Reasoning together
Often there is no substitute to talking to each other, or communicating information in some other way, but reasoning, properly so called, can always be done entirely by yourself.
Thus, we may say 'the Judge gave his judgment after listening to the arguments put forward by both opposing counsels. However, the 'ratio descendi' is independent of what went before.
Jürgen Habermas, the great defender of deliberative democracy,
he personally killed Adolf Hitler & overthrew the Nazi party. Sadly, he didn't do the same thing to the Communist regime in East Germany.
lived up to its demands:
Reasoning together is like shitting together. It may be more salubrious to do it alone.
he never feared changing his mind
Its contents changed from shit to shittier shit.
Since The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Habermas had been arguing that reason survives in modern life only as something people do together, that is, by giving each other reasons and staying open to being moved by them, rather than by force, money or tradition.
This was clearly false. You did your 'debate prep' at home. Increasingly you relied on statistics and Deontic Logics or Structural Causal models with a mathematical representation.
There may have been primitive societies, where people came together to try to reason things out. This involved hitting each other with clubs to encourage brain juices to bubble forth from broken skulls.
Between Facts and Norms
For Kant, what lies between quid facti and quid juris is is the philosophical or legal deduction, which establishes how empirical reality justifies a normative claim. Kant thought deduction could be done by the solitary individual.
was that idea
i.e. the utterly false notion that people can only shit or think when they are together.
turned toward law and democracy directly: a state counts as legitimate only when its laws could in principle be justified to everyone bound by them, through exactly that kind of open exchange.
In principle, anything could be justified to anybody by a cat uttering a sequence of miaow miaow noises.
Legitimate states exist as a matter of both fact and law. The US is de facto and de jure a legitimate Nation State. The Kingdom of Iyerland is not a legitimate state. This is why I don't have sovereign immunity even though leprechauns chose me as their King on March 23, 1984.
I’d watched that argument take root in a decades-long intellectual history.
No intellectual capacity is required to talk bollocks.
Thinking is a practice, it involves owing each other explanations, questions, answers.
No. Thinking is stuff that happens inside the brain. It may be wholly non-verbal.
It is not a fast process, and doing it in public, out loud, in front of a room, is what makes it worthwhile.
I suppose, on the Continent, the spectacle of a constipated shithead trying to squeeze out a turd is what makes living worthwhile.
I attended all of Habermas’s seminars during my time at Northwestern with great interest and, to be honest, a sense of awe. One day, the topic of the weekly seminar was inclusion,
sadly stupid shitheads can't include smart peeps in the project of watching them poop or try to think or whatever.
and I had argued, with the timid conviction of a green graduate student, that deliberative publics ought to be designed for inclusion,
i.e. they will be 'cheap talk' pooling equilibria- i.e. useless for any economic purpose (because scarce resources are used up)
and that entry into these publics required that members accept the terms of deliberation themselves.
In which case they won't actually include anybody whose time has an opportunity cost. Also, because of Arrow Impossibility, McKelvey Chaos & Chichilnisky's goldilocks condition for preference & endowment diversity, deliberation is bound to be a waste of fucking type unless, obviously, it is merely cosmetic. 'Transferable utility' is working its magic in smoke filled rooms.
‘Well, we can tell that Ms Prattico really is a Catholic in the strict, universalist sense,’
She's a slut. She includes any penis in her vagina. That's what happens when you let nuns educate your girls.
was not the answer I expected – and what took me by surprise wasn’t that he’d made a joke of my religion, but that he’d seen me as a person with a history and a set of unexamined beliefs, something he’d noticed only by teaching me.
Teechur noticed me! I feel so special! True, he was calling me a dim Catholic slut. Still.
... Visiting the US in the 1960s and ’70s, he’d been introduced to the Quakers, and something in their small meetings had stayed with him, specifically the way they sought unity with everyone present.
