India has many languages of diverse origins. Yet it is a 'deliberative Democracy'. Almost everybody in Iran speaks Persian. It isn't a democracy at all.
India is Hindu. Hindus need to hang together because there is a Muslim threat but Hindus don't want to kill each other. Elections are a peaceful way of resolving conflicts as to who gets to set policy.
Iran is Shia majority. Shias want to dominate Islam for historical reasons. They are going to be theocratic, not democratic. They may hold elections, but the game is rigged in advance.
Does 'Communicative action'- i.e. talking- matter? Not very much. Tardean mimetics- i.e. imitating the superior- is cheaper, faster & more effective.
Habermas, who has just died, believed otherwise.
Wikipedia says-
The Theory of Communicative Action is a two-volume 1981 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in which the author continues his project of finding a way to ground "the social sciences in a theory of language".
Social Science is founded in Statistics & mathematical structural causal models. It isn't founded on language or a theory of language.
which had been set out in On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967).
Which features mathsy stuff like 'Granger causality' & Muth Rationality & Hannan Consistency. Habermas had studied shit and was stupid. He didn't know any type of logic. The Natural Sciences feature 'games against nature'. Social Sciences feature strategic games. In the latter, things like Shapley values matter. Not so in the former.
The two volumes are Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung),[3] in which Habermas establishes a concept of communicative rationality,
It is irrational to talk to a guy about a Social problem if he doesn't have all the relevant facts and figures at his fingertips. The question is whether his SCM churns out better predictions.
and Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft),
Fuck Functionalism or Neo-Kantianism as a game for soldiers- or drug addled anthropologists.
in which Habermas creates the two level concept of society
There is- 'the Individual Level (Agency): This refers to the actions, choices, and intentions of individuals. People make decisions based on personal beliefs, values, and goals, and through their behavior, they influence social dynamics and outcomes'.
Sadly, that's not how we actually behave. We imitate what smarter people are doing even if we don't understand their reasoning. My preference is to stay in bed rather than go to skool. I go to skool coz smart kids do so. Losers stay in bed & become morbidly obese 'shut ins'.
There is also the 'Social Level (Structure): This encompasses the organized systems and institutions—such as family, economy, education, religion, and government—that guide and constrain individual behavior. Social structures are durable patterns of relationships and institutions that provide stability and continuity across generations'.
Families break up. Economies go down the toilet. Education turns out to be a crock of shit. Priests turn out to be pedophiles. The good news is that you can avoid bad structures and adhere to good ones- till something better comes along.
and lays out the critical theory for modernity.
Did you know we live in 'modern times', not 'days of yore'? That's why there are no dragons flying about the place.
After writing The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas expanded upon the theory of communicative action by using it as the basis of his theory of morality, democracy, and law.
He decided they might be good things which was very nice of him.
The work has inspired many responses by social theorists and philosophers, and in 1998 was listed by the International Sociological Association as the eighth most important sociological book of the 20th century.
All sociological books are shit.
The theory of communicative action is a critical project which reconstructs a concept of reason which is not grounded in instrumental or objectivistic terms, but rather in an emancipatory communicative act.
There are no 'emancipatory communicative acts' save that of a kidnapper or a jailor who says 'I'm now going un-cuff you. You are free to leave'. But that's 'instrumental' & 'objectivistic'. Talking bollocks isn't emancipatory. It is a fucking nuisance.
This reconstruction proposes "human action and understanding can be fruitfully analysed as having a linguistic structure",
Language has a linguistic structure. Stuff you do or think can have a linguistic description. What a fucking amazing discovery!
and each utterance relies upon the anticipation of freedom from unnecessary domination.
No. It doesn't rely on anything at all. If you can talk without danger to yourself, you talk even if some dude is dominating the fuck out of you.
These linguistic structures of communication can be used to establish a normative understanding of society.
Even a cat can have such a normative understanding. It purrs to show it likes society. It hisses & scratches you if it doesn't like your society.
This conception of society is used "to make possible a conceptualization of the social-life context that is tailored to the paradoxes of modernity.'
Since this was already possible, that conception was useless.
This project started after the critical reception of Habermas's book Knowledge and Human Interests (1968),
at least the fucker wasn't a raving Commie.
after which Habermas chose to move away from contextual and historical analysis of social knowledge
which might involve some actual research
toward what would become the theory of communicative action.
which was mindless garbage.
