p. 605, "Philosophy as Stand-In and
Interpreter", p. 9). However, in the light of internal validity conditions deducible from
Habermas's perspective,

Winch's arguments are too weak to uphold the thesis that inherent to every

linguistically articulated world-view and to every cultural form of life

there is an incommensurable concept of rationality, but his strategy of

argumentation is strong enough to set off the justiﬁed claim to universality

in behalf of the rationality that gained expression in the modern

understanding of the world from an uncritical self-interpretation of the

modern world that is ﬁxated on knowing and mastering external nature

(TCA 1, p. 66).

In Winch's view, the limits of the world for the members of the same culture are

245

given by the limits of dreir language. They cannot step out of the horizon of their own
life. Consequently, any attempt at understanding is also possible only from Widrin after a
mandatory cultural assimilation to the framework of the worldview where the members of
a language community come to an agreement regarding the main themes of their private
and social life. In addition, insofar as each culture establishes through the mediation of
language a relation with reality, the concepts of "reasonable" and "irrational", "real" and
"unreal", "true" and "false" make sense only vvidrin the linguistic system. On these
grounds, Winch concludes that anthropologists (like Evarrs-Pritchard), who speak about
the superiority of our pattern of rationality by pressing the demand for consistency over
the natives further than the natives would naturally recognize, are in fact guilty of
misunderstanding and commit a category mistake. We have seen before that such
arguments convey for a Winchian social scientist an insurmountable dilemma which
could be brieﬂy formulated as follows: when we come across a set of what appears
irrational beliefs is drere merely a misunderstanding rooted into a defective translation?
This difﬁculty disseminates in a wide range of subsequent questioning: Since rationality
consists in the appropriate use of reason to make free choices in the best possible way,
only for an individual capable of deliberative behavior and rational criticism, does it
make sense to be irrational. Were we to acknowledge some apparently irrational beliefs,
what should we understand and what should be our attitude toward drem? Should we
then explain how irrational beliefs came to be held? Or, instead, should we understand
beliefs more charitably by asking ourselves if what appears to be irrational may be
interpreted otherwise in its privately motivated or culturally justiﬁed context? After all,

are there alternative and equally legitimated standards of rationality? If not, can one

246

translate between different linguistic frameworks or, else, what can one reasonably do in
order to understand other people?

Habermas ﬁnds Winch justiﬁed, up to a point. There are reasons to insist upon
the historical conﬁgurations of customary practices, group memberships, cultural patterns
of interpretation, forms of socialization, and to adopt a participative attitude from Widrin
the totality of a form of life. Nonetheless, understanding must go beyond empirical
mechanisms and must be conceived in terms of problem solutions open to systematic
evaluations in light of universal validity claims: propositional truth for the describing
the state of affairs or the objective world (the common perspective of a drird person or
nonparticipant), normative rightness for the common social world (which gives
legitimacy to linguistic intersubj ective interactions between participants in
communication actions), subjective truthfulness for the expressions of the private world
(which refers to speakers' intentions and aesthetic harmony as subjective mirror surfaces
for normative expectations and certain facts or how states of affairs and valid norms and
values look from the perspective of the ﬁrst person) and comprehensibility as every
action oriented to reaching understanding can be emphasized as a common negotiation of
meanings that is instersubj ectively recognized. Any cultural tradition makes available
concepts to designate the three correlated worlds (objective, social, and subjective), must
permit the necessary differentiation of validity claims (of truth, rightness and truthfulness)
and correspondingly stimulate the differentiation of attitudes (objectifying, norm-
conforrnative and expressive). Therefore, in order to set the conceptual framework of
background convictions for such processes of coming communicatively to an

understanding based on mutual agreement, Habermas prefers the phenomenological

247

connotation of "lifeworld". He says "the world concept and the corresponding validity
claims provide the formal scaffolding with which those acting communicatively order
problematic contexts of situations, drat is, those requiring agreement, in their lifeworld,
which is proposed as unproblematic" (T CA I, p. 70). On this view, Winch is vulnerable to
a critique based upon the procedural concept of communicative rationality which suggests
that forms of life are an equilibrated inter-play of the cognitive, moral and aesthetic
aspects. Habermas assumes drat, in a long run, "it can be shown that decentration of
world understanding and the rationalization of the lifeworld are necessary conditions for
an emancipatory society" (T CA 1, p. 74)

In this context, considering the distinction we previously made in subsection 6.12
between conventional and post-conventional modes of communicative action we can
refer to the parallel contrast between dogmatic-naive and critical-reﬂective forms of
argumentation. In the frrst case, what counts as good reasons may be ﬁxed by the cultural
traditions of a given society and the validity may be regarded as beyond dispute. Unlike
Winch, Habermas drinks drat arguments based on force or are a matter of traditions
slavishly followed are instances of irrationality. In such cases rational presuppositions are
satisﬁed to a sufficient degree of approximation in theoretical, practical, and explicative
discourses corresponding to the three types of validity claims drat inﬁltrate the threefold
world spheres. After all, discourse is the reﬂective form of linguistic practice associated
with an open-ended and critical form of argumentation which is developed in modern
societies.

As traditional forms of life are gradually dissolved in the process of social

modernization, the disappearance of "value-irnbued cosmologies and the disintegration of

248

the sacred canopies" leaves a gap behind as we are confronted with new premises about
the question "how should I live?" ("Philosophy as Stand in Interpreter", p. 1). The
collapse of religious and metaphysical worldviews inevitably leads to the disenchantment
of the world and to the tragic condition that we are unwillingly left with a void.54 We
must face the challenge of the growing social complexity and irreducible pluralism of
modern life which has gradually eroded the traditional beliefs people use to lived by. In
modern societies, modes of communicative action are related to critical forms of
argumentation and rationalization processes. Therefore the problem of rationality which
has been traditionally associated with the hard core of humanity is explicitly tied to
dilemmas of modenrity and consequently implies our ability to negotiate our way through
the "maze" of the modernization of society (consisting in the development of the
conjoined areas of science with its technological application, market economies,
formalized legal systems, bureaucratic organization, edrical codes, high art and mass
culture, and so on). Hence, in a world which was robbed of the enchantrnent of the
religious and metaphysical imagination, cultural custom is stripped of its power to
inﬂuence the formation of personal identity and the structuring of beliefs systems. The
postconventional communicative action is associated with open ended and critical debate
based on reasons, not on force or unquestioned authority of a tradition as Winch has
proclaimed. Therefore, rationality is tied to communicative competence which provides
for meaningfully participation in discursive interactions. Understanding can be reached
by redeeming validity claims of propositional truth, normative rightness, subjective
truthfulness and aesthetic harmony geared to intersubj ective recognition. Habermas says

that, "this communicative rationality recalls the idea of logos, inasmuch as it brings along

249

with it the connotations of a noncoercive force of a discourse" ("Communicative versus
Subject-Centered Reason", p. 607). Thus, the participants can overcome their at ﬁrst
subjectively biased views and reach a rationally motivated agreement which is expressed
by a decentered understanding of the world.

(C) Finally, we may conclude these considerations with two discussions which
will emphasize the postconventional character of the idea of discourse. The ﬁrst one will
refer to discourse in terms of rationally motivated consensus which is made possible by
argumentation that come sufficiently close to satisfying idealizing presuppositions. The
second one will present the specialization of discourse as a consequence of the process of
modernization of society. And this will require a more general approach to Habermas's
redemption of the project of modernity.

I) In Theory of Communicative Action Habermas uses the term discourse for
forms of argumentation that come closer to satisfy the "exacting conditions" and in which
participants are conceptually required to suppose that a rationally motivated consensus on
the universal validity of contested claims is possible in principle, provided drat the debate
is critically open and would be carried long enough. Habermas singles out the claims to
propositional truth and normative rightness as being conceptually linked to the idea of
universal agreement on the universal validity of what is agreed (see T CA I , p 388, T CA
2, pp. 400-1). Thus, the term universal applies to validity claims in two senses: everyone
must agree on them and what is agreed is valid for all participants in discourse. To this
extent, this idea is an idealizing presupposition which is unavoidable for certain forms of
argumentation embodied in theoretical discourses (that drematize claims to propositional

truth) and practical discourses (that thematize claims to moral validity).

250

In particular, Habermas's discourse edrics is built upon a middle ground where the
inadequacies of universalist moralities are corrigible drrough the concrete needs and
empirical claims of the lifeworld. However, rationality in practical matters does not have
privileged access to particular moral truths. It cannot also absolve anyone of moral
responsibility for making reasonable choices in the worlds we live. In the long run,
Habermas crosses the border to social and political philosophy saying a last farewell to
Kant. His theory of the rationalization of society which give legitimacy to a normative
framework in a broader sociologic perspective implies a commitment to make a better
world by assuming the great liabilities of our time. This remark leads us to the second
discussion.

2) Habermas uses the term discourse for critical and reﬂective forms of
argumentation as found in modern societies in contrast with "naive" forms of
argumentation from conventional forms of life driven by custom and habit. He argues
that in the process of social development, the fragmentation of traditional reason drat
leads to the appearance of "expert cultures" requires specialized pragmatic, edrical and
moral discourses. These sociological connotations show the connection between the idea
of discourse and his interest in redeeming the project of modernity. My exposition on
this issue will emphasize the emancipatory aspects and the paradoxical effect of the
Enlightenment ideals. But, in the ﬁrst place, it will help us to understand the status and
the role of discourses in the context of Habermas's response to the complex moral
dilemmas posed by differentiation processes in our time.

Enlightenment drinkers formulated an optimistic and ambitious project of

modernization of society which consisted in the effort to develop for the enrichment of

251

everyday life the related expert ﬁelds of objective science, universal morality and law,
and autonomous art. In this respect, Habermas explicitly draws from Weber's idea that
this cultural separation consists in a differentiation of substantive reason typical of
religious or metaphysical world-views, which was ﬁrst implied by Kant's concept of
formal rationality, and relies on a "belief in a procedural rationality and in its ability to
give credence to our views in the three areas of objective knowledge, moral-practical
insight, and aesthetic judgement" ("Philosophy as Stand in Interpreter", p. 4, "Modernity -
An Incomplete Project", in Postmodernism - A Reader, 1993, p. 103). The resulting
specialized domains of thought inherently determined a division of labor in splitting
ﬁelds of competence and responsibilities and consequently raise the problem of mediation
between the compartments of reason. In this respect, Richard Peterson remarks in his
recent book Democratic Philosophy and the Politics of Knowledge (1996), drat
"embodied rationality has to be conceived in terms of social practices, in particular
specialized practices" (p. 155).55

Habermas rests his critical arguments on extensive sociological and
edrnographical evidence provided by social scientists from Durkheim and Weber to Mead
and Parsons, and from Marx and Lukacs to Horkheimer and Adomo. Such theoretical
and empirical contributions are grounded in an understanding of the social character of
the rationalization processes and are dialectically reevaluated Widrin the comprehensive
syndresis of Habermas's complex view of commruricative rationality. Neverdreless, he
admits many times how much his view is in debt to Max Weber's perspective on
modernity. In "Modernity - An Incomplete Project" (in Postmodernism - A Reader, 1993,

pp. 103-4) he appeals to Weber's view of cultural modernity as characterized by the

 

252

fragmentation of reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into the autonomous
spheres of science, morality and art. Habermas ﬁnds that with this cultural separation,
areas of competencies are inherently split. The resulting division of labor further expands
the distance between experts and the larger public. Thus, questions of knowledge, of
justice and moral determination or of taste will fall under speciﬁc registers of validity:
truth, tightness, audrenticity and beauty.

The point is that the differentiation of cognitive-instrumental, moral practical and
aesthetic-expressive processes is associated to the Enlightenment project of developing
the ﬁeld of objective scientiﬁc reasoning, universal concept of morality and law, and
autonomous art and art criticism according to their inner logic. Enlightenment thinkers
like Condorcet promoted optimistic scenarios regarding our unlimited ability to control
nature on our behalf and to understand the world and the self. They believed in the
progressive emancipation of mankind through the evolution of civilization which leads to
the "rational organization of everyday social life" ("Modernity - An Incomplete Project",
p. 103), and had no doubt that the reign of morality, justice and equality would provide
the institutional premises for the happiness of human beings. Habermas observed that our
century shattered that optimistic dream. From here, he raises a legitimate question
"should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be,
or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?" ("Modernity - An
Incomplete Project", p. 104).

The emancipatory project of cultural modernity set the universalist premises for
the triumph of instrumental rationality which was obsessed by the success and efﬁciency

of purposive action, but the result was not universal human freedom as a progressive

 

253

morality but hidden and grotesque forms of repression and terror. Hence, Weber points
to unresolved tensions and "aporias" of modenrity and warns that its optimistic
emancipatory scenarios were proven to be mere illusions, since, ironically, instrumental
rationality leads to the imprisonment of human being into an "iron cage" of an
impoverishing bureaucratic system which suppresses civic liberty and the individual's
pursuit of happiness.

As Habermas observes, Weber detects the sign of a relativist age in the return of a
new polytheism, what else if not an indication of a pluralist tendency: the conﬂicts of
gods takes on the depersoniﬁed and objectifying form of antagonisms among irreducible
values and life. And Habermas concludes on the negative result of a rationalized world
that become meaningless. He quotes the inspired words of Weber, "over these gods and
their struggles it is fate - and certainly not any 'science' - that holds sway" (TCA I, pp.
246-7).

However, the idea of the selection of the appropriate means to achieve some
preestablished end seems to be too problematic even in Weber's eyes, to preclude the idea
of multiplicity.56 The question becomes how could one set out the preferable goals and
determine the most reliable choices among the means available to reach those goals
within a particular society? Obviously, the grounding of the guiding norms of different
societies and the understanding of different forms of life is only possible by appealing to
different kinds of rationalities. Of course, we must understand whatever logical link there
exists between mean and ends from a standpoint of a generally recognizable pattern of
efficient behavior Widrin that speciﬁc cultural and linguistic framework. And Weber

concludes somewhat skeptically that we must choose between the " gods and demons"

254

 

alive within our cultural world, we decide to follow.

This idea is echoed Adorno and Horkheimer's tragic diagnosis of the recent
history of world wars and holocaust which display an unprecedented brutality and terror.
They explain this development as a paradox of rationalization which results from the
negative dialectic of Enlightenment unfolding within industrialized societies obsessed by
technological efficiency at the expense of values.

Habermas shares with the critical theory the idea that one-dimensional purposive
reason deforms and encroaches the lifeworld and alienates people from everyday life. But
he went further and distinguishes the rationality of the system, which is purposive and
driven by efficiency, from the rationality of the lifeworld, which is inherently
communicative. In cases of distorted communication or the prevalence of instrumental
thinking, he speaks about pathologies and colonization of the lifeworld whose integrity is
endangered and eventually collapses giving rise to legitimation of aberrant and alienating
social behaviors and bureaucratic institutions which annihilate the autonomy of
individuals. In this view, according to Wellmer, "the paradox of rationalization would be
that a rationalization of the life-world was the precondition and the starting point for a
process of systemic rationalization and differentiation, which then has become more and
more autonomous vis-a-vis the normative constraints embodied in the life-world, until in
the end the epistemic imperatives begin to instrumentalize the life-world and threaten to
destroy it" ("Reason, Utopia and the Dialectic of Enlightenment", in Habermas and
Modernity, 1985, p. 56).

Habermas understands that Weber's undecided resolution tragically pushes us to a

sort of relativism which is the hallmark of our age. However, he thinks drat the remedy is

255

still to hold on to the emancipatory intentions of the Enlightenment and for this reason he
decides to save the project of modernity in a revised version. He suggests drat we should
not repeat the mistakes made by surrealist revolt against modern aesthetics. First,
emancipatory effect does not fallow a destructured value sphere whose desublimating
meanings are shattered and dispersed by extreme negation of traditional forms. Second,
communication processes need an integrative cultural pattern that should cover cognitive
meaning, moral expectations, subjective expressions and evaluations, which are
interrelated in everyday linguistic interactions. He assumes that "a reiﬁed everyday
praxis can be cured only by creating unconstrained interactions of the cognitive with
moral practical and the aesthetic expressive elements" ("Modernity - An Incomplete
Project, p. 105).

Therefore, he decides not to abandon the project of modernity as a lost cause and,
instead, he advocates for a corrected alternative to it by learning from past mistakes. In
this respect, Habermas would require the access to actors' intersubjective roles and
discursively redeemable thoughts and beliefs regarding their pragmatic relation to the
world and what they understand by "means" and "ends". Otherwise what warrantable
proof might we get that we are not simply caught in a reﬂexive interpretation, that
" Verstehen" is not just a self-projection of our own mental frame, intentional make-up or
linguistic presuppositions? So, ﬁnally Habermas rejects Weber's "tail wagging" between
rational and moral standards of cultures and he gives up the instrumentalist conception of
rationality that Shuttles back and forth between culturally impregnated "gods" and
"demons".

From this vantage point, as Wellmer shows, Habermas ﬁnds objectionable both

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Weber's too restricted conception of rationality and Adomo-Horkheimer's negative
dialectics which fail to properly express the internal logic of modem rationalization
processes. From the broader perspective of "a post-traditional conception of rationality"
"there would neither be a paradox of rationalization nor a 'dialectic of enlightenment';
rather it would be more adequate to speak of 'selective' processes of rationalization, where
the selective character of this process may be explained by the peculiar boundary
conditions and the dynamics of a capitalist process of production"("Reason, Utopia and
the Dialectic of Enlightenment", p. 56).

Habermas suggests that in empirical and contingent situations of conﬂict and
disagreement we have to move to the linguistic level of the discourse and of the
unavoidable presuppositions of argumentation in order to warrant the validity claims that
have been responsible for the breakdown of communication. If there is a prevailing force
that should Show us the paths between the horns of the dilemma of "gods and demons",
that is the force of the "better argument". Rationality should play the role of a practical
guide helping us to choose how we shall live and to cut our way drrough the labyrinth of
the modern lifeworld. And this is the context in which we may evaluate the explanatory
value and the methodological limits of the concept of communicative rationality. This is
the goal of the next section.

6.4] COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY: AN ASSESSMENT

The discussion of Habermas's reconstruction of the universal and the formal
properties of communicative action points to the rational potential of the idealizing
preconditions of any meaningful speech act and provides an account of the possibility of

cross-cultural understanding. In this section I will return to the concept of

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communicative rationality with an evaluative interest. The question is whether this
concept can provide a context-transcendent ground for understanding. I will brieﬂy
evaluate the adequacy of Habermas's view by considering some enduring objections that
confront his conceptual program. This will bring into target the concept of the ideal-
speech situation which sets the counterfactual limits for the possibility of rational
argumentation.

Two lines of discussion will be developed. First, I will critically explore the
context-transcendent force of the concept of communicative rationality. Then I will make
an attempt to draw an assessment of the concept of the ideal speech situation by
describing mostly in a "narrative" way its possible application across historical contexts
to some famous case studies. In this respect, I will outline an imaginary polemics
between Habermas and Rorty, though developed from the premises of a real conceptual
confrontation between them.