Habermas was wrong. Quakers 'step aside' if they disagree. The clerk records the 'sense of the meeting'. The emphasis is on 'communal discernment' rather than consensus. But, it is based on 'inner light' which is available in solitude.
When he came to describe the conditions under which people could reason together as equals,
which is what was the case in Iron Age tribal republics
he said he heard an echo of those meetings: conditions that hold only when everyone who could be affected by a norm isn’t just included but has a voice, can object, and speaks with sincerity.
This existed in Europe three thousand years ago. The Quakers were initially a persecuted sect. They grew rich and respectable. Sadly, they were utterly useless in stopping wars in the first half of the Twentieth Century. After that, people ignored them.
In those conditions, which go far beyond mere inclusion, the only constraint left on discourse is ‘the unforced force of the better argument’, as he put it in Justification and Application (1993).
This may be true of a court of law or tribunal of experts. But both have very narrow 'costly signal' eligibility criteria. They aren't 'inclusive' at all.
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), his seminal work originally published in German, made an argument about something concrete: 18th-century coffeehouses, salons and journals, where private citizens began treating the affairs of state as something they had standing to publicly discuss and judge, rather than simply obey.
Habermas was ignorant of history. The English chopped off their King's head in 1649. The first coffeehouse was set up in 1650. Cairo got its first coffee house in 1530. That's why Egypt became a 'deliberative democracy' many centuries before the UK.
That habit, Habermas argued, was where modern democratic legitimacy first took root.
During the Renaissance there was renewed interest in Periclean democracy. But what clinched matters was that taxation without representation tended to lead to repeated national bankruptcies. Not knowing Econ, makes a Social Scientist stupider than shit.
The book also identified tendencies that would weaken it, too. He thought that the public sphere had already started to decay, folded back into spectacle by advertising and mass media, the public reduced from participants to an audience.
He wasn't a participant. He was a stupid cunt who taught worthless shite.
It took almost 30 years for an English translation to appear. By the time it did, in 1989,
The Berlin Wall fell in November of that year. Habermas might have his uses because he wasn't too keen on German reunification.
Habermas had gotten a great deal of mileage out of the book in its original language; indeed, it had already made him a name outside Germany. When Craig Calhoun finally gathered the English-language response into a single volume, Habermas and the Public Sphere (1992), bringing together historians and theorists who challenged the argument, closing with a long response from Habermas himself, he could have easily spent the occasion defending a book that had already proved itself. Instead, he very openly contended with these critiques.
In which case he was defending himself.
He came to think he’d been too sceptical about one piece of that story. But the warning itself never went away
Two critics stand out. Nancy Fraser argued that the public sphere was never actually open to everyone since it had excluded women and other groups from the start.
Did you know women have to sit down to pee? How is that fair? How about your including wimmin in your boy's club of peeing while standing up.
She proposed replacing one public with many, arguing with each other, including publics formed by the very groups shut out of the first one.
Not to mention schizophrenic people arguing with themselves.
Geoff Eley made a related point from history: working-class and plebeian public spheres had existed alongside the bourgeois one all along, not before or after it. Both were extending an argument that Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge had made back in 1972, that a whole proletarian public sphere existed, which Habermas’s book never accounted for.
Also, there were a sphere of public coprophagy where everybody shat with each other and then feasted on each other's faeces. Refusal to participate in such rituals is a sign you are a fucking bougie cunt who secretly votes Republican.
Habermas answered these criticisms directly, in an essay called ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, printed as the closing chapter of Calhoun’s book. Habermas conceded that the exclusion of women was not incidental but built into how the bourgeois public sphere had worked from the start.
Pericles was totes bougie. That's why he didn't let women vote in the Ecclessia. Stalin was even more bougie. He didn't let women have any power whatsoever.
Unlike the exclusion of underprivileged men, which was a problem of class, and in principle correctable,
just as the problem of gender was 'correctable' by giving women the vote
the exclusion of women, he now wrote, ‘has been constitutive for the political public sphere not merely in that the latter has been dominated by men as a matter of contingency but also in that its structure and relation to the private sphere has been determined in a gender-specific fashion.’