The theory of communicative action understands language as the foundational component of society and is an attempt to update Marxism by "drawing on Systems theory (Luhmann), developmental psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg), and social theory (Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Mead, etc.)".
i.e. useless, dated, shite. What constitutes Society is 'collective action problems' featuring coordination & discoordination games. Even a deaf & dumb person can participate. The Allied armies which defeated Hitler & Tojo spoke a lot of different languages. Consider the Swahili speakers who fought alongside Indians & Chinese Nationalists in Burma. If you saw the platoon opposite you was advancing, you provided covering fire, before sprinting forward yourself. You didn't have to understand Chinese or Hindi.
Thomas A. McCarthy states that
The Theory of Communicative Action has three interrelated concerns: (1) to develop a concept of rationality that is no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory;
Habermas failed. John Muth succeeded. Moreover, if there is Knightian uncertainty, regret minimization is the way to go.
(2) to construct a two-level concept of society that integrates the lifeworld and systems paradigms;
though they are already integrated- or become so by the time we are about three years old.
and, finally, (3) to sketch out, against this background, a critical theory of modernity
modernity is about higher productivity & the law of increasing functional information
which analyzes and accounts for its pathologies
i.e. stuff this shithead didn't like. Was Nazism a pathology? Yes. It turned out conquering land to the East was a game not worth the candle. True, initially you get a windfall but, very soon, the productivity of conquered land falls precipitately. You can't live off unproductive land.
in a way that suggests a redirection rather than an abandonment of the project of enlightenment.
There was no such project. Some stupid professors gassed on about it in the Eighteenth century and despots like Fredrick & Catherine were, initially enthused by it because they thought it could lead to rapid 'catch up' growth.
The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1 sets out "to develop a concept of rationality that is no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory."
Modern philosophy & Econ had turned mathsy. It had no fucking premises whatsoever. Anybody can say 'boo to Nazism'. You need smart people to figure out ways to bomb Hilter to buggery.
With this failure of the search for ultimate foundations by "first philosophy"
Being as being. But you can have a logic without an ontology. 'Shut up & calculate' is good advise- if you are smart. If you arent' teach shit to shitheads.
or "the philosophy of consciousness", an empirically tested theory of rationality must be a pragmatic theory based on science and social science.
Of both of which Habermas was impartially ignorant.
This implies that any universalist claims can only be validated by testing against counterexamples in historical (and geographical) contexts – not by using transcendental ontological assumptions.
Verification, not validation, is all that is available to us.
This leads him to look for the basis of a new theory of communicative action in the tradition of sociology. He starts by rereading Max Weber's description of rationality
which was irrational. The exercise of reason which results in increased inclusive fitness is rational. Anything else isn't. But this is determined by the fitness landscape. It is fine to do Model Theory if you are employed for that purpose. It isn't, if you earn your living as a plumber.
and arguing it has a limited view of human action. Habermas argues that Weber's basic theoretical assumptions with regard to social action prejudiced his analysis in the direction of purposive rationality, which purportedly arises from the conditions of commodity production.
Weber understood that people need jobs to earn money to buy food. Habermas thought differently.
Taking the definition of action as human behaviour with intention, or with subjective meaning attached, then Weber's theory of action is based on a solitary acting subject and does not encompass the coordinating actions that are inherent to a social body.
People intentionally coordinate with each other. When you throw a party, you make sure to send out invitations giving the time & place of the bean-feast.
According to Weber, rationalisation (to use this word in the sense it has in sociological theory) creates three spheres of value: the differentiated zones of science, art and law.
Value pre-exists in what is produced under these rubrics. Scientists & artists & lawyers get paid because of the 'Expected Value' of their work. If that work is shit, they get the sack.
For him, this fundamental disunity of reason constitutes the danger of modernity.
We must escape from that danger by migrating to 'days of yore'.
This danger arises not simply from the creation of separate institutional entities but through the specialisation of cognitive, normative, and aesthetic knowledge that in turn permeates and fragments everyday consciousness.
Why don't people shit while they are eating? It would save time- right? Is it because of 'modernity'? Yes. Fuck you modernity! Fuck you very much!
This disunity of reason implies that culture moves from a traditional base in a consensual collective endeavour
Slavery? Serfdom? Killing off the Neanderthals?
to forms which are rationalised by commodification
People were trading flint axes 50,000 years ago.
and led by individuals with interests which are separated from the purposes of the population as a whole.