6.41) COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY AND THE TRANSCENDENCE OF
CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS

Habermas argues that rationality consists in communicatively achieved agreement
based on arguments that contain reasons or grounds that are systematically connected
with validity claims regarding a problematic speech act. He says,

the rationality proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points

to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible

to continue communicative action with other means when disagreements

can no longer be repaired with everyday routines and yet are not to be

settled by direct or strategic use of force. For this reason I believe that the

concept of communicative rationality, which refers to an unclariﬁed

systematic interconnection of universal validity claims, can be adequately

explicated only in terms of a theory of argumentation (my emphasis, TCA
I, pp. 17-8).

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Habermas repeatedly insists that validity claims are not ﬁxed, but can be
contested, defended or revised with reasons. There are different ways to settle disputed
claims. One may appeal to authority, urge the power of tradition, or use brute force.
However, Habermas contends that giving reasons for and reasons against a claim is
fundamental to the very idea of rationality. Habermas describes three possibilities for
demanding reasons. First, when a speaker says, "it is snowing outside" he raises a claim
to truth with a constative speech act about the state of affairs. We can imagine a hearer
responding "what reasons do you have for saying that?" A second possibility is that the
hearer does not refer to the truth-content of the utterance but challenges the speaker's right
to say that or the appropriateness of the speaker’s intent to establish an interpersonal
relationship drrough dialogue in that particular context. Let's imagine that a professor in
the midst of an explanation being interrupted by a student who asks: "What is your yearly
income?" The professor may reply: "What reasons do you have to say that to me right
now?" A speech act which calls for this mode of response is identiﬁed as regulative.
Finally, the third possibility is that the bearer questions the speaker's truthfulness in
saying what he says. For instance, when a man says "I love you" to his girl friend, he tries
to establish an interpersonal relation with her on subjective grounds. But she could
believe that he is deceiving her. It might happen that he just wants to take advantage of
her naivete or exploit her credulity. Her doubts that he is not sincere may prompt her to
say: "What reasons do you have for expecting me to believe that you mean that?" The
speech act that demands for this kind of response is called an "expressive" speech act.

Habermas stresses the illocutionary aspect of an utterance that brings about the

interactive use of language. This implies that a speaker who performs an utterance

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establishes an intersubjective relationship with a bearer and accepts the binding force of
an obligation to justify with reasons what he says. For the hearer, to understand the
claims raised by the speaker means to know under what conditions drat claim is both
valid and acceptable. Mutual agreement is not to be achieved drrough intimidation,
coercion, or terror, but through the appeal to reason. The obligation to act in a speciﬁc
way is related to the conditions of satisfaction or conditions of validation which specify
rational obligations to justify a disputed claim. These conditions are presented by
Habermas as a source of the binding force of speech acts. In this respect, an action of
communication makes use of the unavoidable presuppositions of argumentation in order
to gain intersubj ective recognition for validity claims. As Thomas McCarthy puts it,
"there exists a 'reﬂective medium' for dealing with problematic validity claims - drat is,
modes of argumentation or critique that enable us to thematize contested validity claims
and to attempt to vindicate or criticize them" ("Preface", in T CA I, pp. xi). This
possibility exists for each of the three dimensions of communication that lead to a
discursive understanding: the claim to propositional truth can be challenged and
defended with reasons; the claim that an action is right or appropriate against a certain
normative framework, or even when one steps out of that framework and questions its
legitimacy as a whole; and the claim that an utterance is reliable, being a sincere or
authentic expression of one's private life or subjective experiences. The three possible
types of validity claims are associated with three corresponding structural components of
speech acts: truth is linked with the propositional one, normative rightness with the
illocutionary one and truthfulness with the expressive one. The illocutionary success of a

speech act depends on whether the speaker's motivation is genuinely communicative

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oriented toward understanding or he simply acts strategically. In many cases this bring
about truthfulness which might be more convincingly characterized as an idealizing
presupposition. Habermas recognizes that in real contexts, not only is it difficult to say at
what extent one is sincere or straightforward, but at times anyone may be unable to see
the limit between the communicative intent and the strategic manipulation of speech.
Hence, Habermas explores the rational ground of possible agreement by introducing the
counterfactual idea of an ideal speech situation. This is said to be inherent in any possible
speech, since even intentional deceptions are designed in a way or another to pertain to
the claim of truth or normative rightness. Thus, the critical dimension of idealizing
suppositions, which applies to undistorted or unrestricted processes of communication
oriented toward understanding, is also relevant in the strategic case when structural
components of speech acts are disturbed and the effectiveness of language use is judged
in terms of successfully attaining ends. For practical conditions of reaching rationally
motivated understanding, idealizations approximate an ideal type of argumentation
process which is abstracted from the conditions of everyday communication. The ideal of
an "unrestricted communication community" (in Apel's words) implies that rationally
motivated agreement can be reached in principle only if the communication process
continues long enough and is open to the force of the better argument ("Discourse
Ethics", p. 88; TCA I , p. 42). In this respect, Habermas holds that the reconstruction of
"general symmetry" conditions must be adequately fulﬁlled by every competent speaker
in order for discursive justiﬁcation of validity claims to take place. This means that drere
is a symmetrical distribution of chances for all members of a speech community to

understand and engage in a perfonnative attitude. In the case of practical rationality, it is

 

261

implied that if all those affected by a norm are heard and claims are based on reason, not
on authority, then consensus may be reached regarding a norm.

From a critical perspective, a close examination of Habermas's theory of
communicative rationality may locate some difficulties with his theses regarding the
understanding of validity claims and the idealizing suppositions of argrmrentation. I will
shortly refer to the most important objections to Habermas's view of the rational potential
of language in general, and on the context-transcendent aspects of communicative
rationality in particular. Several critical challenges to his project will be addressed in a
way consistent widr Habermas's sometimes shifting view (even if some enduring
ambiguities and his second thoughts on these issues will make this task difﬁcult). Above
all the next discussion is not designed to respond to all the problems he is facing, but to
contribute to an assessment of the idea of communicative rationality and to emphasize its
normative role in the treatment of the pathologies of modernity. In what follows, I will
question four interrelated aspects of Habermas’s view on the rational potential of
language. First, I ask whether a suspension or an avoidance of validity claims is possible.
Second, I challenge the thesis that all three kinds of validity claims are simultaneously
raised widr every speech act. Third, I point to some problems with the justiﬁcation of
norms in connection with the likelihood of the decline of consensus in the context of the
growing complexity of cultural differentiation in modern societies. Fourth, I discuss in
what sense the context-transcendent power of communicative rationality bears upon the
unconditional character of the claims to truth and on the transcendence of the normative
claims to rightness. We shall notice that the four situations which will be further

discussed are converging on the issue of the therapeutic role of communicative rationality

 

262

in healing the illness of a lifeworld in which language is no longer suited to the pursuit of
understanding. Universally raised validity claims and counterfactual idealizations of
argumentative processes provide the unavoidable foundation for a use of language to
achieve agreement and thus humans can save their inner selves and hold to their
membership in the club of rational beings.

I) Habermas assumes that all speakers universally raise validity claims in every
speech act and all hearers cannot understand symbolic utterances vvidrout taking a yes or
no position on the claims to validity raised by the speakers. I will shortly examine here if
such a claim may appear stronger than is warranted by his argument. McCarthy considers
that interpreters of pluralistic cultures seem capable of understanding expressions of a
symbolically structured reality without reacting to the claims to validity made by a
speaker. In reality, people often seem to be indifferent, and they do not necessarily
challenge one's grounds for moral or epistemic decision making. Moreover, many times
we take claims to validity simply on faidr because of a lack of knowledge or simply for
convenience. Habermas acknowledges that, at least in some circumstances when reasons
are not sound or secure enough, there may be a suspension of judgement. But, in his
view, such abstention from decision can only be provisional. He argues that the
illocutionary force of speech consists in dialogical interactions when speakers and hearers
are in principle caught in a binding obligation of appealing to reasons. Habermas
dismisses as irrational the situations when participants to communication are not bound
by or do not recognize the compelling requirement of accepting or dismissing arguments
and the communicative intent is sacriﬁced for the sake of strategic use of language in the

pursuit of subjective interests and gratiﬁcations. In this respect, it seems to me that

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McCarthy's objection refening to the possibility of suspension or avoidance of validity

claims can be related to the issue of coercive speech. Habermas acknowledges the
undeniable persuasive edge of authority and instrumental reason over truth and rightness,
and he is aware that in the lifeworld the strategic mechanisms of inﬂuence frequently
replace consent. He recognizes that the normative aspect remains an unlikely or a very
improbable ideal condition, which only comes close to being accomplished in everyday
day communication processes. Nevertheless, to avoid the strong idealizations of speech
is an indication that language use has lost its basic communicative status to provide for
agreement and has entered into a kind of parasitic mode which is driven not by the better
argument but by interests. For Habermas, the counterfactual component of speech lays
out the premise for the critical function of communicative rationality and is connected
with his diagnosis of social pathologies. However, it seems to me that we can understand
that in some empirical contexts, one's denial of rightness or deceiving behavior bears
witness to the gap between everyday-life situations and the counterfactual conditions of
the ideal speech supposition. Habermas admittedly faces this possibility by
acknowledging that the counterfactual prerequisites of an ideal Speech are not actually
meet in any historic community, so far as social roles and economic statuses of those
affected by the norms are not equal and democratically shared. Insofar as such normative
conditions that set an ideal type of speech acts and are never to be reached as such, their
essentialist or descriptivist interpretations are misunderstandings to which Habermas
himself calls attention.

2) Habermas argues drat three kinds of validity claims are simultaneously

thematized with every speech act. This assumption sets the general framework for the

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ideal speech situation and points to the idea of an equal ability to form comprehensible

sentences speciﬁed in three classes of relations with reality (propositional-constative,
moral-normative, subjective-expressive). I will examine in what sense we could defend
such a strong thesis.

In Habermas's view, understanding is tied to the illocutionary force of an
utterance, which consists in the intersubjective relationship bound by a reciprocal
obligation. To understand a speech act means to identify the claims to validity that the
speaker raises with that speech act and to comprehend the arguments which can be used
by the speaker to justify a disputed claim or by a hearer to justify his acceptance or
rejection of it. At this point we cannot avoid addressing again the recurrent question drat
keeps hunting us from behind - that is, in what sense is understanding connected with
rationality?

As we have noticed in the section on universal pragmatics, Habermas
distinguishes between the cognitive use of language and the interactive use of language.
The ﬁrst emphasizes the propositional content in constative Speech acts; the latter
focuses, with the help of regulative speech acts, on intersubjective interaction driven by
the process of argumentation. The illocutionary force brings about the relationship
established in communication between a speaker and a hearer bound by reciprocal
obligations to justify their positions by appeal to reasons. This implies that, if challenged
by the bearer, the Speaker must give reasons to support his claim as being right or true. In
reply the hearer might reject what is said, or argue that the speaker has no right to say
that, or simply may express doubts regarding the speaker's truthfulness. In case of

misunderstandings or confusions, the critical debate may continue until the speaker's

 

265

claim is recognized as justiﬁed and the hearer grasps the reasons which support the claim.
The hearer may be wrong or purposively mystifying in his denial of the speaker's claim.
Hence, he does not have the last word. The debate must be carried until an eventual
agreement can be reached based on the best arguments available.

However, insofar as the main focus is not on the trudr-content of utterances but on
its illocutionary force, which consists of the binding mutual obligation to appeal to
reasons, speakers and hearers could agree with each other in good faidr that a claim is true
when in fact it is false. For instance the fact that once everyone agreed that the sentence
"the eardr is ﬂat" is true, did not make it so. The problem is different in the situation of
the justiﬁcation of norms. More recently Habermas (Postmetaphysical Thinking, p. 65)
seems to acknowledge that consensus is neidrer a sufﬁcient nor an appropriate criterion of
truth. In contrast with his initial consensualist views, Habermas argues now that the
eventual agreement to be reached about the propositional aspect of speech acts cannot
ﬁmction as a truth-criterion. It is just an account of the meaning or the deﬁnition of truth
which is commonly shared by the participants in discourse. People may act
communicatively and yet be wrong in their beliefs, which may be simply rooted in
ignorance or illusions. Losing sight of the propositional component of speech may lead
to holding falsehoods. Certainly, universal acceptance does not make a belief true.

Habermas may suppose that his shift of emphasis from the propositional to the
interactive aspect of language-use protects him from such cognitivist objections as the
one raised above. In fact he tries to avoid the difficulty derived from his consensualism
by assuming that every speech act simultaneously raises all three kinds of validity claims

(TCA 1, p. 101). His point is that if a claim to truth is primarily redeemed in an utterance,

 

266

the claims to normative rightness and truthfulness are raised indirectly or in a secondary
way. In connection with this assumption, Habermas claims drat every speech act can be
contested from exactly the three points of view. According to Cooke this thesis that an
utterance can be rejected as invalid from the angles of trudr, rightness and truthfulness is
not equivalent but different and weaker than the contention drat the illocutionary success
depends on reaching agreement with regard to all three validity claims Simultaneously
raised in every speech act (Language and Reason, p. 84). Habermas is aware that to
require the bearer to be convinced by any one of the three claims is very unlikely in
everyday communication. For example when a speaker says, "the snow is white", a claim
to truth is raised in the ﬁrst place. Also, indirectly, he raises a claim that it is appropriate
(normative rightness) and that he is trudrful in saying that. A hearer may agree that the
snow is white and he may judge the speaker to be truthful. Nevertheless, if he ﬁnds that
the remark is inappropriate (perhaps it is performed while they were singing in a choir or
praying), the speech act will be unsuccessful. To make drings worse let's imagine a
participant at a forum who interrupts the lecturer saying: "Would you please tie my Shoe-
strings?" According to Habermas, we may suppose that, the offended lecturer and the
unpredictable speaker will engage in argumentation. The ﬁrst may give voice to his
discontent regarding such a disturbing request and the latter may provide reasons for why
he believes the speech act is far from being outrageous and is normatively in order. In
this case, one cannot exclude the possibility drat the utterance is so inappropriate and so
obviously intended to embarrass the speaker that teaching a mutual agreement on
normative matters is almost impossible.

The foregoing analysis shows that the condition of agreement on the basis of

 

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simultaneous thematization of the three claims is too strong and more arguable than the
weaker thesis drat it is possible to contest every speech act from the three points of view.
To further substantiate the difference between the two interpretations of Habermas's
thesis let's imagine a bank-robber who shouts "hands up" while airrring a gun at a cashier.
From a semantic point of view, orders or commands cannot be decided in terms of true
or false; hence, although this utterance might have communicative sense, its propositional
component is presumably suspended. By contrast, from the angle of the illocutionary
aspect of speech acts, the bank teller is supposed to understand indirectly that the bank is
being robbed (the state of affairs), may question his right of the speaker to do that
(normative rightness) or even question his sincerity in performing this utterance. It is not
necessary for the cashier to agree with the bank robber, but he cannot avoid taking an
attitude and eventually rejecting one or all the three claims to validity raised in that
speech act. The cashier might take the command as being a joke. Moreover, he may
contest the bank robber's right to act as he does or simply have doubts that the bank-
robber is truthful. Obviously, it is risky to disregard the demand as a false warning, or a
sting operation. In such a case, an interpretive mistake or disagreement may be life
drreatening.

Habermas shows that the actual performance of utterances like "I beg you", or
"this is a request" or "that's a promise" is not what it explicitly claims to be. Such
expressions are designed to convince the hearer that the speaker is truthful, but they
cannot be assessed from the point of view of their truth-value since "there is no parallel
with constative speech act" (see M. Cooke, Language and Reason, p. 62). It seems to me

again that the distinction between the communicative and the strategic use of language

 

268

may add more comprehensibility to such Situations. The point is that Habermas's
pragmatic evaluation of the processes of argumentation from everyday communication
allows a rational critique of dishonest and immoral usage of speech, for instance when
utterances like "that's a promise" or "this is the whole truth" are simply used to deceive
the bearer. Although Habermas has little to say with regard to truth or justice themselves,
the critical thrust of communicative rationality transcends the historical and cultural
contexts.

Habermas argues that communicative action oriented toward understanding
represents the primary mode of language use. Therefore, the instrumental manipulation
of language (assuming falsities, wrong doings or untruthfulness) with a strategic intent is
“parasitic ” on the communicative use of language (TCA I, p. 288). For instance the
command of a bank robber, the demand of a rapist, and the declaration of love made by a
womanizer could be explained as being centered on the success and fulﬁllment of aims
and desires. Habermas suggests that the latently strategic use of language merely
simulates the communicative use. It success depends on the power of persuasion of a
pretense. In this respect, it is parasitic because it is based on the successﬁrl creation of the
illusion that the actors are using language with an orientation toward understanding (TCA
I , p. 294). Cooke assumes that in speech acts performed with a strategic intent, the
raising of validity claims is suspended in many circumstances. In this category are
examples of orders or drreats ("Give me money or I will shoot you" , "Get out") and
certain insults or curses ("May your child die before you") (Language of Reason, p. 24).
We learned ﬁom Habermas already that such a distorting use of language should be

distinguished from the contexts where language is used communicatively. An utterance

 

 

269
which may be used strategically, may be also used to reach understanding on the context-

transcendent basis of communicative rationality (e. g. a pretending declaration of love
versus an authentic declaration of love). This brings about the strong idealizations that
have a normative-counterfactual nature and are very improbable descriptions of the state
of affairs. The integrative role of the communicative action is essential to the
reproductive processes of the lifeworld. This fact is emphasized once more by
Habermas's thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld by the mechanisms of functional-
systemic integration.

In conclusion, the strong thesis of simultaneous redemption and vindication of the
three claims to validity with any speech act is not defensible in many of the cases
described above. (Some critics Show that sometimes either one's verbal behavior is
awkwardly inappropriate or insincere and that in some speech acts one’s claim may be
even suspended). However the weaker dresis that it is possible to contest every speech
act from the three points of view is more acceptable. A speaker acting communicatively
raises validity claims but this does not require in all circumstances that a speaker and his
hearer achieve an agreement with regard to all three kinds of validity claims. In fact,
sometimes a better understanding just makes a disagreement more comprehensible.
Habermas seems to assume that a successful communication depends on the speaker's
implicit warranty for the validity of the one direct claim and the two indirect claims and
the hearer's acceptance or rejection of what is said. If the hearer ﬁnds the speaker's
reasons for defending the offending claims as ultimately convincing, then the linguistic
exchange will be successful and an agreement can be reached. In this light Habermas's

main concern is to contrast empirical contexts of speech which are under the (implicit or

{duel

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explicit) pressure of authority and tradition with the likely effectiveness of the
counterfactual ﬁction of the ideal speech, which is the unavoidable foundation for "the
humanity relations among men who are still men" (after J. Thompson, "Universal
Pragmatics", in Habermas - Critical Debates, p. 125). This means drat all participants to
a non-manipulative and noncoercive communication must rest their decisions on
commonly binding rational grounds if they are not to lose the normality of their inner
selves.