The fucker didn't want to get cancelled by crazy lesbians.
Habermas conceded that other public spheres had existed alongside the one he had taken as foundational. And he softened the warning, without abandoning it. He came to think he’d been too sceptical about one piece of that story, the early stirrings of consumer society.
evidence for which exists from ten thousand years ago.
But the warning itself never went away. Sixty years on, he was still diagnosing a public sphere being distorted by commercial and structural forces, only now the culprit was platforms and algorithms rather than advertising and mass circulation.
He was stupid, not senile. Good for him. T
He did not give up everything. He still wanted to keep the public sphere as something to measure democracies against, even if the history behind it was messier than he’d first made it look.
There was and is a 'public sphere' defined by constitutional law. It exists irrespective of the form of government. A Dictator may have to be more careful of 'public opinion' than an elected Chief Executive.
Early in my dissertation work, I wanted to explore the role of experts in democracies
Legislatures may form comittees and sub-comittees which take testimony from experts. The elected Chief Executive may hire experts. It is likely that the Civil Service will include expert cadres.
The literature on the dangers of 'delegated legislation' & the theory of agent principal hazard has examined this in some detail.
through Habermas’s theory of deliberative politics, though I didn’t yet know how – I was, by any measure, stuck. My advisor, Cristina Lafont,
who had to sit down to pee
one of his most trusted students, arranged a meeting anyway, at the hotel where he stayed during his visits to Northwestern’s campus in Evanston. He didn’t seem to mind that I arrived without a fully formed argument.
Women have to sit down to pee. They brood so much on this injustice that their tiny brains atrophy.
Over almost two hours at what was then the Homestead Hotel, he had me lay out the problem as it stood, half-formed, and began working through it himself, out loud, testing it against his own theory as he went. He explained the three types of discourse that characterise deliberation – moral, ethical, and pragmatic –
There are only two types of discourse- alethic & imperative. Both may be strategic.
and was clear that when it comes to the moral, there are no experts:
There may be. If there is a moral clause in a contract, a Court may recognise an expert on the subject.
only individuals working out, together, what’s right in a given context.
This student cunt didn't get that moral reasoning uses counter-factuals. People are able to do it in solitude though, no doubt, they may consult with others if the issue is complex.
Followed to its conclusion, that seemed to leave no room for expertise anywhere in deliberative politics. But he then turned to pragmatic discourse, where expertise does real work: finding the most empirically sound way to reach a goal already agreed on.
A legal expert clarifies your duties under various clauses- including moral clauses- of a contract. Pragmatic discourse is about what is politically feasible.
Experts have no authority over what’s right, fair or worth valuing – only over facts.
There are experts who tell us which painting is worth valuing. There is a considerable economic literature on envy-free or 'super-fair' allocations.
This was, in miniature, an argument he’d been making since his early work on science and politics:
He was ignorant of both subjects.
that treating value-laden political questions as though they were merely technical ones corrodes democracy.
Germans know shit about democracy. Anglo-Saxons understand the fact-value distinction. A jury decides question of fact which are positive. A judge- who is a fucking expert in the law- decides questions of law which are normative.
In later meetings in his office, more routine than that first one, I pushed the distinction further: what did it mean for climate change
which Chichilnisky had addressed. Economists can do useful stuff. Sociologists can't. They are too stupid.
– a problem almost always treated, in his terms, as a matter of pragmatic discourse,
it is a problem amenable to mathematical analysis. The solution has to be based on the reverse game theory of incentive compatible mechanism design.
all graphs and targets and carbon budgets, and almost never as a moral one.
Stupidity isn't immoral. If you are stupid you can say 'Climate Change is naughty. Boo to fossil fuel emissions!'. But you can also eat your own shit to protest Gaza.
Who pays? What do we owe the people who pay? How should the resources that caused the damage be used? He didn’t have a ready answer. He asked question after question, testing the case against his own framework as though it genuinely hadn’t occurred to him before.