This stupid fucker is against specialization on the basis of comparative advantage & the division of labor. Men should give birth to just as many babies as Women. Evolution took a wrong turn 100 million years ago.
This 'purposive rational action' is steered by the "media" of the state, which substitute for oral language as the medium of the coordination of social action.
The State uses oral language. So does organized crime.
An antagonism arises between these two principles of societal integration—language, which is oriented to understanding and collective well being,
because nobody ever calls anybody else a fucking wanker who eats his own shit- right?
and "media", which are systems of success-oriented action.
The State ordered Habermas to eat his own shit. That is why he turned into a shithead. True the State didn't use 'oral language' to communicate its order. But Habermas understood that is what it wanted him to do. He wasn't an utter cretin, you know.
Following Weber, Habermas sees specialisation as the key historical development,
i.e. the Neolithic Revolution was very evil. We should go back to being hunter-gatherers. Also, men should give birth to babies. Gender dimorphism is a type of specialization which is deeply repugnant. Everyone should have both a vagina & a penis.
which leads to the alienating effects of modernity, which 'permeate and fragment everyday consciousness'.
Drinking too much fragments my consciousness every day. Habermas was fortunate to be born stupid.
Habermas points out that the "sociopsychological costs" of this limited version of rationality are ultimately borne by individuals,
which is why we feel sorry for Elon Musk
which is what György Lukács had in mind when he developed Marx's concept of reification in his History and Class Consciousness (1923).
Lukacs suspected that evil capitalists might use him as a toilet and sell him on that basis.
They surface as widespread neurotic illnesses, addictions, psychosomatic disorders, and behavioural and emotional difficulties; or they find more conscious expression in criminal actions, protest groups and religious cults
& homosexuality. Lukacs considered gay people to be morally decadent. Stalin reintroduced the sodomy ban around this time.
Lukács thought that reification, although it runs deep,
he genuinely was a toilet.
is constrained by the potential of rational argument to be self-reflexive
Lukacs was the anus which shat on himself
and transcend its occupational use by oppressive agencies.
He was a toilet so filled with his own shit that no oppressor wanted to use it.
Habermas agrees with this optimistic analysis,
If this is optimism, what is despair?
in contrast to Adorno and Horkheimer, and thinks that freedom and ideals of reconciliation are ingrained in the mechanisms of the linguistically mediated sociation of humanity.
Very good of him, I'm sure. At the time, if a Professor wasn't actually foaming at the mouth and trying to stab the American ambassador, he counted as a freakin' genius.
Volume 2
Habermas finds in the work of George Herbert Mead
who was perfectly sensible.
and Émile Durkheim concepts which can be used to free Weber's theory of rationalisation from the aporias of the philosophy of consciousness.
This can also be done by masturbating.
Mead's most productive conceptis his theoretical base of communication and Durkheim's is his idea of social integration.
Yet, it is Tardean mimetics which rules over all.
Mead also stressed the social character of perception: our first encounters are social.
Our first crimes are anti-social.
From these bases, Habermas develops his concept of communicative action: communicative action serves to transmit and renew cultural knowledge, in a process of achieving mutual understandings.
Mimetics ensures it will happen anyway. If your company has a superior product, your rivals will try to re-engineer it or send spies to find out how you make it.
It then coordinates action towards social integration and solidarity.
It may do. It may not. But markets solve coordination problems better than pi-jaw.
Finally, communicative action is the process through which people form their identities.
No. People were homosexual even when it was 'the love that dare not speak its name'. Incidentally, I am actually a highly trained Ninja warrior even though my Japanese is unintelligible to any body except the baby. Sadly, baby beats me up.
Following Weber again, an increasing complexity arises from the structural and institutional differentiation of the lifeworld, which follows the closed logic of the systemic rationalisation of our communications.
It is markets which support 'increasing complexity'. Otherwise there is 'error accumulation' & a 'scissors crisis'. Hayek was right. Kantorovich was wrong.
There is a transfer of action co-ordination from 'language' over to 'steering media', such as money and power, which bypass consensus-oriented communication
Nope. There are plenty of theorems in Social Choice theory & Mathematical Politics which show how 'transferable utility' (pay-offs) promote consensus.
with a 'symbolic generalisation of rewards and punishments'.