3) Another source of criticism of Habermas refers to the idea of reaching consent
in matters of moral justiﬁcation of norms. For instance, the interpretation of one's actions
should consider not only the common case of a possible disobedience of a norm, but also
a consideration of the possible rejection the norm itself. In such cases, we can
legitimately presume that the participants to practical discourse are self-deceiving or, at
best, that they are misled by empirical evidence. Nevertheless, validity claims provide
the internal formal structure and the counterfactual demands for participating in the
argumentative process and reaching agreement. Their proper implementation determines
one's ability to utter a coherent and meaningful statement and even to demonstrate one's
normality of mind. The presuppositions of argumentation are characterized by Habermas
as unavoidable universals that provide the necessary grounds of moral deliberation and
make possible the communicative action oriented toward reaching understanding.

Among other considerations, Habermas suggests that the strong idealizations
implicit in argumentation include the assumption that any one is capable of speech and is
supposed to take part in debate with an equal voice. Given commrmicative competence,

every participant in communicative exchange is entitled to question every assertion, to

 

271

introduce new topics, and to express new attitudes, needs, or desires ("Discourse Edrics",
p. 76-7). This idea is controversial. Some critics (Seyla Benhabib, Maeve Cooke)
observe that these idealizations can be interpreted as moral intuitions which are not
shared by everyone, but only by those participants in communicative action who accept
the universalist moral drinking. For instance, the principle of "universal moral respect"
and "egalitarian reciprocity" are necessary presupposition of argumentation only for those
members of postconventional edrical communities who call into question the dreological
and ontological bases of inequality (see Cooke, Language and Reason, p. 31). If the
context-transcendent power of the rational justiﬁcation of such norms seems appropriate
for a liberal-democrat, it hardly ﬁts in the mental make-up of a religious fanatic or of a
radical advocate of cultural difference.

A related question is in what sense the rational requirements of argumentation
could still be fulﬁlled in the midst of the conﬁrsion of the social-political crisis of our
time? Perhaps it is needless to say that the growing complexity of modern societies
affected by differentiation and the multiplication of value perspectives increases the
likelihood of a decline of consensus. The unprecedented bureaucratization of our world
justiﬁes a reasonable expectation for the temporary regirnentation of the communicative
interest of reaching agreement with the strategic mechanisms of integration. Habermas
indicates that possible participation in the postconventional processes of communication
makes reference to an ideal speech, which sets the counterfactual conditions of critical
argumentation. But how useful is this really to understand people at home in a world
colonized by instrumental reason and impoverished by traditional cultures? In this

respect, Habermas argues that the request of unquestionable compliance with traditional

 

272

value-orientation or obedience to authority or the decision to silence political opponents,
or, simply, have them beheaded, are disclosing vistas toward the dark side of our history,
the ﬁeld of repeatable irrational battles long fought since the early dawn of civilization.
However, on some accounts (Wellmer, Benhabib, McCarthy), Habermas's demand for
consensus in the face of the irreducible pluralism of modern democracies would make
moral judgments impossible to achieve so far as the idealizing norms set implausible or
utopian conditions for historical subjects (see M. Cooke, Language and Reason, p. 153).
In his reply to critics, Habermas acknowledges that the basis of questions on which
universal agreement can be reached is getting progressively narrower and this raises the
question of the theoretical relevance of his discourse edrics. Although he seems to be
aware of the universalist limitations of his point of view, he still sticks to his central
notion of rationally motivated consensus.57
Habermas weighs the skeptical challenge of such problems pointing to the
irrationality of the world as a counterbalance to the soundness of the transcendental-
pragrnatic derivation of moral principles. Nevertheless he refuses to leave the moral
theorist on the unstable ground of wishes, desires or subjective decisions and contrives a
negative counterfactual argument to prove drat the option between the rationalist
standpoint of universal presuppositions of justiﬁcation and the skeptical attitude is
ultimately not a matter of free choice. In Habermas's view, one may refuse to act
communicatively by temporarily bracketing validity claims or keep moral norms in
disregard. But even a skeptic "cannot reject the edrical substance (Sittlichkeit) of life

circumstances in which he spends his waking hours, not unless he is willing to take

refuge in suicide or serious mental illness" ("Discourse Ethics", p. 100). Therefore, one

273

may seek for normative dissent or avoid the idealizing presuppositions only at the
expense of the extreme consequence of no longer counting as a rational agent.

4) Now the question is in what sense does Habermas hold that communicative
rationality transcends cultural and historical contexts? In order to outline an answer, I
will make ﬁrst some comparative observations regarding the context-transcendent power
of rationality widr reference to the claims to truth of theoretical discourses and the claims
to normative rightness of practical discourses. Then I will look to the idealizing
universals of argumentation which account for the critical thrust of communicative
rationality. Nonetheless, Habermas repeatedly argues that the perfonnative attitude
involves participation from within the social world. If this is the case, the question that
arises is whether arguments are neutral or culture-laden. In this respect, as Th. McCarthy
remarks, to understand what reasons are about,

we have to draw (at least implicitly) upon our own (intuitively mastered)

competence as members of a lifeworld and to assess the internal connections

between ideas, to evaluate evidence and arguments, to distinguish the valid from
the invalid, the sound from the unpersuasive ("Reﬂections on Rationalizations", in

Habermas and Modernity, p. 184).

Habermas's reply on this matter may appeal to the weak transcendental argument which
insures the universal and unavoidable, and yet fallible and pluralist, rational ground for
communicatively oriented action. His emphasis is not on the cultural or historical content
of thematized validity claims, but on the possibility of raising them universally and on the
transcendental dimension of the strong idealizations. Habermas suggestively describes
the impact of the context-transcendent power of rationality on the empirical and

multifarious cultural and historical landscapes as a "thorn in the ﬂesh of social reality"

(Postmetaphysical Thinking, p. 47).

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We have seen that in general the idea of discourse refers to a reﬂective
communicative action oriented toward an understanding tied to the idea of universal
agreement. In this respect, it offers a context-transcendent sense of validity that goes
beyond the "provincial agreements of the speciﬁc local context" (TCA I, p. 444).
However, theoretical discourses wherein the truth-clairns rely on scientiﬁc evidence and
are internally connected only with the idea of universal agreement, are different from
practical discourses wherein the moral claims are specially linked with argumentation in
the process of discursively achieved universal agreement. This means that the validity of
moral claims is conceptually bound by the critical practice of giving reasons in a way
which cannot be inferred about the claims to propositional truth. Nevertheless,
Habermas's position is not unambiguously clear in this respect. In Theory of
Communicative Action ([1981], 1984) Habermas argues that the "the concept of the
validity of a sentence" cannot be dissociated or explicated apart from "the concept of
redeeming the validity claim raised through the utterance of the sentence " (T CA I , p.
316). Therefore, we are compelled to analyze the conditions of propositional truth in
terms of its intersubjective recognition. He admits that a speaker might still produce
verifying grounds which are objectively available "according to a procedure that can be
applied monologically". That is, the explanation of whatever supports a validity claim
does not need to move from the semantics of sentences to the pragmatic level of using
language communicatively. However, he ﬁrrther quotes Dummett saying that "an
assertion is a kind of gamble drat the speaker will not be proven wrong", and relies on his
connection between the content of an assertion and a speaker's commitment in making it.

Habermas takes this as an indication of the fallibilistic character of argumentation which

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makes possible the grounding of claims made in uttering a sentence. In this respect, he
stresses drat the validity of a sentence is criticizable in principle and this bears upon the
illocutionary dimension of speech. On this basis he defends the thesis that truth
conditions cannot be explicated independently of the discursive redemption of that
corresponding truth-claim. He argues that "to understand an assertion is to know when a
speaker has good grounds to undertake a warrant that the conditions for truth of asserted
sentences are satisﬁed" (TCA I, p. 318).

In contrast with such consensualist views Habermas argues more recently, in
Postmetaphysical Thinking (p. 65), that an agreement on truth-value is reduced to the
explication of a commonly shared meaning or deﬁnition of truth, but it cannot function as
a truth-criterion. This implies that the only way a rationally motivated consensus is
relevant for the idea of truth is when it is connected to moral responsibility. The point is
drat every rational person as a competent participant in a theoretical discourse should
honestly accept the arguments and evidence of truth and admit its universal and inﬁnite
validity (see Cooke, Language and Reason, p. 156).

The case is obviously different with respect to moral and edrical justiﬁcations that
are inevitably caught in the middle of social conﬂicts and cultural clashes or whenever
political or ethnic groups struggling for recognition dispute the legitimacy of normative
establishment. Moral and edrical questions are addressed from the perspective of
participants in their effort to ﬁnd concrete answers in particular situations, “if the
questions and answers are not to be robbed of their normative substance and their binding
force” (Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, p. 24).

Nevertheless, the moral perspective requires the participants to transcend the social and

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historical context of their particular form of life and generalize the maxirns and contested
interests. If the consent on normative matters were not to be coerced, it must be adopted
the point of view of all those possibly affected. Habermas quotes Hobbes who claims
that agreement “would have to grow from inside human life”(in idem, p. 24). And yet,
Habermas argues that tr'udr achieved in dreoretical discourse is a regulative idea which
point to the possibility of an inﬁnite rational agreement and implies an anticipation of a
“ﬁnal consensus". One the one hand, he contends that only in the performative attitude
one can advance a claim that “transcends all cultural and historical bounds”. On the other
hand, he suggests that truth supposes an inﬁnite rational agreement, which is possible “in
the forum of an unlimited community in communication”. ("A Reply to my Critics", in
Habermas: Critical Debates, eds. : J.B. Thomson and D. Held, 1982, p. 277). Though it
is not completely clear how this expression could be interpreted. For instance, we may
infer, as we noticed before, that the discursive redemption of the propositional trudr-
claims is no longer a criterion of truth. This suggests that for constative utterances such
as "there are unicoms", ""the earth is round", "there are tigers in Africa" the
argumentation does not play a constitutive role. If a constative utterance is true, this is
not because an agreement might be achieved with regard to the validity of the claim
raised, but because conclusive empirical evidence could support the claims (Davidson is
right on this matter). In this respect, Habermas's point would be close to Putnam's
contention that "trudr is a property of a statement which cannot be lost, whereas the
justiﬁcation can be lost" (Reason, Truth and History, p. 55). In this light, the idea of truth
contains a moment of unconditionality that inherently transcends all cultural and

historical contexts. Comparatively, whereas moral validity claims justiﬁed drrough

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agreement are in principle subject to revision in the light of new arguments, in practical
discourse, the well-foundedness remains conditional and fallible. In an inspired
description of practical discourses, which ought to be the dominant mode of reaching
consensus, Habermas compares them with "islands drreatened with inundation in a sea of
practice" ("Discourse Edrics", p. 106). The context-transcendent voice of communicative
rationality driven by the force of the better argument is almost always silenced by narrow
and instrumental aspects of a history and a culture driven by the goals of domination and
control. The reﬂective agreement which must be grounded by compelling arguments is
drrust aside by the appeal to authority of an institution, inviolability of tradition or the
instrument of force.

That is why Habermas’s acknowledgement that the notion of "ideal speech
community", which points to the strong idealizations of speech acts, seems very unlikely
to be fulﬁlled in satisfactory manner in everyday communication. And yet, he contends
that all forms of argumentation reveal often in a counterfactual way a set of idealizing
universals which are rooted in the structure of the action oriented toward understanding.
Here lies most of the strength of the transcending power of communicative rationality. In
this respect, Habermas insists on two related points: (a) Whereas the special context-
transcendent power of truth claims is often too weak to hold and the special context-
transcendent power of validity claims is too restricted to a narrow basis of moral
judgments, the counterfactuals of argumentation may provide to a greater extent the
universal and unavoidable grounds for the possible understanding. Such a
communicative idealization is the assumption that all participants in a discourse are

consistently exchanging the same linguistic expression with the same meanings. (b) The

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transcontextual force of the critical dimension of communicative rationality resides
precisely in the "the tension between the normative promise contained in the strong
idealizations implicit in the very notion of argumentation and what happens in actual
empirical practices of argumentation" (Cooke, Language and Reason, p. 157). We have
noticed repeatedly that the process of giving reasons is guided by the presuppositions that
participants in discourse are motivated only by the force of the better argument and no
other force will prevail, that all hypotheses must be critically assessed and no voice
should be excluded form debate.

In addition, Habermas maintains drat all forms of argumentation make reference
to the idealization that all communicatively competent participants regard each odrer as
accountable. This thesis is twofold. On the one hand, everyone is bound by the
obligation to support widr reasons a claim made in a given speech act. The failure to do
so leads to the strategic use of language when not understanding but success becomes the
main concern of action (see T CA 1, p. 332, TCA 2, pp. 180-81). On the other hand, all
participants are supposed to manifest a willingness to reach understanding. A violation of
this presupposition would count as a denial that one is acting as a rational agent. It seems
to me that the lack of accountability, the avoidance of the binding responsibility to justify
a disputed claim or sheer caprice are instances of this type.

The context-transcendent power of the strong idealizations allows the critical
assessment of the violations of argumentation in everyday linguistic interactions. This
aspect can be traced down to various normative deviations and psychological
disturbances which point to the pathologies of modernity. The contradiction between the

idealizing counterfactuals of action oriented toward communication and the imperatives

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of success and efﬁciency of strategic action provides for the recognition and a conceptual
therapy of the dishonest and unjust practices of argumentation. This is often perceived as
an existential tension which explains the drama and, at time the martyrdom, of the
proponents of reason feeling alienated in a world actually driven by the instrumental
forces and impoverished by the blind authority of traditions. Those who could not
negotiate their moral or cognitive ideals or compromise their honesty were many times
crushed by the “infernal mechanism” of the vanity fair of their historic times. We should
not forget that the factory of our civilization has usually eliminated those too big to ﬁt
thorough the eyes of a needle which sews the carpet of the institutional system of their
world. There are plenty illustrations in this respect: Anaxagoras was chased out of his
city to his death at sea; Socrates was condemned to drink hemlock; Thomas More was
beheaded by Henry VIII for refusing to accept his break outwith Rome, Giordano Bruno
was burned at the stake, Galileo was forced to recant his scientiﬁc beliefs; and we can go
on and on.

The critical drrust of the idea of communicative rationality yields an emancipatory
promise. Habermas believes that in postconventional forms of communication,
understanding is progressively freed from bureaucratic imperatives and the impoverishing
value orientation of cultural traditions. In consequence, participants can self-critically
distance themselves and better see the difference between action oriented toward
understanding and action oriented toward success.

The foregoing remarks lead in a more general direction expressed by the conﬂict
between normative reason and the purposively oriented practices in the labyrindr of a

lifeworld. In general, in terms of discourse edrics, the paradoxical situation which seems

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inescapable for practical rationality trying to answer "How should I live?" is suggested by

a Socratic dilemma. This story emphasizes the divergence between man's highest pursuit

of truth and justice, and the necessities of political life. Socrates never allows us to forget
drat any reconciliation between individual longings and state power should not be reached
at the expense of moral virtues.

In my judgement, the difficulty has two interesting sides. I will limit myself to a
simple indication of these issues without elaborating on them at this time. On the one
side, we need to set up the rules of the game of life according to which we know what is
reasonably acceptable behavior and what is not. So, Wittgenstein is right to stress the
interplay between individual interactions within the network of social intricacies. This is
the structure of the intersubjective tapestry which weaves roles and statuses in a form of
life. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's skeptical contention (in On Certainty) that justiﬁcation
come to an end since we have no way to know the extent of the groundlessness of our
beliefs must be taken with serious reservation. There might be many arguable
presuppositions which are continuously questioned in every day life interactions, but we
cannot wipe out all rules and still pretend to be players in the game or even to have a
game after all. In fact, at bottom there must be a stopping point which might consist in
deﬁning moral conditions binding for everyone. We all recognize that it is wrong to
torture the innocent, to needlessly break a promise or tell a lie,... Don't we? Our own
outrage or guilt feeling when things in the world go otherwise are an undeniable proof
that our deep seated expectations are violated.

We have seen that Habermas aims to provide the rational ground for the possible

understanding in terms of an argument with a "transcendental twist". He declared once

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that one cannot have access to knowledge and develop nomological theories or get rid of
self-deceptions by reasons unless certain presuppositions are universally binding (Reply
to Kai Nielsen in "Discussion" published in Rationality To-Day, 1979, p. 274). Here we
go full circle from the problem formulated in the beginning of this chapter. However, in
the case of practical discourses which need to acquire intersubjective recognition in the
face of the impoverishing burden of social conﬂicts and outright irrational behavior, the
problem is more complicated than in theoretical and explicative discourses made from a
third person’s objectifying neutral position.

At this juncture, I will try to explore the context-transcendent power of
Habermas's idea of communicative rationality by analyzing the concept of ideal speech
situation against some famous case studies which call into question the rationality of
some posthumous societies.

6.42) THE COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY VS A WORLD WELL LOST

The historical considerations which follow aim to outline, mostly in a narrative
form, the complex dimensions of Habermas's perspective and will make clear why I take
this to be his most valuable conceptual contribution. In order to check the cross-cultural
endurance of Habermas's methodology of understanding, I will examine the normative
implications of the concept of ideal-speech against some historical times or traditions.
Notice that the idea of ideal speech situation represents the counterfactual hard-core of
Habermas's dreory of rationality. This implies that the idealizing presuppositions (which
apply if and only if such and such conditions obtain) are neither to be met by the case
studies ﬁom my next stories, nor can they be refuted by empirical evidence. All we can

expect is to be able, on the basis to the context-transcendent and critical potential of

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Habermas's notion of communicative rationality, to judge the illnesses of "a world well
lost" (Rorty's excellent expression) in which personal identities are subjected to
disturbances.

Next, I will test the strength and normative value of the ideal Speech situation
against the lifeworlds in which the good life cannot be universally shared and justice fails.

In the meantime I will try to avoid any possible misunderstanding of this idea to which
even Habermas calls attention. In a recent interview (New Left Review, 229), he
expresses some regret for ever using the notion of "ideal speech" which is "too concretist"
and vulnerable to "essentialist" misinterpretations (see also Between Facts and Norms,
1996, and M. Cooke, Language and Reason, pp. 31, 172-73). For this reason, in the later
works he prefers to use instead the term "strong idealizations" or "idealizing
presuppositions". However, considering that in his great synthesis, Theory of
Communicative Action, Habermas still employs the term of "ideal Speech Situation", I will
continue to refer to it to designate the hypothetical situation in which counterfactual
idealizations would be satisﬁed.