He was stupid and ignorant. She was even more stupid and ignorant. Neither gained by talking to each other.
I’ll never know for sure if he was being generous or if
he was stupid?
I had shown him something he had not yet thought of in applying his own distinction. What stayed with me wasn’t the answer but the manner of it: a philosopher in his 70s, decades into a settled framework,
an unworkable one
still willing to test that framework against a case he hadn’t considered, in real time, out loud, in front of a student.
it still didn't work. Sad.
By 1999, Habermas gave up a position he’d held since 1973, the year he’d argued that truth is simply whatever people would agree on if they argued it out under fair-enough conditions.
e.g. the Fuhrer is bound to win coz he's super-smart unlike that Jew Churchill & that fucking negro, FDR.
By the end of the century, he’d decided this was a mistake:
you have cancer even if your pals agree that you are super healthy.
it confused truth with justification.
Truth is a justification in libel cases. That which is alethic trumps any deduction. You have cancer if you actually do have cancer even if you have a mathematical proof that you are an immortal pussycat living on Uranus.
A claim can meet every test we have for it, survive every objection anyone raises, be about as justified as a claim can be, and still turn out false.
In which case it can't survive one particular objection.
That’s because justification answers only to the standards we happen to hold right now,
No. Justification is required where a matter is justiciable, in which case
1) the matter is protocol bound- i.e. the justification must satisfy certain rules
2) defeasibility must exist because defeasibility is the heart of the law. In other words, no justification is the 'last word' on the matter.
True, one may say 'one must justify oneself in foro conscientiae, or in the eye of God, or to the congregation of the Faithful, or the Party cell or whatever. But that is just a manner of speaking. It is not possible to talk the hindlegs off a donkey, yet we know plenty of people who do nothing else.
and those standards can later be shown wrong.
It turned out, worshipping the Fuhrer wasn't a good idea. No doubt, we'd think differently, if Hitler had won.
Truth doesn’t move when our standards do.
What we think is true changes.
Moral claims were different, he still thought: what’s right can only ever be what a fair conversation would settle on.
A sensible conversation would conclude that what's right is established after the fact.
There’s nothing else for rightness to answer to.
Utility. That's what everything must answer to if Darwin was right.
But facts about the world answer to the world itself,
Sadly, the world isn't listening.
not just to our best current agreement about it.
the 'best current agreement' is stuff we ask experts about, if the thing really matters.
Several people had been pushing him toward this change. The US philosopher Richard Rorty pushed from the side from which Habermas was now backing away: for Rorty, there was no need for truth to answer to anything beyond what an audience could be talked into agreeing on, and he’d been making that case to Habermas for years.
What a pointless waste of time Rorty was!
Lafont, my advisor, who’d arranged the hotel meeting, pushed from the other side, drawing on the US philosopher Hilary Putnam, who had spent much of his career arguing against exactly the kind of view that made truth depend entirely on human agreement.
Sadly, he decided that the fact value distinction was specious. He started off bright but doing Philosophy rots the brain.
Lafont had argued since 1994 that Habermas’s own philosophical tradition, in its turn toward language, had drifted into a position where it couldn’t say the world holds firm no matter how we talk about it.
So much the worse for Habermas. The world existed before we could talk and will exist after we have stopped doing so.
When Habermas changed his mind, he moved toward Lafont’s position, not Rorty’s.
Because he was stupid and ignorant. Still, he understood that his subject had degenerated into Grievance Studies.
What Habermas never spelled out is what this does to moral and political claims once people stop being able to agree at all.
Being able to agree doesn't matter. Being able to work together to solve a collective action problem does matter. In any case, the debate re. 'Aumann agreement' is where one must start if one is researching this.
Truth, on his revised view, still has somewhere to go even if everyone stops talking: the world doesn’t care whether anyone’s listening.