The problem with having lots of punishments & few rewards is smart people either run away or pretend to be as dumb as shit.
After this process the lifeworld "is no longer needed for the coordination of action".
Coz of Ebay & PayPal & Ali Express.
This results in humans ('lifeworld actors') losing a sense of responsibility with a chain of negative social consequences.
When you buy stuff from China you lose human connection with the anus of the Chinese worker. Thus you are unable to lick it tenderly. This is the reason the Chinese are so angry with Trump.
Lifeworld communications lose their purpose becoming irrelevant for the coordination of central life processes.
As Mahatma Gandhi said, we must all spin cotton and live sexlessly in self sufficient villages. Death will be a welcome release.
This has the effect of ripping the heart out of social discourse,
because we are unable to tenderly lick the anus of Chinese or Vietnamese factory workers
allowing complex differentiation to occur but at the cost of social pathologies.
Like buying stuff with money & neglecting to tenderly lick the anuses of the workers.
"In the end, systemic mechanisms suppress forms of social integration even in those areas where a consensus dependent co-ordination of action cannot be replaced, that is, where the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld is at stake.
For example, the British King Emperor was not able to tenderly lick the anuses of every kangaroo & wallaby. This is why the 'lifeworld' of Ozzies produced Dame Edna Everage.
In these areas, the mediatization of the lifeworld assumes the form of colonisation".
Queen Victoria did not tenderly lick Mahatma Gandhi's anus. He was not amused.
Habermas argues that Horkheimer and Adorno, like Weber before them, confused system rationality with action rationality.
because individuals act rationally to implement the agenda of particular systems. Why not say 'my wife does not suck cock. It is as part of the Prostitution system that she guzzles jizz. I am not guilty of living off immoral earnings. All is the fault of the system.' ?
This prevented them from dissecting the effects of the intrusion of steering media into a differentiated lifeworld, and the rationalisation of action orientations that follows.
Eichmann, after all, was only following orders. He wasn't guilty of anything. Some of his best friends were Jews- or would have been if he hadn't killed them.
They could then only identify spontaneous communicative actions within areas of apparently 'non-rational' action, art and love on the one hand or the charisma of the leader on the other, as having any value.
Whereas, when a woman says 'me love you long time', it means she greatly values your jizz.
According to Habermas, lifeworlds become colonised by steering media when four things happen:
Traditional forms of life are dismantled.
Which happened at least 12000 years ago
Social roles are sufficiently differentiated.
Men don't give birth to babies
There are adequate rewards of leisure and money for the alienated labour.
So slavery is okay. It is just well paid blue-collar work which is evil.
Hopes and dreams become individuated by state canalization of welfare and culture.
i.e. you can live quite well on the dole and the State owned TV channel broadcasts lots of nice operas.
These processes are institutionalised by developing global systems of jurisprudence.
No. They arise as Hayekian 'spontaneous order'. There is no global system of jurisprudence. There may be 'comity of nations' & treaty law in certain areas.
He here indicates the limits of an entirely juridified concept of legitimation and practically calls for more anarchistic 'will formation' by autonomous networks and groups.
Like the 'Tea Party'? No. He means the Skinheads.
"Counterinstitutions are intended to dedifferentiate some parts of the formally organised domains of action, remove them from the clutches of the steering media, and return these 'liberated areas' to the action co-ordinating medium of reaching understanding".
Definitely the Tea Party. Trump is now a two term President.
After dispensing with Weber's overly negative use of rationalisation, it is possible to look at the Enlightenment ideal of reason in a fresh light.
It was bullshit. Still, teaching Kant & Rousseau is less demoralizing than having to teach Woke shite.
Rationality is redefined as thinking that is ready to submit to criticism and systematic examination as an ongoing process.
There is no such need. A rational guy making a shitload of money on the Options market is under no obligation to reveal what algorithm he is using. On the other hand, a drooling imbecile may be willing to accept advise & criticism on the type of dog turd he chooses to devour.
A broader definition is that rationality is a disposition expressed in behaviour for which good reasons can be given.
It is perfectly rational to stick with a non-deterministic decision rule which produces a superior outcome. You don't know why it works but it is obvious that it does work. Still, this isn't a 'good' reason. Why not? There may be some side-effect which is currently unobservable. It is worth spending a bit of money turning the 'black box' into a 'white box'.