As the argument proceeds, I will stage an imaginary theoretical meeting between
Habermas and Rorty which is designed to display the context-transcendent power of
Habermas's concept of communicative rationality. Other references or digressions will be
avoided unless they help the critical exposition which is intended here. We shall see not
all practical questions raised by individual lives (like those referred to in the next
biographical stories) can be redeemed discursively. As Habermas indicates, the practical
questions can be divided into pragmatic questions, which are not concerned with general

interests and the best we can hOpe for is a fair compronrise, and evaluative questions,

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which ask what is the good life and refer to interests Speciﬁc to individual histories and
thus are not generalizable. I will ﬁrst discuss the case of Socrates against his prosecutors.

In the Apology, Plato envisages Socrates as a "gadﬂy" Widrin Athens, acting as a
private oracle coaching the citizens about virtue miety) and trying to persuade them that
"the unexamined life is not worth living" (Apology, 38a). Unlike those who judged him,
he thought that the real moral difficulty is not to elude death but to outrun vice.
Consequently, by challenging their minds oriented to efficiency rather than to wisdom, he
found that "the fully examined life cannot be lived ". As we know, Socrates was
condemned to death in order to silence his ‘stinging” voice. His cross-examination
among the "money changers" of the city disturbed the intellectual inertia and moral
complacency that underlie dogmatic civic mentality, and hence eroded the political
stability of his society. In fact, he put the Athenian democracy on trial, and the guilty
verdict is actually a self-condemnation of a corrupt society.

No doubt, in light of counterfactual constraints of the idea of the ideal speech
community, Habermas must ﬁnd that Socrates's attitude is rationally acceptable against
the background of his society. Such a conclusion is supported by the demand from a
recent study ("Copying with Contingencies - The Return of Historicism" (in Debating the
State of Philosophy, 1996, p. 21) that rational acceptability must be stretched beyond the
limits and the standards of any local community. In this respect, Habermas contends drat
the line between '-is true' and '-is justifiably held to be true' must be blurred. Socrates's
judges were convinced that they served the truth by delivering their "guilty" verdict,
Meletus, his accuser, that withstand with an arguable tradition, we must avoid confusing

the speech of with what is rationally justiﬁable and authorizes acceptability derived from

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the idealizing presuppositions of an ideal speech situation. Habermas says, that "if
someone states 'that p', he or she must (implicitly) at least) be prepared to justify 'p' by
appealing to a rationally motivated agreement of other publics, not just ours, a public of
experts, an ever wider public of reasonable person, or a public of people who are 'better

versions of ourselves ("Coping with Contingencies", p. 21).
It has been said that Habermas's notion of "ideal speech situation" shares some
features with Putnam's limit-concept of "ideal trut " deﬁned as a transhistorical posit
which allows us to speak of different conceptions of rationality. While rationality is a
matter of applying criteria, ideal truth consists of a universally valid ground of
knowledge, a bedrock beyond culture and time which lays the premises of objectivity.
From the relativist camp, Rorty disagrees with Habermas and challenges the
normative dimension of his concept of communicative rationality. Rorty presses the issue
in the opposite direction of an ethnocentric view and appeals instead to "solidarity" or
culture as the only legitimating factor. He believes that the whole story of truth and
rationality is about the familiar procedures of justiﬁcation given in a particular society,
ours or any other. To avoid self-refuting consequences he assumes that "true" and
"rational" are ﬂexible terms and are characterized by a diversity of references and
procedures for assigning them. Nevertheless, it is hard to make sense of his claim that
this very ﬂexibility is compatible with the identity of meaning and that it insures the
intentional sameness in the same way as terms like "here", "there", "you" and "me", and
even "good" or "bad" mean the same in all cultures ("Solidarity or Objectivity" in From

Modernism to Postmodernism: An Antology, 1996, p. 576).

According to Rorty, Habermas's description of rational discourse in terms of

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universal presuppositions of argumentation for validity has similar implications as
Putnam's formula of "rational acceptability under idealized conditions" ("Emancipating
our Culture", in Debating the State of Philosophy, 1996, p. 28, "Relativism - Finding and
Making", in Debating the State of Philosophy, p. 42). Such a convergence between
communicative reason and Platonism vindicates my claim drat Socrates's accusers are
convicted of their wickedness by reason. This conforms to Plato's interpretation of reason
as the gatekeeper for the ideal order of Truth and Rightrress. Insofar as the candidates for
truth and rightness are already assessable in principle for an ideal speech community that
is inherently rational, it seems a fair inference that all the arguments which might be
brought for or against the " guilty" verdict must be available for ideally competent rational
speakers. All that remains is to argue out the matter by justifying a deliberation in the
view of the reﬂective consensus to be reached by such an ideal community and inevitably
rejecting what seems to be true and right for Socrates‘s jurors. That is, to assume that
they were not blinded by their conservative prejudices or narrow concerns for setting an
example by silencing his stinging voice, and their judgement did not succumb to their
personal idiosyncrasy against that uncomfortable ‘gadﬂy'. I do not see how Habermas
would dissociate himself ﬁom such a possible interpretation.

By contrast, Rorty irnputes to Habermas the spiritual perfection suggested by the
Platonic approach. Consequently, he agrees with one of Habermas' critics (Geuss) that
the notion of "'ideal speech situation' plays no part in the dreory of social criticism. He
suggests that the pragrnatist emphasis on our community of liberal intellectuals is much
more appropriate to give post-factum account of any change of view (see "Habermas,

Lyotard on Postrnodemity", in Zeitgeist in Babel, 1991, p. 87). Rorty stresses the idea

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drat our ability "to justify ourselves to our earlier selves" is not built into human nature or
universalistic competence. "It is just the way we live now" ("Solidarity or Objectivity", p.
583). All we can do is to abandon the great rationalist scenarios and engage in the
rhetorical task of making different world descriptions or"vocabularies" to look as
attractive and persuasive as possible for "us".

Rorty is animated by a kind of "romantic hope" for an utopian world which is not
yet but will come sometime in the ﬁrture. He nurtures the expectation that everydring
would be utterly, wonderfully changed, drough he does not say what he means by that
world, other than that the idea of truth as "rational acceptability" is too limitative. He
believes that "you can only idealize what you have already got. But maybe drere is
somedring you cannot even dream of yet" ("On Moral Obligation, Truth and Common
Sense", in Debating the State of Philosophy, p. 51). The way he drinks of imagination
and sentiment as an alternative to reason recalls Hume's preference for "people with
whom you can feel at home". And this obviously implies that Habermas's ideally
competent speakers are people with whom you cannot feel at home, they being relatives
of Descartes's subj ect-centered-reason (once exposed to Hume's criticism).

Perhaps, the example of a utopian drinker, so akin to Rorty, who chose not to bend
his reason in face of authority may illustrate the difference between Rorty and Habermas.

Thomas More was an eminent drinker of his time but his fame did not hinder Henry V111,
who also praised his nimble mind, to behead him for disobedience. As far as More
caught in the conﬂict with his sovereign seems to be able to discern what is rationally
justiﬁable from what is just motivated by subjective interests or sheer caprice, his case

could drrow some light on Habermas's idea of reaching understanding. One may wonder

287

why a person of such wide intellectual tolerance, exceptional poetry and purity of life
apparently so idly chose to have resented king's demand, an heroic refusal which paved
the road to his death? After all, he announced the communist scenario, the deﬁance of
the lust for gold. But he also blamed the religious asceticism and sectarian exclusivism,
and had faith in the excellence of man. Then, why did he forsake his philosophy of
tolerance which could have saved his live and adopted instead an uncompromising
attitude which triggered the whole chain of events which culminated with him being
accused of high treason and, in the end, executed.58

And yet, I must observe that this example proves again the case of the conﬂict
between strategic-instrumental and communicative reason. AS soon as one compares
More's theoretic and normative beliefs with the vicissitudes of his practical life, one
cannot be but shocked to see the contrast between his prophecy of rational compromise
rooted in what he believed to be truthful and trustworthy and his senseless martyrdom
caused by his inﬂexibility toward his tyrannical sovereign. Maybe, as lord chancellor,
More learned that the philosophical reasons of projecting an imaginary land and the
pragmatic reason required by the administration of a real country are often not
overlapping each other. In obeying political reasons one must give up the prerogatives of
free drinking ant that might amount to losing one’s self. It happens that More did not
accept to pay this price while many others did (the only other exception of the archbishop
John Fisher). He chose to die not for the sake of a knighdy observance of the code of
honor, which was simply ignored by all his contemporaneous who unconditionally
surrendered to king’s demand, but for preserving the integrity of his own self by resenting

the evil. Irnplicidy, the moral order is saved and rationality prevails. Though we may

288

imagine the dilemma More has been drrough in the ﬁnest hour of his life, given the
tension between his tolerant beliefs and the inﬂexibility of his conduct. This calls to my
mind the conﬂict between the pursuit of understanding and the strategic reasons of
success. Lifeworld has been always more vulnerable to the emotional or rhetorical
accents of political agendas promoted by different group of interests than the . genuine
commitment to knowledge. In our time of individualist insurgence and cultural clashes,
the gap between truth—seeking and the mere goal of persuasion, as well as between
rightness and efﬁciency, seems even more acute than before. For instance, Habermas
might supposedly judge that an idealized king or an idealized Chamber of Lords would
agree widr More upon the force of the better argument, provided that they are able to
engage in a process of undistorted communication - that is, to take the side of what is
right and not being completely subdued by subjective interests as it happened to be. In
the same way, Galileo could be found innocent by a rational tribunal and Luther would
reach consensus with the Diet of Worms. Rorty may pretend that it is not clear how an
idealized speech community deliberating exclusively on rational grounds would look.
Instead, he dreams ahead to a coming utopian society where past injustices to be
reevaluated, and that can avenge More versus the king and nobles who caused his death,
Galileo against the Inquisition and Luther against the Diet of Worms. Supposedly, Rorty
can put in More's mouth while his executioner is untying the buttons of his shirt and
prepares his neck for the sharp blade raised in the waiting: "Some day you people... are
not going to be relevant" ("On Moral Obligation, Truth and Common Sense", p. 51). Just
drat, and Slash! (his head rolls in dust). Judge yourself if this would be a fair posthumous

consolation! As of myself, it certainly helps though I wouldn’t put my money on it.

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An even more difficult question is, on what basis would Rorty assume that a
future society would not be even worse than the one confronted by Galileo? What
justiﬁes Rorty’s optimism in our age in which we live under the terrifying specter of a
nuclear or ecological disaster? It's hard to tell unless he would admittedly adopt a kind of
ideal of progress which emerges form the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment.
But that implies that Rorty must take Habermas's redemptive interest in modernity and,
consequently, admit that Habermas is right in the transcendental justiﬁcation of the
universal potential of understanding. Rorty is thus caught in the dilemma of accepting the
context-transcendent power of idealizing presuppositions and drerefore coming to terms
with Habermas regarding the nature of communicative rationality or abandoning his
romantic hope in a utopian society as pure speculation.

Thus, if Rorty does not discard the idea of rationality, that is because he prefers to
use it in connection with what he calls "moral virtues of a rich and secure culture", that
are in his view "curiosity, persuasion, and tolerance". This aspect has nodring to do with
knowledge or truth but with the "superior sort of audiences" which become possible in
utopian tolerant societies ("The Notion of Rationality", in Debating the State of
Philosophy, p. 85). In the line of relativist argument, Rorty drink that there is only
dialogue and no objective, extra-historical and universalist bridge can be found beyond
conversations between cultures other than "us", fallible humans ready for the bound of
solidarity ties rather than falling into existentialist despair. That is why he wants to put
the search for truth on equal footing with good politics. He drinks that the gap between
truth and justiﬁcation is not bridgeable by any transcultural rationality which can be used

to criticize other cultures and praise others from an extra-mundane ground, "but simply as

290
a gap between the actual good and the possible better" ("Solidarity and Objectivity", p.

575)

My point is that, in order to know what is the warrant for such a possibility of
progress, Rorty has to appeal to a kind of rationality which may insure drat his hope is not
proven to be mere illusion in the bitter end. This implies that he would stand close to the
Enlightenment ideal of emancipation and, implicitly, he is bound to speak Habermas's
language - that is, exactly what he seems to reject. This involves not just a cognitive
commitment, but a moral responsibility which presses harder and more dramatically on
our shoulders than ever before as a result of the irreducible diversity and pluralism of our
style of living. We cannot expect that undeserved or unnecessary suffering will be
avenged at a Final Judgement or the Day After since God is no longer a viable hypothesis
or an option so compelling (as it surely was in the past). Nevertheless, it certainly brings
relief to drink that your claim will be vindicated and assessed on the scale of reason and
not on sheer caprice or brutal force. And in this respect, Habermas, and not Rorty, has
the last word. Habermas's theory points to the rational potential of language and claims
that a person can widrdraw from the rational communication processes based on the
transcendental force of the idealizing presuppositions only at the price of losing the
competence to act as meaningful being. Therefore, Habermas comes to the conclusion
that a human being cannot be a normal mind and give up the claims to validity which are
tied to the unavoidable counterfactual conditions of argumentation. To give up the
conscious intent for reaching communicative agreement would be as alienating as it
would lead to the loss of the self or plunge into deep existential despair, suicide, etc. On

this conceptual basis, his interest in a critical social theory opens a window to the

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understanding of "irrational choices", which are linked to the recourse to force and
instrumental means to maximize effects of the strategic action. (For instance, when
survival is at stake, as it happens in conditions of famine and wars, the demise of dignity
and moral respect, let alone the poverty of the search for truth, are very likely
consequences.)

And yet, insofar as the prerequisites of rationality typiﬁed by the concept of an
ideal speech situation are presented as counterfactuals, they are not falsiﬁable by
experience. The conditional statement is that speakers can properly understand each
other in the process of linguistic communication only if they rationally participate in
dialogue. In this respect, Habermas suggests that people cannot avoid making validity
claims to truth, rightness and truthfulness and elude the universal demands of
argumentation. In a strong interpretation, this implies that failing to do so would call into
question one's membership in the club of normal hmnan beings. And this is exactly the
sense in which Habermas's assumption of ideal speech may end up implausibly
rationalizing people, as I said above.

Once again the devil lies in the details. The world we live in is not a dream land
of rational communication, but a common place for lack of sincerity, intentional
deceiving and injustice where having character is more sparsely rewarded than making
money or having authority. If we look at our impoverished history we become aware of
the tremendous role played by brutal force, cunning power and violence, which destroyed
dreams of freedom and ruined the life of so many people. In order to avoid unnecessary
deception and betrayal, one needs to accept a much weaker sense of the notion of "ideal

speech". I am inclined to accept that norms of rationality are useful guides that Show

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where to go and what we should do. The reﬂective agreement can be reachable under the
provisions that all speakers participating in a discourse have an equal voice and are
honestly engaged in communication processes driven by the "better argument", which is
to be determined from the vantage point of a universalist moral commitment to equality,
justice and well-being.

Nevertheless, the fact such improbable conditions are not actually plausible, and
one may have justiﬁed doubts that they will ever be met, drat does not mean that our
world is completely ﬂooded with irrationality. In fact it isn't. Were people ever telling
lies or deceiving dremselves all the time, we would be incessantly living in a state of
delusion. In such a case, no utterance would make any sense. The absurd consequence,
obviously denied by evidence of ordinary speech interactions, is not only that
understanding becomes impossible, but even our survival would be an unintelligible
mystery: after all, we wouldn't know how we have continued to exist for so long. AS a
matter of fact, we may understand that, at times, people may be wrong provided that their
background beliefs are basically correct. Thus, Davidson’s caution could help avoid
overstating the issue and inappropriately drawing "ought" from "is". In this more modest
sense, I ﬁnd that Habermas's concept of ideal speech has a real normative value for
everyday communicative processes. In the mean time, life becomes more bearable
because one knows what to expect from an imperfect world like ours. And if politicians
would be required to issue their speeches from a chair provided with a lie detector, we
might be shocked by our ﬁndings, though we would not be completely lost in
disillusionment and emotional distress. The critical thrust of communicative rationality

helps dissociate the parasitic mode of language from the moral and trudrful intent of

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reaching understanding. On this theoretical basis Habermas identiﬁes two kinds of

 

pathological developments in modern societies: the cultural impoverishment of the
lifeworld and the colonization of the lifeworld by “the system”, wherein the mechanism
of functional integration takes over individuals' lives (see TCA 2, pp. 301-2). Habermas
can explain the paradox of modern processes of rationalization in terms of unwilling and
devastating effects such as anomie (word coined by Durkheim), loss of meaning
(expression used by Weber) and mental illnesses (analyzed in psychopathologies, Freud's
mechanism of frustration). If Habermas could offer a diagnosis of these symptoms as
causal consequences of the colonization of lifeworld, he may use the concept of
communicative rationality as "a yardstick for the assessment of these disturbances"
(Cooke, Language and Reason, p. 148). He contends that he can do this by a pragmatic
account of systematically distorted communication. But, except few suggestive remarks,
he has not made a serious attempt to work out an articulated account of the violations of
the internal idealizing structure of speech. However, in the long mm, the awareness of
what we can expect in a world dominated by the drive to success and efﬁciency would
show us what has been spoiled and what must be ﬁxed or surrendered in the process of
societal modernization. This suggests that the normative standards of rationality that
would permit the criticism of corrupted components of speech acts make possible the
account of possible distortions of communication.

In sum, Habermas's concept of communicative rationality has some idealizing
tendencies in two aspects: (1) the implausible portrayal of speaker-heater communicative
interactions in which claims to validity are justiﬁed and regulated by the force of the

better argument; and (2) the idealizing projection of societies in which a rationally

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motivated consensus can be reached in open-ended critical debates, in conditions in
which no argument can be excluded and every one affected must participate with an equal
voice in discourses about moral justiﬁcation of norms. The sacriﬁce of people like
Socrates, Galileo and More, sketched above bears witness to the contrast between their
power-driven world and the utopian ideal of a rationalized lifeworld where suffering and
frustration is presumably vindicated. If the basis of universal agreement is as limited as
my stories Show, one may question the usefulness of Habermas's discourse edrics which
does not tell much about the cognitive content of judgements and norms in particular
historical and cultural contexts. In this respect, one critic observes that "if we accept the
substance of Habermas's discourse dreory as an account of what constitutes the validity of
moral norms and judgments, the class of moral norms and judgements becomes so small
that the part played by moral reason in dealing with the practical questions of everyday
life shrinks alarmingly" (Cooke, Language and Reason, p. 154). We could imagine that
Habermas's response would put the emphasis on the idea of ideal speech, which
represents the counterfactual core of communicative rationality. He may repudiate for
instance the descriptivist or essentialist interpretations of his account and contend that he
has little to say about the concrete problems and hardships confronting individuals and
communities in their daily life. In such a case one may have justiﬁable doubts regarding
his repeatedly made assumption that strong idealizations are pointed by everyday
communication processes which come close to fulﬁlling the requirements of
argumentation. In addition, the inherently restrictive sphere of Habermas's discourse,
would need to be complemented by another theory of human experience and action which

must cope with the practical question left out by him.

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And yet one should not lose sight of Habermas's achievements in the nridst of
idiosyncratic readings of his project. He attempts to reconstruct the formal and universal
conditions of raising claims to validity in the postconventional use of language - that is, to
establish a decentered worldview, to justify appropriate norms and to structure a personal
identity that is autonomous and individuated. The fact of the matter is that in a reﬂective
communication process, the conceptual debate is open-ended and the alternative bases of
criticism must remain open. Therefore, Habermas himself would self-consciously agree
that there should not be anything unusual in the evaluation from may angles of the merits
and limits of communicative rationality. Here lies his undeniable modernity. What is
particularly impressive in his attempt to provide the ruriversal and unavoidable idealizing
grounds for possible understanding is his determination to reconstruct the context-
transcendence power of communicative rationality in a world in which the value of the
good life is no longer valid across cultures. He looks to the rational potential of language
to ﬁnd normative presuppositions which serve for the critique of social pathologies of a
"world well lost". The required assistance of commruricative rationality in dealing with
injustice and disturbed individual identities may not be designed to cure for good either
our utopian hopes and illusions or skeptical pessimism and relativism about values.
However, its critical thrust may, at least, prevent us from taking any claim to validity on
unquestioned faidr or succumb in the face of authority or force. Reﬂective participation
in communicative action implies a fair debate in which all participants have an equal
voice and no argument is exempted from critical examination. On these rational grounds
may rest the critique which could help to avoid unnecessary suffering and on which we

may rely while we are repeatedly subjected to the blow of unfairness and meanness in our

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daily lives. But we should not expect Habermas to tell historical subjects what to believe
or how they should live their lives nor to propose a perfectly organized, harmonious and
transparent society which would suppress difference in favor of an artiﬁcial unity for the
sake of consensus. Therefore, it is a misunderstanding to expect commrmicative
rationality to describe concrete forms of life or to imagine a prophecy about a future stage
of post-traditional cultures, which are necessarily outcomes of the modern development.
Despite Habermas's warning against such misinterpretations many critics still see
"grounds for unease" with regards to the utopian content of his project (see Cooke,
Language and Reason, pp. 31, 162-3, 166).

In the light of foregoing considerations, we may conclude that the concept of
communicative rationality is not a speculation about a dream world but a normative
projection with a critical theoretical function, which points toward a rationalized
lifeworld in all three of its constitutive spheres. First, it yields a vision of a lifeworld in
which cultural traditions would be reproduced through the critical and open processes of
intersubjective evaluations of validity claims. Second, it projects a vision of a lifeworld
in which legitimate orders would be reproduced and regulated drrough critical and open-
ended argumentative processes designed to justify norms and aimed at reaching
consensus. (Naturally, this involves opinion-fonnation and a discursive will according to
which participants' main concerns should be moral, legal and political rights, not the
common value of the good life). Third, it implies a lifeworld in which individual
identities ought to be self-regulated through reﬂective practices of assessment based upon
the better argument (T CA 1, pp. 66-7, Justification and Application: Remarks on

Discourse Ethics, p. 163). Brieﬂy put, from the perspective of normative interpretation of

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Habermas's project, the participants to a discourse must be willing to cogently consider
every arguments and continue the discussion indeﬁnitely or until an agreement is
achieved. In this intersubjective context of linguistic interactions, the idealizing
presuppositions of speech establish the counterfactual rules of the game for the process of
reaching understanding and thereof point to the critical drrust of communicative

rationality.

Chapter 7) CONCLUSIONS
7.1) CLOSING REMARKS

In this chapter I will conclude the dissertation by clarifying the argument along
with a few closing thoughts about a larger project. In the meantime, I will brieﬂy
summarize where I am after the discussion presented so far.

The aim of this dissertation was to explore in what sense rationality secures the
ground for the possibility of cross-cultural understanding and to question what kind of
understanding, if any, can be valid across cultures. In this respect, the preliminary
reference to Descartes has shown that for him the difﬁculty of understanding between
peoples from different cultures never arises. His idea of a unique and self-sustaining
reason establishes the universal premises of understanding across the peculiar diversity of
"custom and example". In this way he is conﬁdent the he can secure the unity of
knowledge from the demons of skeptical doubt and insure the universal validity of the
language of the mind. But we have seen that later research in andrropology and sociology
called into question Descartes's subject and challenged the nature and the prerogatives of
his notion of rationality and, implicitly, the validity of his view on understanding. The
interpretation of other people is now made possible in terms of unconscious perceptual
associations (Frazer), "language-habits" (Sapir), religious ceremonial (Durkheim), and
patterns of drinking (Weber). Furthermore, the universalist ambition of the Cartesian
project was undercut by Wittgenstein's and Winch's criticism. On the basis of their
relativist ideas of "language-game" and "form of life" used to describe linguistically
enclosed world-views, they prompted the demise of the Cartesian idea of the universal

authority of reason as a basis from which understanding across cultures is possible. Since

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there is no transcultural ground to ascribe to other cultures rules of behavior which are not
familiar to their home-language, the best we can do is to understand one's way of life by
surveying the way one uses language. From this perspective, there is no court of reason
to rule outside a shared linguistic framework on what is a meaningful utterance and what
is reasonable or correct behavior. Thus, what appears as irrational or incomprehensible to
us can make sense Widrin the context of the rules goveming the ways of life in which
agents are embedded and to which they assent. Insofar as an ethnographer cannot rely on
some neutral middle ground of a common rationality, when he leaves his home-language
venturing in a hitherto unknown culture to investigate alien speakers, his capacity to
understand his informants depends solely on his ability to translate their language. Here
the issue of translation arises. We must ponder the impossibility of making sense of alien
verbal behavior by considering Quine's dresis of the indeterminacy of translation (bound
to the inscrutability of reference). He believes that apparent linguistic uniformity bears
upon the behavioral associations and has nodring to do with the problem of the
equivalence of meanings (see his parable of the "outward uniformity" of trimmed bushes
in elephantine shapes but with different forms of twigs and branches below the surface).
To optimize the chance of agreement between two speakers of different languages, Quine
appeals to the maxim of charity, which stipulates that a bad translation is more likely than
a faulty mind when our tentative translation manual yields some weird or silly assertions
made by our informants. Davidson capitalizes on this tack to argue drat languages are
indeed essentially interpretable and, consequently, he contends that Quine's radical
assumption of a complete failure of translation is mistaken. Davidson's concept of

understanding relies not on the behaviorist notion of "stimulus meaning" but on the quasi-

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mentalist idea of "holding true beliefs" most of the time, as developed in his principle of
charity. And yet, he delirnits himself from any transcendentalist reading of his thoughts
regarding the appeal to charity and sets empirical limits to the process of linguistic
interpretation. Hollis goes in the direction rejected by Davidson and assumes an a priori
reason, which is expressed by rational "bridgeheads" consisting of beliefs universally
shared by mankind. But he fails to prove this strong claim.

By reviewing the positions taken by major ﬁgures from Wittgenstein and Winch
to Quine, Davidson, and Hollis I have tried to consider what conceptions of rationality
can support possible understanding across cultures. At the end of the ﬁrst ﬁve chapters, I
had found no adequate treatment of rationality for this purpose. To restore conﬁdence on
this matter I turned to Habermas's conception of communicative rationality. He explains
on the basis of an argument with a weak "transcendental twist" how understanding is
possible across cultural and historical contexts. His pragmatic reconstruction of the
universal conditions of speech acts establishes three linguistic links between participants
in communication which can generate a mediating ground set by explicit or merely
implicit claims to validity. His point is that every utterance unavoidably redeems and
vindicates claims to the truth of the propositional content in relation to the state of affairs
or facts, to its rightness, legitimacy, justiﬁability or appropriateness in the social context
of the shared norms and values within a lifeworld, and the truthfulness, sincerity, or
authenticity regarding subjective expressions of the speaker's internal intentions, feelings
and desires. The validity claims represents three fundamental illocutionary modes and
are present in three corresponding types of utterances (constative, regulative and

expressive) which are associated with three extra-linguistic domains (the objective

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domain showing how things stand, our social domain which is formed by their
intersubj ective interaction, or in my private domain of internal and subjective
experiences).

In his view such unavoidable universals make possible understanding as a relation
between a bearer who has the elementary capacity to take an afﬁrmative or negative
stance toward what is said by a speaker who can defend by reasons the validity claim
being made. For instance, a bearer may contest what is being said and ask the speaker,
"what arguments do you have to say that" or the bearer might ﬁnd the claim either
inappropriate or immoral, or simply suspect that the speaker is not sincere. To be
convincing, the speaker has to present reasons to defend the disputed claims. Therefore,
understanding the claims to validity is inherently connected with the process of
argumentation. Such claims to validity are bound by the idealizing presupposition such
as the condition of linguistic consistency and the meaning equivalence, which is
counterfactually pointed by actual everyday communicative processes. He thinks that the
"lifeworld" provides the context of communication. The universal and necessary
conditions of possible understanding are thus built into the fabric of "the intersubjective
structures of social reproduction".59

0n the basis of this discussion I conclude regarding the problem of rationality
and cross-cultural understanding that Habermas's concept of communicative rationality
is the best way to make sense of cross-cultural understanding among the conceptions I
have explored. From his vantage point we can criticize productively the other positions

discussed so far. First his concept of procedural rationality breaks all monological

conceptions of reason. Above all, he rejects the kind of subj ect-centered reason as found

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in Descartes. Habermas's concept of rationality mainly refers to "the disposition of
speaking and acting subject to acquire and use fallible knowledge" and its criteria are not
simply found in standards of truth and success that govern the relationships of knowing
and purposively acting subjects to the state of affairs. He treats action oriented to
communication as a kind of social interaction designed to reach agreement on the rational
basis of a common recognition of corresponding validity claims raised in speech acts.

As Habermas realizes the relevance of language games argument, he concedes to
Wittgenstein and Winch that it is right to insist upon the historical conﬁgurations of
customary practices, group memberships, cultural patterns of interpretation, forms of
socialization and to adopt a participative attitude from within the totality of a form of life.

But he further argues that such an argument is vulnerable to a critique based upon the
procedural concept of communicative rationality which suggests that forms of life are an
equilibrated inter-play of the cognitive with the moral and the aesthetic-practical.
Whereas Wittgenstein and Winch rebel against the transcultural standards of rationality,
they are found liable by Habermas to the imputation of reducing the complexity of
rationality to the one-sidedness of the cognitivist aspect of worldview at the expense of
the other moral-practical and aesthetic expressive dimensions. Habermas shows that to
understand an alien speaker means to understand the validity claims he raises in his
utterance and to grasp the reasons he gives to support his claims.

Habermas admits that a competent social scientist must be focused on the use of
language and should begin to reconstruct the universe of discourse from within. Since we
cannot make sense of meaning and interpretation of other cultures unless we evaluate the

validity claims and the reasons used by the participants in these forms of life,

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understanding is based upon a context-transcendent power of communicative rationality.
But as the investigation proceeds he should determine if his informant's speech is driven
by the authority of the shared tradition (for instance, whether the native speaker obeys a
custom or fears the menace of his gods or, eventually is forced by the chief of his tribe to
undisclose the truth or, simply happens to be unright or dishonest). The researcher's
competence is tested in the ﬁeld by his ability to grasp whether his subjects use language
with a communicative intent or whether they just strategically pursue some interests. In
the ﬁrst case, validity claims are thematized and the reasons offered by the speaker to
support them may hold cross-culturally. In the latter case, the behavior under scrutiny
may be shown to be deceptive (i.e., the native may say something just to get a reward, to
have fun or humiliate the scientist, a foreigner to him).

Therefore, in contrast with Wittgenstein and Winch, Habermas argues that we are
in general able to understand in a rational context of language-use the claims to validity
raised and to come to grips with reasons given to support them. He argues that a
reﬂective agreement, which involves a critical attitude and a world decentration, is
possible in the postconventional modes of communication in modern lifeworlds.

Unlike Quine, Habermas argues that everyday communication reveals idealizing
suppositions which are approximately realized by every communicative exchange in
which words and expressions are likely used in the same ways and with identical
meanings. This is exactly what Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation rejects.
He admits that the "outward uniformity" of behavioral dispositions is imposed by society
to insure a "smooth communication", notwithstanding it bears upon patterns overlying a

"chaotic subjective diversity" of connections between environment and behavior. In this

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respect, complex behavioral associations could explain with a good deal of linguistic
uniformity verbal dispositions to give assent or dissent to various sentences within a
community of speakers. In a way comparable with bushes trimmed to look identically
from the outside but different in their inward twigs and branches, linguistic forms may
appear as the same, though communication presupposes no similarity in nerve nets.

In consequence, on this view we can never know which meanings of our phrases
would appropriately describe the native's overt behavior because language is essentially
indeterminate with regard to the things in the world which are captured by it. Hence,
Quine concludes that we could make countless translations depending on the translation
manuals we use, but we will never be able to tell which translation better matches the
meaning of alien utterances. His radical translator make use of charity as a simple rule of
thumb, which is more useful in the early confusing stages of translation when
understanding an alien behavior may be just a empirical matter of good psychological
guessing. While Quine ultimately relies on psychological conjectures, Habermas adopts a
Kantian approach. He works in a transcendental framework in a symbiosis with
reconstructive sciences (such as Chomsky's generative grammar, Piaget's psychological
development of mental structures, and Kohlberg's theory of moral stages).

Habermas takes formal commonalties as unavoidable grounds that provide the internal
formal structure of utterances and make possible the process of reaching agreement in
terms of validity claims and counterfactual conditions of argumentation. As a matter of
fact, one's ability to perform a coherent and meaningful speech act depends on their
implementation. On these arguments, Habermas ﬁnds a way out of relativism in terms a

rational reconstruction of communicative competence that is based on the universality of

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validity claims. He assumes that the idealizing presuppositions of linguistic equivalence
are counterfactually and implicitly redeemed by actual communicative practice. And this
likelihood of fulﬁlling the condition of the consistent use of meanings across the cultural
divide shows that coming to an understanding is not only possible but takes place in
social interactions between people speaking different languages. From this concrete
historical and sociological angle, although the case of radical translation may be contrived
as a mere theoretical possibility, it is neither a real problem nor relevant for actual
interlinguistic relations.

Davidson may agree with this critical conclusion so far as he shows that all
languages are basically interpretable. But he claims that this is just an empirical
condition since he does not assume that they must be so. But because he is frustrated by
the futility of attempts to answer "what is meaning", he shifts his concern to what would
sufﬁce an interpreter to understand the speaker of an "intractable" language. In this
respect, ﬁrst, Davidson thinks that one's beliefs must be mostly true, and one's inferences
must be mainly the right or normatively appropriate ones. If not, it will be impossible to
assign any interpretation to one's verbal behavior and ascribe any interpretation to one's
mental state. Second, his theory of truth associated with a theory of rationality bearing on
the principle of charity provides support for the idea of partial, rather total failure of
translation. This implies a common ground between intersubjective structures of beliefs,
which point to the quasi-mentalist idea of holding true sentences. Davidson argues that
while the idea of truth remains relative to language, it is as objective it can be. And yet,
the theory of interpretation and translation involves a high degree of rationality as a

prerequisite for assigning reasonable "intentional content" to one's utterances and to

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mental states they presumably express. Therefore, on Davidson's view, the constraints of
charity means more than a simple rule of thumb, and its test is represented by successful
communication. The appeal to charity shows how disagreement is possible on the basis
of some agreement and this bears upon holding mostly true beliefs. But, so far as we are
imperfect beings capable of being mistaken, we need charity to interpret others.60

For Habermas, communicative rationality has a context-transcendent power and,
from this perspective, Davidson may appear unnecessarily cautious. At the same time,
Habermas does not share Hollis's substantive notion of bridgehead for being
monologically assumed as consisting in rational beliefs and rules of coherent judgement
to which a rational man must subscribe. For Habermas, rationality is inherently
discursive and interlocutors must assume the possibility in principle of an undistorted
dialogue seeking for truth, rightness and sincerity and governed by the force of the "better
argument". However, so far as his account of understanding via agreement relies on a
universally shared "communicative competence", describable as ability to raise validity
claims and giving reasons to support them, it is consistent with the requirement of charity
but it is somewhat stronger and more compelling. His pragmatic reconstruction puts
together a transcendental argument that insures universality and necessity with an
empirical method of testing fallible hypotheses against historical and cultural reality of
the lifeworld. In this perspective, the idea of rationality is given a stronger and more
precise conceptualization in terms of validity claims, which are universally thematized in
speech acts and linked to the normative requirements of argumentation that make
understanding via agreement possible. He assumes that the "better arguments" should

prevail in rational disputes. One's ability to utter a coherent and meaningful statement

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depends on formal commonalties that provide the internal structure to argumentation.

One's failure or avoidance to do so could lead to a breakdown of communication but also
raises doubts regarding one's mental competence.

Faced with transcendentalism and skepticism, Habermas avoids each extreme in
the philosophical tug of war regarding understanding and develops better conceptual
weapons than any other theorist in our day, ranging over a wide spectrum from language
theory to sociology. Further, he is not limited like a Wittgensteinian philosopher to
descriptions of how the world is and ﬁnally to leaving it unchanged. As the only
alternative to rational dialogue is endless conﬂict and unavoidable wars, Habermas's
concept of communicative rationality provides for the chance to meet pragmatic demands
by helping us to increase our potential for survival in a world torn apart by splitting
cultural differences and political contrasts.

In fact, at the metatheoretical level, we have noticed that the participants in the
relativity debate (including Winch, Quine, Davidson, Hollis, and Habermas) must accept
the universal and unavoidable presuppositions of argumentative reasoning and the
conditions of consistency and coherence which make their thought comprehensible in
critical dialogue. If communication is to remain possible, to raise doubts about the
standards of rationality requires to be able to replace them and start again by adopting, in
the ﬁrst place, new rules governing the belief-formation and actions, and then by
determining the "charitable" implications of the validity claims within the "discursive
attitude". We have seen that social scientists returning from their cultural explorations
cannot consistently deny a common pattern of reason which is non-discursively shared by

two different systems of beliefs or native forms of life, and, in the mean time, to argue

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that these are just as good as or superior to their own. In this matter, Habermas gives up
the monological and one-sided positions and establishes an idea of critical debate based
on arguments which makes intelligible the dialogue between different conceptual
alternatives.