Habermas is now ready to make a preliminary definition of the process of communicative rationality: this is communication that is "oriented to achieving, sustaining and reviewing consensus
This must be false because there are uncorrelated asymmetries which can lead those with the same Bayesian priors to reject 'Aumann agreement'. More broadly, by a theorem of Chichilnisky & Heard, consensus is only desirable if preference & endowment diversity meets a Goldilocks condition. Finally, by the McKelvey Chaos theorem we know that making the decision space multi-dimensional creates an 'agenda control' problem which renders the thing 'anything goes'. Habermas ignored everything interesting that was happening in the Social Sciences over the course of his very long, utterly useless, life. That's what happens if you don't study STEM subjects at skool. Your brain turns to shit.
– and indeed a consensus that rests on the intersubjective recognition of criticisable validity claims".
There can be no such intersubjective recognition unless there is an objective function such that categoricity obtains. Sadly, even if there is an objective function, the objective itself is arbitrary and so 'naturality' is far to seek.
With this key definition he shifts the emphasis in our concept of rationality from the individual to the social.
He has no theory of the social- i.e. what constitute 'collective action problems' & which mechanisms are available to solve them.
This shift is fundamental to The Theory of Communicative Action.
It is a shift from shit to shit.
It is based on an assumption that language is implicitly social and inherently rational.
Math is inherently rational & does provide solutions to collective action problems. Language doesn't greatly matter. Just imitate what more successful societies are doing.
Argument of some kind is central to the process of achieving a rational result.
It is irrelevant. Still, for some purposes- e.g. 'adversarial' justice systems, or parliamentary democracies of the Anglo-Saxon type- it is considered a good thing if there is a venue where such arguments are presented and 'put on the record' so to speak.
To overcome agent-principal hazard, there may be a stipulation that decisions have to be made after rival arguments have been presented. There may also be Professional obligations of this type.
Contested validity claims are thematised and attempts are then made to vindicate or criticise them in a systematic and rigorous way.
He was too stupid to do so. Lawyers get paid a lot of money to examine such questions in various contexts.
This may seem to favour verbal language, but allowance is also given for 'practical discourses' in which claims to normative rightness are made thematic and pragmatically tested.
Like in the fashion industry. You imitate what the cool kids are wearing. That's Tardean mimetics.
Non-verbal forms of cultural expression could often fall into this category.
So do verbal forms. That's why my entire vocabulary changed after I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Habermas proposes three integrated conditions from which argumentative speech can produce valid results: "The structure of the ideal speech situation (which means that the discourse is) immunised against repression and inequality in a special way ...
Since there can be no 'i-language', there can be no ideal speech situations. Watanabe's ugly duckling theorem applies.
The structures of a ritualised competition for the better arguments
the thing isn't 'ritualised' at all. If you can get in a smart guy to talk about it, you do so. Otherwise you have to be content with tossers like Habermas.
… The structures that determine the construction of individual arguments and their interrelations".
There are no such structures- at least for grown-ups who do useful stuff.
Granting such principles of rational argumentation, communicative rationality is: The processes by which different validity claims are brought to a satisfactory resolution.
That depends on the 'fitness landscape'. There may be a very good argument for disarmament & Pacifism. But it goes out of the window when the country is attacked.
The relations to the world that people take to forward validity claims for the expressions they deem important.
Circumstances- or expectations re. states of the world- are what matters. Expression doesn't matter. If you notice that all the smart people are packing up and fucking off, you don't hang around. You follow their example.
When I was a kid, I noticed that all the intellectuals who were loudest in denouncing Western Imperialism had secured tenure on Western campuses. They urged me, with tears in their eyes, to go to the villages and join the toiling masses in their struggle against Neo-Liberalism. I moved to Hampstead- quite a lovely village but too full of darkies.
Habermas then discusses three further types of discourse that can be used to achieve valid results in addition to verbal argument: these are the aesthetic,
holding your nose when you see the other guy so that he comes to believe that he smells bad
the therapeutic
I often used to advise Amartya Sen to chop off his own head so he would be less ugly. Also, his health would improve because he would have lost 5 k.g. worth of useless shit.
and the explicative.
Telling people why they are shit.
Because these are not followed through in The Theory of Communicative Action the impression is given that these are secondary forms of discourse.
Like farting. Habermas may be dead but his oeuvre will continue to hang in the air like a bad smell.
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