In the light of this conclusion, I consider that the problems which remain to be
solved are presented by the most enduring objections to Habermas' theory of
communicative action. In chapter 6, I provided a relatively lengthy exposition of his
position and, particularly, in section 6.4, I showed which are the challenges he must face
to buttress his view. Several critical objections to Habermas's project revealed gaps and
ambiguities in his sometimes shifting perspective. The following discussion is not
designed to respond to all the problems he faces, but to contribute to the idea of
communicative rationality and to emphasize its normative role in the treatment of the
pathologies of modernity. In this respect, we may question four interrelated aspects of
Habermas's view on the rational potential of language: First, some critics observe that a
suspension or an avoidance of validity claims is possible. Second, we have seen that the
strong thesis that all three kinds of validity claims are simultaneously raised with every
speech act can be challenged and that sometimes we just can contest an utterance from
the three points of view. Third, I pointed to some problems with the justiﬁcation of
norms in connection with the likelihood of the decline of consensus in the context of the
growing complexity of cultural differentiation in modern societies. Fourth, I discuss how
the context-transcendent power of communicative rationality bears upon the
unconditional character of the claims to truth in a way which is different from the

discursive vindication of the normative claims to rightness. To reach consensus may be a

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constraint on practical discourses and may be also relevant for some cognitive issues
which cannot be decided on the basis of empirical evidence which is available (e.g.,
epistemological questions regarding the existence of anti-matter, the nature of the Big-
Bang, the space-time structure with black holes, etc). But propositional truth usually
involves a kind of unconditionality which does not depend on agreement between
participants in communication in a way similar to the grounding of a norm, when the
consent must be achieved in the situation of a debate permeated only by the better
reason.

These four critical aspects were described as bearing on the issue of the
therapeutic role of communicative rationality. Habermas's contention is that universally
raised validity claims and counterfactual idealizations of argumentative processes provide
the unavoidable foundation for a use of language to achieve agreement by which humans
can save the integrity of their inner self and maintain their identity as rational beings. In
connection with this Habermas points to a pathology of modenrity that may be used as a
diagnosis of the illnesses of a lifeworld in which language is no longer suited to the
pursuit of understanding. He shows that the development of modern societies leads to
unwilling and devastating ill-suited effects such as anomie, loss of meaning and personal
disturbances and suggests that such social and personal anomalies of communicative
action account for a disturbed processes of understanding in linguistic exchange. In
connection with this attempt to identify the pathologies of lifeworld, Habermas
dissociates the parasitic mode of language oriented towards success and efficiency from
the primary use of language to reach understanding. He explains the paradox of modern

processes of rationalization in terms of the cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld and

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the colonization of the lifeworld by the system in which the mechanism of functional
integration takes over individuals' lives. The awareness of the contrast between the
imperatives of instrumental reason which permeates a system driven by success and
efﬁciency and the lifeworld structured by communicative rationality oriented toward
understanding play an important critical function in the process of argumentation of
validity claims. In this respect he projects a vision of a utopian lifeworld in which we can
imagine politicians acting in good faith for the cause of truth and justice instead of merely
ﬁghting for their own beneﬁt or, at best, promoting the narrow interest of the good life of
their community.61

Although Habermas does not properly elaborate the intricacies of such a theory,
he wants to have the last word in the rationality debate. He admits that the skeptic may
be right to refuse to argue and prefer instead to "assert his position mutely and
impressively". Nevertheless by refusing to speak out and take a yes and no stance he
extricates himself from the communicative practice of everyday life in which he is a
fortiori forced to participate unless he is ready to terminate for good his membership in
the social community or to discontinue the reproduction of his life in the intersubj ective
web of a shared form of life. That means in Habermas's view that the "skeptic may reject
morality, but he cannot reject the ethical substance (Sittlichkeit) of life circumstances in
which he spends his waking hours, not unless he is willing to take reﬁrge in suicide or
serious mental illness" ("Discourse Ethics", p. 100). One may refuse to speak or may not
act communicatively by bracketing validity claims. However, one may withdraw from
the discourse where reason is the judge who adjudicates the disputes only at the expense

of the extreme consequence of putting in jeopardy one's mental normalcy.

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In sum, on the basis of the critical thrust of communicative rationality, Habermas
contends that he can provide a pragmatic account of systematically distorted
communication and provide "a yardstick" for the assessment of the disturbances bearing
on understanding. He believes that we can recognize what components of language have
been distorted and what must be ﬁxed or surrendered in the process of societal
modernization. However, this focus on language makes Habermas liable to the
accusation that his "overemphasized" tendency to "linguistify" human experience and
action is made at the cost of the failure to account for the non-linguistic and pre-linguistic
dimensions. I have also indicated that he has not made yet a serious attempt to work out
an articulated account of the violations of the internal idealizing structure of speech.62

In thinking about these problems I believe that a three-fold reconstruction of
reason may be an appropriate project. I think that we may discuss the idea of rationality
as analytically distinct on the three levels: phenomenological, scientiﬁc-theoretical and
normative. However, at this moment, I can only point to a possibly fruitful research
programme. I will brieﬂy refer to this larger project in the closing section of these
conclusions.

7.2) A REFERENCE TOA LARGER PROJECT

My initial project aimed at a three-fold reconstruction of rationality. The required
theorization and arguments go beyond what I could develop in this dissertation. My
concern here is to offer a glimpse of an unﬁnished idea. It remains a program to be
pursued in the future as one of my intellectual challenges.

I believe that to determine a common core of rationality across cultures and

account for overlaps between different conceptual schemes or ways of life we must

312
explore three interrelated ﬁelds: ﬁrst, the intelligibility of styles of living and patterns of

behaviors different from ours; second, the possible dialogue among different theoretical
discourses and scientiﬁc explanations; and, third, the common ground of agreement on
moral matters in practical discourses. By imagining a three-tier-rationality, we can
approach a more comprehensive project that may enable us to account for cultural
breakdowns and for intercultural dialogue and agreement. We can do this from three
angles: a) phenomenologically, we may stress the web of social interaction from the
behavioral aspects to concrete ways of living which are culturally impregnated; b)
theoretically, we may be concerned with the scientiﬁc grounding of knowledge; and
ﬁnally, c) from a normative standpoint, we may focus on the justiﬁcation of moral
standards and criteria of rationality which must be observed if understanding and, in
general, social life is to be possible. These three aspects are analytically distinct, though
they are interrelated in the social practices of acquiring understanding. On the ﬁrst level,
we often bear witness to pre-logical or pre-theoretical intuitions, unquestioned rules of
behavior followed by people caught in a speciﬁc tradition or custom. In this respect we
refer to a historically and culturally bound rationality (contextual or "short range"), which
is sensitive to the needs of the lifeworld. On the second level we may raise the issue of a
rational potential for scientiﬁc understanding linked to theoretical language as it is
translatable and consistent in communication (e. g. rigid designators, specialized scientiﬁc
descriptions, etc). On the third level, we may refer to the ideal-normative aspects of
rationality (cross-cultural, or "long range"). This may provide a common ground for
understanding that can justify norms and help construct cross-cultural bridges between

different lifeworlds.

313

Were we to succeed in the articulation of a challenging three-tier-model, then we
would provide a simpler and more comprehensive notion of rationality with which we
could face problems of cross-cultural communication. Such a three-tier-reconstruction
could help account for successful understanding across linguistic and cultural
frameworks. When understanding breaks down, its failure points to possible gaps of
understanding which may appear when people do not meet on the same level of the
discourse (i.e., cognitive or theoretical reasons are mistakenly taken as moral or practical
reasons). However, as my reﬂections on this issue are not systematically worked out, the
convincing story about the promise yielded by the three-tier structure remains yet to be

told.

NOTES

NOTES (1-12) to INTRODUCTION (pp. 1-3 8)
1) The word "reason" originates in Latin "ratio-nis", which comes from the Latin
translation of the Greek term "nous" used by Greek philosophers from Anaxagoras to
Plato and Aristotle. Given that "nous" is often translatable as "intellect", the word
"intellect" could be used as interchangeable with "reason".

In a more common use of the term, one may account for the evolution of one's
own personal intellectual experience, in an effort to show how one arrived at that
particular thinking. However, in general all those mental functions, including intellect
and reason in the ﬁrst sense, are characterized by spontaneity rather than receptivity, so
excluding sensibility.

2) People are inclined to see themselves as rational. As Vilﬁ'edo Pareto once
observes, people like to put a "varnish of logic" over their conduct.

3) In fact, Greek philosophy approached the issue of rationality long time ago.
Pythagoras is credited for having ﬁrst coined the term philosophy. He distinguishes
between "the slavish" that naturally pursue the glory and riches, and philosophers
searching for truths (aletheia -- See Diogenes Laertios, Life and Doctrines of
Philosophers 8.8; aﬁer J .O. Urmson, The Greek Philosophical Vocabulary, Duckworth,
1990, p.130).

Consequently, the conventional translation "love of wisdom" seems to be less
accurate than "love of rational understanding" or "love of knowledge" ("episteme ") as
opposed to simple opinion ("doxa"-- According to J .O. Urmson, "wisdom" has in
common English a practical reference (e. g. wise policy, precautions, plans, investments,
etc), whereas "sophia" means theoretical skill intellectual excellence (J .O. Urmson, Greek
Vocabulary, pp. 131, 151-152)

"Sophia" is after all the capacity for rationality that deﬁnes our being and gives us
distinctiveness in the universe. That is to exercise reason in order to make sense of the
world, and to act in accordance with some acknowledged epistemic or moral goals. For
him, particularly, the language of reason that gods speak is that of number. And yet the
fear of irrational still blocked many paths. According to a story, the theorem bearing his
name, that the square root of 2 was an inﬁnite surd was drowned (by pure mischance) at
sea. It was hard to accept that even gods were at times speaking gibberish.

The same paradigm of thinking is valid for that entire age of philosophizing.
Reason alone, declares Parrnenides, can establish what Is. If we have access to the truth
it could not be on the basis of sensory appearance. The truth opens to logical mind only
and Being is what a thought seeking for ontologic consistency declares it to be: there is no
distinction between Reason and "the One". His disciple, Zeno of Elea aimed to prove as
absurd the alternatives to Parmenides's account. His paradoxes (aporias), which still
puzzle our intellect, were aimed to prove that there is an irresoluble conﬂict between the
demands of reason and of sense. Heraclitus' dictum that everything changes may seem
plausible to the latter, but all differentiation (not only the temporal ﬂux) leads examining
mind to an inescapable contradiction. Thus Zeno's arrow is eternally ﬂying, and it never
reaches the target.

314

315

For Plato, reason is described by metaphor of the charioteer which encourages the
white horse, symbolizing the good and restricts the maleﬁc behavior of the black horse,
the image of evil. However, Plato goes ﬁrrther than this suggestive metaphor. According
to Mittelstrass (Scientiﬁc Rationality, p. 85), Plato refers to the idea of rationality in two
ways. On the one hand, giving reasons, or the grounding criterion (logon didonaz) was
always a constitutive element expressed by among the criteria for rationality, (Leibniz
called it principium reddenda rationis). On the other hand, explanation serves for
speaking about objects already constituted: that is, for establishing the validity of
propositions referring to objects ("torein ta phainomena"). Explanation has also has a
conceptual structure by being theoretical knowledge ("episteme" or "teoria") and a logical
form by being deductive. It consequently emphasizes a "grounding structure", which,
according to Aristotle, with respect to the establishment of beginning principles or
axioms is "epagogic".

In this tradition, rationality was best represented by science. Thus, instead of
speaking about scientiﬁc culture one may wish to use the term "rational culture" referring
primarily to scientiﬁcally articulated theories and practices. That would mean that
rationality of science provides a model for the whole sphere of culture. Consequently,
science is not responsible for faulty knowledge. We must be held accountable for
committing epistemic mistakes. It is the psychological basis and the historical and
cultural ups and downs, which are pointed out by the modern philosophy of science as
being irrational.

4) The use of the term "pluralistic" as pertaining to rationality may again strike one
as being additional evidence of ambiguity in semantic matters: different models of
rationality? This idea is offensive at least for the traditional European philosophy and
science which embraced the view of a monistic, unitary rationality, characterized by the
lack of alternatives with respect to rational orientations. Once abandoned the image of a
one growing rational culture, the plural rationalities undermined the monopoly of the
single "law court of reason" and opened the way for a required principle of toleration.
This principle assumes, according to Mittelstrass, that "no decision can be made with
regard to the claim to rationality from the point of view of lacking alternatives, and even
more (because this only express the fact of the ﬁniteness of man) that theories, with
respect to paradigmatic circumstances, are capable of becoming "rational, perhaps,
bearing in mind their designers, even "blessed"" (Scientific Rationality, p. 84).

5) Blaise Pascal's complains: "L'homme n'agit point par la raison quifait son estre"
(Pensees, 395, p. 210). Then, the question is what makes human beings to behave as
“fouls” by ignoring the rules built in their own selves? Pascal does not hesitate to
answer: "La corruption de la raison paroist par tant de differrantes et extravagantes
moeurs. It afallue que la verite soit venue, afain que l'homme ne vesquit plus en soy
mesme" (Pensees, 396, p. 210). This contrast between reason as a truth seeming faculty
and corrupting "diﬂerent and extravagant customs" puts Pascal in the rationalists' camp
together with Descartes.

6) As individuals are liable to prejudice, they cannot be exempt from such fallibility.
In this light, Pascal is right then, only fools could take senseless collective judgements

 

316

for the pure and trustworthy light of Reason. Culture is questionable and unreliable,
Reason is beyond doubt.

7) Hume has been more cautious than Descartes. He would not blame God for our
mistakes. Instead he warns us in the Treatise of Human Nature that "reason is, and ought
only to be the slave of the passions; and can never pretend to any other office than to
serve and obey them" (Book H, Part HI, Sect. III, p. 415).

Nevertheless, one may argue that, on the one hand, he fell back to "custom and
habit" which Descartes was so eager to blame for all our miscommunications. Therefore
he undermined the claim of rationality in underlying the formation of beliefs. Though,
we cannot say yet that Hume refers to the notion of culture as lifeworld, in a sociologic
sense, that Descartes tried to freed himself from in the rational quest for self-justifying,
self-generating certainty. It is merely the psychological custom of the mind that explains
the manner in which we can reach or build the world. As Ernest Gellner noticed the
difference between the two programs: "If Descartes was anguished because he could not
bear the idea of God the deceiver, Hume was anguished because he could frnd no good
reasons to trust the convictions by which we live" (Gellner, Reason and Culture, p. 21)

On the other hand this modern skeptic found the Cartesian "ego" empty because,
"F or from what impression could this idea be derived?", he asks (Treatise, book 1, part
IV, sect V1, p. 251). The self is reduced to "bundle or collection of different perception,
which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual ﬂux or
movement" (idem). For Hume mind remains a passive receptacle impregnable by the
bundle of perceptions. Consequently Hume limited the scope of inquiry to how world
happens to be made out of customs and habits as a mere contingent and unwarranted
working of our sentient nature. Since we cannot validly derive "on t" from "is", Reason
becomes silent in matters of values as well, and its deliberative role played in practical
decision making or value assessment is undercut. Nevertheless he allowed it to
characterize the mathematical and logical reasoning. In fact, his problem was to provide
a proof that inductive reasoning could be rationally maintained. Even if induction does
work, the question what makes it a rational proof and not a simple matter of
psychological association explainable as habit or custom, and, in general, why should we
trust any rational argument?

Unlike Hume, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant uses the concept of reason as
a special mental faculty (distinct from sensibility, and intellect) which in drinking ideas
(leading to antinomies) of absolute completeness and unconditionedness transcends the
conditions of the possibility of experience;

8) In our days, Descartes's evil genius that deceives all human simultaneously is no
longer a hypothesis we should believe or take for granted. In some contexts deceiving
oneself could be desirable, generating a "vital lie" that safeguards happiness or stimulate
the ability to c0pe with difficulties. In other contexts, it suggests "bad faith", "inner
hypocrisy" or plainly "false consciousness" leading to the refusal to acknowledge our
mistakes and character ﬂaws. Sometimes self deception is unintentional consisting in
stubborn denial, idiosyncratic avoidance or biased understanding of one's self and/or the
world. Other times, it is purposeful process to avoid unpleasant or painful realities (see
Mike W. Martin, "self-deception" in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Robert

317

Audi, general editor, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 720-1). Deluded mental
states are explainable through ignorance, false opinions, lack of self-awareness or wishful
thinking. The most typical situations are when lovers are blind either to the "ugliness" or
the "unreciprocated affection" of their partner, parents tend to exaggerate the virtues of
their children, smokers rationalize their self-poisoning habit, dying patients of cancer
pretend to themselves that their health is improving, and so on and so forth. While
deceiving others could be justiﬁed by a possible expected utility, the dresis of
intentionally deceiving oneself seems paradoxical, unauthentic or self-defeating in the
light of reason. Existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre denounce it as
dishonest cowardly refusal to face tragic but signiﬁcant truths regarding death,
responsibility and freedom. Sartre, for instance, treats it as rather spontaneous, and not
explicitly reﬂected upon, but Freud found it motivated by unconscious repression.

9) Durkheim concludes, "forcing reason back upon experience causes it to disappear,
for it is equivalent to reducing the universality and necessity which characterize it to pure
appearance, to an illusion which may be useful practically, but it is denying all objective
reality to the logical life, whose regulation and organization is the function of the
categories. Classical empiricism results in irrationalism; perhaps it would even be ﬁtting
to designate it by this latter name" (The Elementary Forms of Religious Liﬁe, p.14).
According to Durkheim, the empirical thesis compels us to deny the universal and
necessary categories of knowledge which generally make things of the world knowable
and are independent of any particular subject. He claims that "these essential ideas... do
not merely depend upon us, but they impose themselves upon us" (idem, p. 14).
Durkheim thinks that our rationality is essential for being human and represents
our logical ability to systematize and classify the world, as we can know it. But he found
the categories of knowledge gravely incomplete with regard to the explanation of reason
as a merely form of individual, sober experience inherent in the nature of our mind. One
the one hand empiricists "believe that the world has a logical aspect which the reason
expresses excellently. But for all that, it is necessary for them to give the mind a certain
power of transcending experience and of adding to that which is given to it directly; and
of this singular power they give neither explanation nor justiﬁcation" (idem, p. 14). On
the other hand, Durkheim considers that the structures of reason evolve out of cultural
practices. Hence Kant mistakenly claims that intellectual categories can be deduced
transcendentally. On the basis of ethnographic study of people engaged in social
cooperation, Durkheim thinks that he is able to justify scientiﬁcally what Kant believed to
be simply inherent in the transcendental nature of human intellect. Only within society it
makes sense why particular wills and minds, irrespective to their lifeworldly origin, could
commonly agree upon the Kantian anhistorical kingdom of ends and transcultural truths.

10) Durkheim claims that, generally, in the same way as an initially undifferentiated
reason, all the essential institutions of society have been shaped in the early social
interactions of the magic ceremonies. In the dawns of civilization, in fact until recently,
ritual prescriptions were according to Durkheim indistinguishable from legal and moral
rules. Because the idea of society is describable as the "soul of religion" (The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life, p. 419), "and it is hmnanity that has reaped the fruits" (idem, p.
420)

318

11) As Weber assumes, "the intensity of the search for the Kingdom of God
commenced gradually to pass over into sober economic virtue; the religious roots died out
slowly, giving way to utilitarian worldliness" (Protestant Ethics, p. 176).

12) In addition, the abandonment of the Cartesian unshakable foundations of
knowledge leads to an unexpected step back from the epistemological angle of the
regression of certainty.
II It 13

NOTES (13-29) to CHAPTER 2 (pp. 39-84)
13) If we are to continue this line of questioning in a post-modernist fashion, one may
ask on what rational ground can we base our choices, say between contemporary
medicine and Zande witchcraﬁ, between Big Bang cosmologies and Summerian Myth of
Creation, between the old Chinese architecture and American Functionalist School of
Chicago, etc.? Some may argue that art, empirical sciences and formal disciplines
represents different levels of discourse. Not so for a relativist. However, it is not my aim
here to address such an extensive line of questioning which weakens our focus and moves
us outside the conceptual framework of our discussion.

14) When Wittgenstein has been informed by his doctor that the "darkness" is coming,
he said, "Good!" His last words, before he lost consciousness, were "Tell them I 've had a
wonderful life! " How could one explain this stoic, peaceful attitude in the face of the
imminence of death? Perhaps, he felt at that last moment that he had reached the bottom
of his 'fate" and fulﬁlled the meaning of his life by suggesting what a post-metaphysical
culture might be like.

At his last farewell, he probably knew that a God's eye perspective is mere an
illusion. Therefore he sends his message to those for whom he has written showing that
there is more between heaven and earth than can be seen by the use of a single vocabulary
as sought by philosophical quest for certainty. On these grounds Wittgenstein counsels us
to give up the ideal of philosophy from Plato and Descartes to Russell and Moore as far
as it aims to represent the world. He also critically refers to himself as the author of
Tractatus where he defended a logical atonrism and looked for devising an ideal language
in which for each simple object or property there would be ﬁxed, unambiguous symbol.
(Philosophical Investigations, sec. 23).

In what follows I do not intend to directly cope either with the analysis of the
Wittgenstein's inﬂuence over the last decades of philosophy or to articulate in a coherent
manner his theory in order to judge its consistency. Such an attempt would be
inappropriate for two reasons: First, Wittgenstein himself denies that he has a theory
(Philosophical Investigations, sec. 109). To investigate philosophically is neither to seek
theses or theories nor to ﬁnd static meanings or objects permanently picked out by words.

It is to understand by attending to the uses of language relevant in the speciﬁc context.
The 'aura of mystery' and arguments concerning the sense and directions of later
philosophical approaches (including 0n Certainty) make them subject to various
interpretations, sometimes even contradictory. Wittgenstein declares (Philosophical
Investigations, "Preface") that he had hoped to bring the remarks into some coherent
whole, but such an attempt could never succeed because philosophical investigations

319

involve coming at the problem from different directions.

Secondly, this topic would go beyond the objectives of this paper. In consequence
we will restrain the discussion to later Wittgenstein's view on meaning as the vehicle of
understanding between people.

15) See Wittgenstein — 0n Certainty (esp. sec. 566); see also Peter Winch - The Idea
of Social Science.

16) Wittgenstein compares the tools in a toolbox with words. A hammer, pliers, a
saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-plot, glue, nails and screws have the same functions as
the functions of the words (Philosophical Investigations, sec. 11). He questions the
meaning of the words in the same way we ask about how we handle a tool. "But what if
the thing that any of us would take for a hammer were somewhere else a missile, for
example, or a conductor's baton? Now make the application yourself" (0n Certainty, sec.
352).

Wittgenstein believed that his later view could be better understood if one sees it
against the background of his T ractatus. Surprisingly, though, he did not articulated an
explicit analysis of the picture theory of meaning he shares in his early philosophical
period and the references that can be found are usually 'enigrnatic' and ambiguous. The
Tractatus holds that the ultimate elements of language are names that designate simple
objects. In the later works it is argued that the words 'simple' and 'complex' have no
meaning in the abstract, devoid of context. The distinction always depends on what sense
of these words we have in mind. "It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the
'sirane parts of a chair' (Philosophical Investigations, sec. 47). By such examples
Wittgenstein tries to show that the ideas of "simplicity" and "complexity" which are
"super-concepts", cannot be deﬁned as in absolute terms since they are in fact relative to a
language game. For him, the question is not metaphysical but a practical one: how to
apply those notions.

17) For instance, metaphysics, in Plato's tradition, distinguishes between genuine
knowledge of essences (episteme) regarded as timeless, universal and immutable and
mere opinion (doxa) as ephemeral, parochial, and contingent. Plato's speaker, Socrates
inquires into the essential features of all concrete objects that are 'good', 'pious', 'virtuous'
or 'beautiful'. Subsequently, the meaning of a word is given by what all things identiﬁed
by that word uniquely share in common. An ontologic commitment, in this very
inﬂuential view, is described in terms of indefatigable search for ultimate grounds or
foundations of being.

Closer to our time and from a different angle, Russell (in On Denoting) is also
interested in how your philosophical analysis can dissolve various puzzles, and Moore in
(What is Philosophy) maintains that, "the ﬁrst and most important problem of philosophy
is: To give a general description of the Universe." We realize also that for Wittgenstein
the idea of 'agreement with reality' does not have any clear application (0n Certainty, sec.
215). We shall further see that Quine also adopts a conventionalist approach. According
to his view, the ontological entities have the same status as the verses describing the
Homeric gods. They are just manners of speaking.

320

18) Th. Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions (1960), uses Wittgenstein's
concepts as family resemblance or similarity relations in order to deﬁne the concept of
paradigm. Kuhnian paradigms are deﬁned as social commitments commonly shared by
the members of scientiﬁc group. Such social practices give content Kuhnian notion of
'norrnal science'. According to Kuhn, scientists learn the ways of practice of making
empirical judgements not by learning explicit rules like 'symbolic generalization', but by
getting more familiar with the similarity relations that help us to discriminate among
exemplars deﬁned as common judgements shared by the members of disciplinary group.
Such an idea was ﬁrst advocated by Ch. Peirce in "How to make our Ideas clear?" where
he speaks about the norms and values sanctioned by scientiﬁc community. If Peirce
seems to be forgotten, nevertheless, in this respect, Wittgensteinian inﬂuence was
considerable.

19) Wittgenstein criticism applies not only to Descartes, but also to himself. If in
Tractatus he held that any proposition presuppose the whole of the linguistic portrait of
the world as framework of meaning, in the later work he made shift from the world-
picture to the more modest and relative context of language games, as a house which
carry the foundation-walls (0n Certainty, sec. 248). Henceforth, Wittgenstein's
philosophical home is built no longer built on the Cartesian absolute certain grounds but
in mere ﬁnite and relative experience (if are to paraphrase W. James). At one hand, the
world is just a moving target; on the other hand, we have to accept the contingency of the
world we leave, knowing that nothing outside the "ﬂux" secures the metaphysical
grounds of a "view from nowhere" (as Th. Nagel calls it). His later conception makes the
correction by conceiving of language as a tool and of use of language as a form of life
involving different speciﬁc techniques.

20) There is a strange fragment where Wittgenstein assumes: "It would strike me as
ridiculous to doubt the existence of Napoleon; but if someone doubted the existence of
the earth 150 years ago, perhaps I should be more willing to listen, for now he is doubting
our whole system of evidence..." (0n Certainty, sec. 185). The point is that it makes
more sense to doubt about the entire system of evidence than to doubt just an isolate
proposition regarding the existence of Napoleon. He continues this idea in other place:
"The existence of the earth is rather part of the whole picture which forms the starting
point of belief for me." (On Certainty, sec. 209). Such a statement is meaningful against
his T ractatus where Wittgenstein exiles philosophical problem regarding the existence of
the whole system in the realm of the bad grammar. As Russell puts it in the Preface, his
argument at that time was that "an eye in the vision ﬁeld cannot see itself", otherwise you
can not avoid the self-referential character that leads to paradox. Now he seems to admit
the contrary.

21) Nevertheless by assuming that no further test was needed and even possible,
Wittgenstein seems to contradict the process of the growth of science as a dislocation of
error embodied in common sense. Knowledge is a continuous subject to revision upon
the impingements of new and recalcitrant experiences. Perhaps it would more
appropriate to restrain the ﬁeld of any possible test to that speciﬁc time.

321

22) I am surprised to discover a seemingly opposite statement allowing a foundationalist
interpretation: "And the bank of the river consists partly of hard rock subject to no
alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which nor in one place now in
another gets washed away, or deposited." (0n Certainty sec. 99).

23) We may observe that the same kind of Cartesian illusion survives in many
empiricists, Carnap, Russell and Quine among others. In particular, Quine himself cannot
escape the double scope of Wittgenstein criticism from On Certainty (sec. 356), though
Peter Winch whose new concept of a descriptive social science gave up the traditional
pattern of rationality, is more likely convinced by Wittgenstein's warning regarding the
difficulty to envisage any private language of thought. In consequence, against Quine's .
observational sentences which, "wear the meaning on their sleeves", Wittgenstein could
argue that they are thoroughly bad and cannot serve as foundation since "if they turn out
to be false, are replaced by others". Furthermore, against the "Cartesian subject",
Wittgenstein contends that since by doubting in abstracto one would not know where a
doubt get a foothold nor whether a future test is possible, that is because what to Putnam
appears as a purely "disembodied mind", as “cogito”, gives no guarantees of what will
happen, obviously certainty is not mere a mental act. Wittgenstein's conclusion applying
to any epistemic subject engaged in a solitary journey which ambitions to re-shape the
world also overshadows Quine's explanation of one's ontologic commitment.

24) Fodor-Lepore argument against "nothing is hidden" thesis suggests that it involves
omniscience available to God only. If this is the case it either Lurinteresting or is a faulty
and inapplicable to humans and therefore it makes no sense.

25) Wittgenstein's concepts such as "language-game" and "farrrily resemblance"
deﬁned in terms of similarity relations have inspired Th. Kuhn interpretation of scientiﬁc
rationality within a "paradigm" (see The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). For
instance, the psychological dimension of paradigm is relative to a Gestalt as speciﬁc way
of seeing the world. From a linguistic perspective, paradigms are describable in the terms
of a global employment of the notion of 'language game' as ﬁamework of meaning.
Insofar as paradigms are emphasized as noncumulative and successive historical units,
rationality within ceases to be a normative problem of formal assessment, a "quaestio
jure", and becomes a practical matter, a "quaestiofacti".

Such ideas parallel Peter Winch's idea of Social Science which tries to describe
different patterns of social practice allowing a descriptive concept of rationality. He
shows the idea of ways of living plays a methodological role in the conceptual
reconstruction of a speciﬁc cultural practice like Azande magic. In this case the activity of
following a rule is to be distinguished from governed by rule.

26) Charles Taylor also holds this point in "Rationality" - Rationality and Relativism).

27) See Charles Taylor - "Rationality" in Rationality and Relativism (1982). On this
issue Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society also makes an interesting point.

28) In Chapter 6, the analysis of Habermas's concept of action oriented toward

322

reaching understanding which is distinguished from the strategic-purposive action
oriented toward success and efﬁciency the notion of apparent irrationally gets a new
relevant dimension.

According to Nozick (Nature of Rationality, Princeton University Press, 1993),
the intellectual component consists in not believing any statement less credible than some
incompatible alternative, and the practical component is bound to decision-value and
implies believing a statement only if the expected utility of doing so is greater than that of
non believing it (Nature of Rationality, p. 64).

29) The paradox applies as well to Kuhnian historians of science. It is not intelligible
why the historian would enjoy the privilege of escaping the framework of a paradigm
whereas others can't.
II! 1|! ll!
NOTES (30-34) to CHAPTER 3 (pp. 85-125)
30) See also James F. Harris, Against Relativism, ch. 4, and Carl Kordig, The
Justiﬁcation of Scientific Change, ch. 2.

31) Shortly put, frrst, so far as a translation scheme would be made possible by the
appeal to the discredited standards of analyticity and synonymy, the systematic ambiguity
of such notions undermines the attempt at mapping out the meanings, and inherently the
foundations of cross-linguistic understanding. Second, although stimulation is described
by Quine as a private affair, if stimuli appear as synonymous for each member of a
linguistic community they are socially uniform stimuli as their synonymy is generalizable
at the level of community. But even this observational synonymy does not survive
outside the border of a language (bilingual cases can't be normally contrived if translation
is to remain radical). Third, Quine's conclusion is that rival systems of analytical
hypothesis can ﬁt totally to speech behavior and disposition of speech behavior and still
specify mutually incompatible translations of countless sentences unsusceptible of
independent control.

32) Quine's examples in Word and Object and Ontological Relativity refers mainly to
the indeterminacy of terms. It is not clear to me how he considers the indeterminacy of
more complex sentences. Maybe he simply thinks that this analysis is no longer needed
as far as the terms of statements fail the test.

33) In addition, such an explanatory hypothesis precludes the possibility of adopting a
realist construal of scientiﬁc theories because of the semantic undetermination. Since the
Indeterminacy of Translation undermines the truth searching of scientiﬁc theories are
consequently pragmatically legitimate to reject it as explanatory hypothesis.
Nevertheless, Quine is not ready to accept such skeptical consequences of his view,
which preclude the pursuit of truth.

34) In this respect, see Harris's acceptance of Stroud's argument in Against Relativism,
p. 129.

***

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NOTES (35-44) to CHAPTER 4 (pp. 126-167)
35) Wittgenstein's discussion of the privacy of the language of thought in
Philosophical Investigations has been very inﬂuential in analytic philosophy. I will make
a hint to his objection though I do not purport to recount or discuss the disagreements
about it.

Wittgenstein imagines the absurd case when one relies on a private
language:

I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I

associate it with the sign "S" and write this sign in a calendar for every day on

which I have the sensation. -I will remark ﬁrst of all that a deﬁnition of a sign
cannot be formulated. -But still I can give myself a kind of ostensive deﬁnition. -

How? Can I point to the sensation? Not in a ordinary sense. But I speak, or write

the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation -

and so, as it were, point to it inwardly. -But what is this ceremony for? For that is
all it seems to be! A deﬁnition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign. -

Well, that is done precisely by the concentrating of my attention; for in this way I

impress on myself the connection between the sign and the sensation. -But 'I

impress on myself can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the

connection right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of
correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right.

And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right' (Philosophical

Investigations, sec. 258).

The idea is clearly revisited in On Certainty (sec. 281) where what counts as right
or evidence is described as a result of the inter-subj ective agreement of a community.
Meanings are established in the process of word-employment within language games.
Such socially recognizable patterns of linguistic practices of a cultural framework which
absorb customs and standards of judgements are simply there 'like our life' (On Certainty,
secs. 61, 559).

I will consider Wittgenstein's controversial argument here only as it casts doubts
on one's capability to understand what is in another's mind from one's own personal
experience. And this issue raises the question of the intelligibility of the inner voice of
the Cartesian subject.

-Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one

can look into anyone's else box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only

by looking at his beetle. -Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have
something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly
changing. -But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? -If
so it would be not used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place
in the language game at all; not even as something: for the box might even be

empty. (Philosophical Investigations, sec. 293).

Wittgenstein seems to rhetorically urge us to 'look and see' (On Certainty, sec. 96)
whether there is any universal feature like substance or general nature common to all
contents of "private" boxes. He is sure that there is none.

36) Wittgenstein says, "We may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be
anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and

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description alone must take place. And its description gets its light, that is to say its
purpose, from the philosophical problems" (Philosophical Investigations, sec. 109).

37) However, a group of interpreters (R. Suter among them, see Interpreting
Wittgenstein) argue that when Wittgenstein claimed that philosophy can only describe
ordinary language leaving the things as they are he misunderstood the entire spirit of
rationalism. For this reason, sometimes the later Wittgenstein , against his early held
views is seen as being very close to the position of ordinary language philosophy
defended by J .L. Austin who also joins to the chorus of those who discarded the search
for a systematic ideal language.

38) R. Nozick claims that if a particular reliable procedure yields an action or belief
which counts as rational, "not only must the procedure involve a network of reasons and
reasoning, but this also must be (in part) why the procedure is reliable" (Nature of
Rationality, p. 71).

39) Conceptual schemes can be compared with systems of "pigeon holes" to borrow a
nice expression used by Irnre Lakatos to characterize conventionalist views (see Selected
Papers, vol. 1, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Cambridge
University Press, 1978).

40) One may argue that these statements are true as far as they stand in certain relation
with experience like predicting, organizing, facing, ﬁtting. But Davidson associated this
aspect with the problematic application of a conceptual scheme.

41) Furthermore, "naturalized epistemology" is also an account of how are we to
articulate a satisfactory theory given the evidence available. The best available theory for
Quine, is our present science, but the sense impingements which back up the meaning of
our sentences and, all of our knowledge, provide us the only cues to "what goes around".

42) When Davidson exposes his realist goal of describing the speech in terms of being
clearer about the entities of the world, he seems to draw again from Quine's premise of a
pure extensional language. He points out, "our present scheme and language are best
understood as extensional and materialist" ("Idea of Conceptual Scheme", p. 188).

43) See Fodor-Lepore counter-argument from the standpoint to an atomistic view on
language, (Holism - A Shopper's Guide, p. 101)

44) Putnam observes that "if one recognizes that the radical interpreter himself may
have more than one "home" conceptual scheme, and that "translation practice" may be
governed by more that one set of constraints, then one sees that conceptual relativity does
not disappear when we inquire into the "meanings" of the various conceptual alternatives:
it simply reproduces itself at a metalinguistic level! " ("Truth and Convention", in
Relativism- Interpretation and Confrontation, p. 181)

45) According to Davidson, insofar as charity appeals to the concept of reason, it

325

appears as a teleological explanation. We may conclude also that traditional ways of
acting are socially privileged (see "Thought and Talk", p. 159).
* * *
NOTES (46-47) to CHAPTER 5 (pp. 168-182
46) Hollis alludes to Davidson when saying "Reason thus advises a blend of charity
and judgements in the understanding of social life and hence a dup-proof course for the
sociology of knowledge too" ("Social Destruction Of Reality", p 69)

47) Henderson assumes that the weighted principle of charity can be subsumed as
derivative from the principle of explicability (see Interpretation and Explanation, pp. 49,
58-59). However, I thing that the relation is the other way around. The principle of
charity provides for the possibility of understanding a subject as holding beliefs or doing
actions and it is understanding what backs up explanations. Therefore understanding is
prior to being able to give explanations as it is also prior to communication. Otherwise
one has to admit the strange thesis that one can explain what one does not understand. In
fact, to make an explanatory scheme or engage in communication one needs ﬁrst to
understand what it is being said. And understanding makes the need for charity.
'3 III *

NOTES (48-55) to CHAPTER 6 (pp. 183-295)
48) I use the term "utterance" interchangeably with the term "speech act" as they both
refer to the elementary unit of linguistic communication.

49) In addition to Davidson condition of interpretability (also accepted by Lewis,
Dennett, Grandy), F odor and Lepore make an inventory of premises for what they call
"argument form T", as follows:
No language is radically interpretable unless...

..."there are behavioral criteria for all its psychological terms" (Wittgenstein, Ryle);
..."there are observable criteria for application of all its theoretical terms" (Ayer);
...contains no "terms available only to one speaker" (Wittgenstein);
..."there are public criteria for ascriptions of knowledge of the language (Dummett);
..."it contains singular terms" (Strawson);

Some of these presuppositions were already implicitly discussed in my paper
(chaps. 2 & 3) in connection with Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson ("Is Radical
Interpretation Possible?", pp. 57-8 ).

50) This assumption reminds Quine's regulative function of logical rules.
Nevertheless Habermas counts the presuppositions of meaning identity among these
idealizations which conﬂicts with Quine's claim of indeterminacy.

51) Habermas considers three distinct positions of a priorism: the analytic reception
of the Kantian program (Strawson), the constructivist positions (Lorenzen) and critical
rationalist position (Popper). In addition, he delimitate himself from Apel's approach of
"transcendental hermeneutic" or "transcendental pragmatics" (see Communication and the
Evolution of Society, pp. 21-23, "Philosophy as Stand-In Interpreter", pp 6-7).

52) After Hegel's and Marx's conceptions on the social character of reason which

 

326

resulted in a "disempowering of philosophy" through a "desublirnation of spirit" proves
Descartes to be wrong about a kind of reason stepping out of the world. Nevertheless, in a
way Habermas intends to redeem some prerogatives of the Cartesian reason which lies
below the surface of phenomenology (in Husserl's version) or analytical philosophy (as
we remarked in the case of Quine).

53) Before turning to the main issue, we owe few conceptual clariﬁcation.

The way Habermas faces historicist and culturalist claims about the variability of world-
views and forms of life raises the question of an irreducible plurality of standards of
rationality. Does such variability preclude the universal validity of his notion of
"communicative rationality"? Does be open again the Pandora's box of relativism? Since
the region overshadowed by distinct clouds which metaphorically represents various
culture, covered by what Habermas often calls "lifeworld" can he still consistently
maintain that rationality was to shine over the shadow and peculiarity of delineated
clouds of idiosyncratic customs and habits? At this moment we owe a conceptual
clariﬁcation. The phenomenological connotations of this term express the need to oppose
the dry rationalist demands which grew out from an austere intellectualist philosophy
which implacably reduces the vital, the empirical and the relative to logical form. I shall
prefer to use this term whenever it would be appropriate to contrast the Cartesian Reason
with a intersubj ectively lived experience and to express concrete social interaction
between people engaged in cultural practices. In the past, though, I will make more use
of the expressions "ways of life" or "forms of life", which were introduced by latter
Wittgenstein in analogy with "language games" and considered lately by the new kind of
social science, proposed by Peter Winch, as a holistic framework of social interaction for
the understanding actual rule-governed-behavior. Insofar as these terms refer to global
social contexts for meanings and distinct cultural practices in contrast with abstract
norms of a transcultural Reason, their meaning is in some extent met by the notion of
"lifeworld" from phenomenological vocabulary coined by Edmund Husserl, developed by
Heidegger, and applied by Habermas to the web of everyday life and communication to
provide a referential context for the process of mutual understanding which backs up the
participants in social interactions. On his view, agents draw from lifeworld the common
background of "consensual patterns of interpretation", the presupposed solidarities
described as "normatively reliable patterns of social relations", and speaking competence
acquired in the process of socialization. However Habermas tolerates as well other
conceptual alternatives of expressing "our" cognitive achievements as he often uses the
term "form of life" as we noticed. So, for him it is not important whether we go on
Winch's and Wittgenstein's way and call them "form of life" and "language game" or we
use other expressions like "practice", linguistically mediated interaction", "convention",
"cultural background", "tradition", and the like. What counts is the fact that these
"commonsensical ideas" attained a status of basic concepts in epistemology.
("Communicative versus Subject Centered Reason", p. 605, "Philosophy as Stand-In
Interpreter", p 9)).

As we know, Husserl introduced the description of the "Lebenswelt" in the ﬁfth
Cartesian Meditation as a concrete surrounding world of culture within which all man
and communities relatively or absolutely separate live, undergoing a continuous change
(Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 132-3, se. 160). He claims:

 

327

"Manifestly the men themselves also change as persons, since correlatively they must
always be taking on new habitual
properties" (idem, p. 135, sec. 162)

Consequently, the full concreteness and incessant character of lifeworld
"applies likewise to all particular formations of the surrounding world, wherein it presents
itself to us according to our personal upbringing and development or according to out
membership in this or that nation, this or that cultural community (idem, p. 136). From
here, Husserl's project is to integrate the concept in his conceptual scheme: the world in
which we live belonging to an extremely low cultural level is subjected to the
phenomenological reduction. Idealized and objective entities of science draw their sense
from the structures of appearance, identiﬁcation, evidence and truth of the lifeworld.
Such idealizing and objectifying abstractions excludes actor's daily life on social scene
and all facts of culture which originate in practical human activity. As alfred Schultz
remarked
"this model is not fully peopled with human beings in their fully humanity, but with
properties, with types (Schutz, Alfred, Collected Papers 1, The Problem of Social Reality,
Martinus Nisjoff, The Hague, 1962., p 255). Since actor's actions and reactions do not
originate in a living consciousness they remain merely ﬁctious.

However, I have no interest for the purpose of this paper to follow ontological
application of lifeworld and its place within "constitutional transcendental
phenomenology". Unlike Husserl, I do not understand the lifeworld as a pre-scientiﬁc
realm, ready made to ﬁll up theoretical abstraction. In my approach there is only a
distinction of degree between lifeworld sphere, cognitive and normative aspects which
provide a more certain and secure rational ground only in the backing up of cross-cultural
communication. In the sense that theorists' lives are also immersed in the same given
lifeworld (notwithstanding its self images allow a plurality of versions of it), theoretical
and normative constructions are part in the structure of a tradition of thought (though it
might be gradually demarcated from set of beliefs less coherent and empirically veriﬁable
structured in common sense mentalities and ideologies).

In my view, lifeworld is the social world in its historic and cultural framework.

Its content is a way or form of life as a particular representation of social reality including
all human relationships from the simple and familiar acquitances to the most diverse
types of interaction within an array of communities (ﬁom ethnic, politic and religious to
disciplinary-professional). First, our everyday experience is part of the intersubj ectivity
of the lifeworld because we live in it as concrete individuals among other individuals,
bound to them through common expectations, desires, goals, inﬂuence and work.
Secondly, the cultural world of customs and habits also deﬁnes the lifeworld because we
are always conscious of its historicity and because we inhabit not a world of things, but of
meanings. Consequently, the intelligibility of these meanings requires understanding how
their communication is possible after all. It is a consequence of sharing cultural relations
that makes us to be human and drives us to behave as we actually do. This is indeed the
ﬁeld targeted by scientists of human affairs (anthropologists, sociologists, economists,
linguists, etc.). In spite of some inherent looming semantic ambiguities, I will make use
of the concept of lifeworld in a somewhat vague and unspeciﬁed description of the
humanly lived world. That is precisely because its stronger reference to social reality that
has a speciﬁc signiﬁcance and relevance for individuals in their daily thinking, feeling

328

and acting. As far as human beings are interrelated within it in manifold ways of cultural
interactions, its meaning is closely approximated in my usage by the Wittgensteinian
notion of ways of life or forms of life. In this respect one's cultural framework may be
idiosyncratic and primordial over against any alien culture.

54) Such a dramatic situation of modern societies is suggested by Weber.

55) Habermas assumes that the modernization of society led to the ﬁagmentation of
three distinct dimensions of rationality: the positive science, post-traditional ethics, and
autonomous art and the institutionalized art criticism. Although many claims that these
segmented areas can manage without philosophical justiﬁcation, Habermas believes that
the very existence of the gaps posed by cultural differentiation poses problems of
mediation between specialized domains. In relation with this aspect there arises two
kinds of questions. One the one hand, the question is about the possibility of a balance
between separated moments of reason in the horizon of the impoverished traditions of the
lifeworld. The challenge is how can we rejoin, without altering their regional rationality,
the isolated the scientiﬁc moral and aesthetic discourses resulting from the ever-
deepening division of labor. In other terms, this problem refers to the inter-relationships
between the three ﬁelds of expert cultures typifying esoteric and abstract forms, which
appear intricately related in the process of every day communication. In this respect,
Habermas assumes that instead of playing the arrogant role of arbiter that inspect the
culture, philosophy can be a translator standing in and mediating between everyday world
an the autonomous sectors of cultural modernity.

On the other hand, the question refers to the issue of legitimation and
rationalization of society, which has been inspired to Habermas by Weberian
interpretation of modernity. Habermas thinks that in this context arises the palpable need
for philosophy to serve the role of rational justiﬁcation which cannot be just a matter of
custom or habit. In this respect he provided a procedural concept of rationality which
offer grounds to norms on the basis of a pragmatic logic of argumentation. This concept
is richer than one-dimensional rationality which was tailored by the imperatives of
success and efficiency of the purposive action, which reminds the Weberian version. On
Habermas view, communicative rationality avoids the paradox of rationality, which
seems inescapable for Adorno and Horkheimer by integrating the instrumental-cognitive
goals with the speciﬁc demands of the moral practical and aesthetic-expressive domains
of value orientation.

55) Weber strives to insure a kind of instrumental rationality (endorsed by many
others, among them Bertrand Russell), which bears upon the assessment of the
appropriate justiﬁable means to achieve speciﬁc ends, but ultimately he despaired about
the possibility of a rational warrant for universal norms that guide our lives. Instrumental
reason is silent about values and cannot indicate us "where to go", at best it can tell us
"how to get there". It is like a mercenary for hire to be use in the service of any kind of
goals, no matter whether they are good or bad. In consequence the pattern of rationality
which provided the intellectual premises of the capitalist society leads to the bitter
awareness that the ineluctable modernization processes.

If Hume is right in warning us that values are beyond proof, then human

329

preferences are a kind of given. In such conditions, as twenty four centuries ago the orator
Demosthenes warned, "nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that
he also believes to be true" (Third Olyntiac, sec. 11)

Another kind of counter-argument to the Weberian instrumental rationality is
elaborated by the "holistic-romantic" conception of society as found for example in the
later work of M. Oakeshott and mentioned by Gellner (Reason and Culture, p. 134). In
this view human communities are complex but unique and symbolic wholes which are
not amenable to the same putative criteria for the selection of means in terms of cost-
effectiveness. Such societies idiosyncratically deﬁned could be understood only by
people immersed and intimate to in the traditions they engender.

57) In Between Fact and Norms: Contribution to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy (William Rehg’s translation, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1996) Habermas
proposes a new formulation of "D" in order to distinguish between the moral principle
and the principle of democracy. He claims that postconventional morality requires anew
form of law.

58) When the time came, More resigned the chancellorship in protest for the general
compliance to king's rule while all other nobles in hypocritical submission kissed the
hand "they could not bite", even if they wished that. Although he theoretically admitted
that all religions are equally legitimated, he was ready to face the execution for high
treason instead of recognizing his brutal sovereign as the chief of his church. In the end,
he was beheaded for refusing to recognize Ann Boleynn's unborn child as heir, though his
heroic but suicidal gesture did not prevent the irreparable breakdown between the Church
of England and Rome that soon occurred. Only John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester joined
him by lashing to the clergymen for their cowardice. Both paid their courage with their

lives.
at It at

NOTES (59-61) to CHAPTER 7 (pp. 296-312)
59) Habermas describes the contrast between the "lifeworld" and the "system". The
notion of lifeworld refers to "the horizon-forming horizon" of communicative action and
points to the symbolically structures spheres of society which are distinct from the
"system" permeated by the strategic-instrumental reason. The idea of understanding and
the consensus-formation make sense only against the "horizon of the lifeworld" which set
up a background of convictions which are more or less diffuse to the extent they are
articulated and thematized by validity claims. When the system takes over the lifeworld,
Habermas talks about the colonization of the lifeworld. In such a case, the reﬂective
processes of reaching consensus are replaced by bureaucratic mechanism base on
inﬂuence (authority, power). Thus, in modern societies the rationalization of the system
takes place on the expense of the communicatively structured spheres of the lifeworld
which are wiped out by the imperatives of functional coordination and control.

60) It seems to me that if I am to understand what 'X' feels when 'X' is desperate in
isolation (no public knowledge is possible), and I cannot verify all huge psychological
knowledge which covers all special circumstances in the world and in 'X's soul (God
certainly can do that, but I doubt that anybody else could). That's why I may be wrong

330

about 'X's feelings. But when I think what desperation (as opposed to hope) means I have
a good chance to instantly grasp 'X's mood without reviewing all Quinean critique of
meaning or making the inventory of all psychological theories of pertaining to mental
depression, or scrutinizing all environmental conditions present in the world of 'X', etc...
In addition we cannot describe 'X' in the same way sciences talk about Oxygen atoms or
the Milky Way. It is not wonder that I am liable of being wrong in understanding 'X', but,
at least, Davidson may charitably assume, I cannot be mistaken all the time because in
that case interpretation would be impossible. According to Habermas, the concept of
communicative rationality brigs about the possible understanding in terms of a basic
competence for undistortive communication and noncoercive agreement.

61) I think that Habermas's broad redemptive interest regarding the necessary and
unavoidable conditions of a meaningful use 0 language might provide for an escape from
what I metaphorically called the relativist "Tower of Babel". This is the mythical place of
linguistic idiosyncrasy and mutual misunderstanding, a metaphor of the ﬁagrnentation of
reason in the postmodern world and the problem of mediation between separated value
sphere as emphasized in the post-modernist attack on reason and the relativist retreat. In
this respect, some post-structuralist and neo-pragrnatist critiques of Habermas such as the
ones represented by Rorty announces the end of philosophy as a privileged truth-telling
discourse and Lyotard adopts an attitude of incredulity toward Habermas's theory as an
example of metanarrative which must be given up. The reason for presenting the post-
modernist criticism is not only to point out potential weaknesses of Habermas, but to
check his response to this attack ant to assess his effort to preserve the emancipatory
dimensions of ideal of understanding as cherished by the Enlightenment.

I this paper I expressed my hope that by suggesting a universal pragmatic
approach of the concept of "communicative rationality" by drawing from Habermas's
theory, we can open its gates of Babel, and, eventually make cross-cultural
communication between its separated ﬂoors possible. Such a discussion is related by
Habermas to the emancipatory goals that emerge from the redemption of the project of
modernity.

The defenders of the intellectual tradition of modernity ﬁnd the claim that
rationality can secure the ground for cross-cultural understanding as unproblematic and
intrinsic intelligible. In this respect, one cannot contest the validity of such a statement
and still count as a reasonable subject, since it is acknowledged that it must be universally
acceptable for any bearer of reason to accede to such a deductive truth. The
consciousness which warranted the infallible knowledge of the external world and of its
human inhabitants found itself justiﬁed in silencing any skeptical voice which eventually
tried to erode its presumptuous epistemic conﬁdence and could proclaim itself as
reasonable and dictate its norms. In this perspective, the meaning of diverging cultures of
life and particular times were described as convergent and inherently translatable into a
universal language and were to be abstracted by an objective and anhistoric "code" of
understanding meaning. The kind of rationality that provided for a transparent and
transcultural scheme of intelligibility also legitimized the drive toward an ideal of rational
society.

The criticism attacked the credibility of traditional rationality. For instance, a
post-modenrist criticism of marxist persuasion condemned rationality as being class-

331

biased or taking the ideological side of the rich and powerful to instrumentalize the
imperialist domination over the poor and exploited. More recently, reason has been
farther accused in various culturalist approaches for being at best "overly structured" or
"too restrictive" and "formal", and at worst "bigoted", racist", and "ethnocentric". In
addition to these pejorative connotations, many contemporary feminist philosophers
revealed a "sexist" dimension.

Consequently, relativists like Paul F eyerabend say farewell to the universal notion
of human understanding, which has grounded the theoretic optimism concerning the
possibility of cross-culturally meaningful discourse and the approach of solving human
conﬂicts within lifeworld. In the face of everyday complex experience, reason is not only
defeated and rendered inapplicable but "conceited, ignorant, superﬁcial, incomplete, and
dishonest", according to F eyerabend (Farewell to Reason, New York, 1987, p. 25. See
also his attack on scientiﬁc rationality in Against Method.)

In sum, it's a sad irony that while the traditional rationality was designed to be
able to notice and correct biases as an impartial fair judge, it makes itself no exception,
proving itself a distorted and one sided representation of the state of affairs. In this
respect, in the last decades, reason's claim for objectivity was targeted again for
dishonestly concealing either an economically politically-based or a male oriented or a
"main cultural-stream" attitude. Since notion of rationality inherited from the
philosophical tradition was under the suspicion for being unﬁt to accommodate to
multiple kinds of societies, it was made accountable for cultural intolerance and strategic
domination. In consequence, as we have seen, a new kind of pluralistic rationality has
been advocated by sociologists, anthropologists and by post-Wittgensteinian philosophers
of social sciences (like Peter Winch) when seeking more ﬂexible patterns of
understanding radically different ethnographic practices (e. g the ideal of salvation vs the
ideal of atonement pursued by archaic religions). In this context, thinkers of relativist
persuasion (Taylor, F eyerabend) ridiculed the arrogance and self-legitimation of classical
reason emphasized as the only good path leading to the objective Truth revealed to God's
eye.

 

The relativism seems to be the most enduring paradigm of our age, which displays
the splitting difference between us at the surface of our culture. In the last decades, new
voices joined the chorus of critics singing in the same key against the old fashion reason.
The traditional image of people coming from different cultural and political spaces and
greeting each other within One Level World fades out in the chaos spreading on the
multiple ﬂoors of Babel, a symbol of fragmentation of societies. On this suggestive
analogy with the biblical tower, the unity of reason worshiped by Descartes vanishes in
the enlarging gaps created by the autonomization of cultural islands which are inhabited
by communities appearing exotic and odd one to each others and are speaking in peculiar
and divergent tongues.

62) To be fair, one cannot hold Habermas accountable for the failure to properly
articulate such a broad point of view. After all, given the unusually broad scope of his
theoretical project, he went farther than anyone in this direction. It seems to me that this
is not a one man mission, nor just an epistemological effort but so far as we are concerned
with ﬁnding a rational way to settle through dialogue our cultural differences this is a
moral obligation. It is a task which involves an interdisciplinary effort at the intersection

332

between human sciences, which tell the story of our historic and cultural contingencies of
understanding (such as sociology, psychology, anthropology and linguistics, among
others), and sciences which may be broadly conceived as sources of knowledge which
ﬁlls out the scheme our world view. And yet, I believe that philosophy can mediate
between such scientiﬁc disciplines playing the role assigned by Habermas - that is, the

"guardian of rationality" in our culture.
It * 1!

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