Only in the sense that the world is jelly of my booty shake which is why I'm not TikTok famous.
His philosophy of Rightness never had that option. So, when the people who’d need to agree on something splinter into groups that no longer talk to each other,
this is called a 'discoordination game'. It could give rise to 'costly signal' based 'separating equilibria'- not necessarily a bad thing.
a factual claim can still be true or false regardless. A moral claim has nothing left holding it up, once nobody’s left in the room to agree on it.
There is no moral claim in a room where nobody is advancing it. Why not say 'a fart has nothing left holding up if there is no arsehole in the vicinity?'
Habermas gave up a position he’d held for almost 30 years because the people around him showed him it didn’t hold.
He also stopped being a member of the Hilter Youth.
He’d spent decades arguing that claims get redeemed when someone can compel you to answer, and then was compelled himself, and answered, in print, aged 70. Those critiques were not meant to be damning objections: they were precisely what his theory called for and was built on, ultimately.
His theory was shit in its entirety. I suppose shit does call forth the criticism that it is smelly because it is, after all, shit. How about a courtesy flush?
Habermas returned to the subject in ‘Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere’ (2022).
i.e. the rise of wokeness. But there was an antidote- viz. White Male Grievance of the Trumpian sort.
His starting point is a particular relationship between beliefs and reality.
The correct solution concept is 'uncorrelated asymmetries' as dictating eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'.
Constitutional democracy runs on
Checks & Balances. Germans don't understand this.
citizens holding certain assumptions about their own disagreements, namely that the disagreements are real, that they’re about something, that better reasons could in principle settle them.
No. In any polity, people understand that they have different economic interests. No 'better reason' can always make everybody better off. However, 'transferable utility' (bribes) enable Society to find good enough solutions to most collective action problems.
The system holds together only as long as those assumptions stay reasonably close to how politics actually works.
There is absolutely no relationship between them. Christmas remains Christmas even if kids no longer believe in Santa Claus.
His argument is that a public sphere, run through social media, threatens that relationship and widens that gap.
This is paranoid thinking. Did you know that Putin's bots are brainwashing dudes into not chopping off their own dicks so as to show solidarity with rapists in Gaza?
For Habermas, there are two forces at play in this widening. Platforms drop the editorial filtering that newspapers and broadcasters used to perform,
or that the Nazi or Communist party used to perform.
and they turn every user into someone who publishes.
Some users get a big following. Most are ignored.
For Habermas the deeper problem isn’t the resulting noise; it’s that heavy platform use produces something smaller than a public: semi-public spheres, self-enclosed, silos whose members can no longer perceive the wider public sphere as inclusive at all – claims to universality beyond their own horizon become, in his words, ‘suspect of hypocrisy’.
The Academy already did that. Professors of worthless shite talk bollocks at each other. Their students can barely tie their own shoe-laces.
That perception is itself the damage, on his account, as much as anything actually happening out in the general public sphere.
If there is a 'cheap talk' pooling equilibrium, it is likely that hedging and income effects give rise to separating equilibria based on costly (or costly to disguise) signals. Mathematical Econ may have its problems but it isn't as utterly worthless as Philosophy or Sociology.
He ends by insisting that ‘maintaining a media structure that ensures the inclusive character of the public sphere and the deliberative character of the formation of public opinion and political will is not a matter of political preference but a constitutional imperative.’
The silly sausage wasn't aware that because there are economies of scope and scale in the News Media, oligopolistic 'Press Barons' are likely to dominate.
A factual claim still has to get the world right, whether or not anyone’s around to check it.
How can a claim be made if no one is around? This lady truly has shit for brains.
Moral claims never did: they answer only to discourse.
No. Mum's frown shows that you are doing something wrong. You stop doing it. She smiles. That's how we rise in morality.
And discourse is exactly what he’s just described coming apart.
His discourse was stupid and ignorant. Fortunately, lots of stupid people wanted academic credentials back at a time when wasting a few years in College didn't mean a life-time of debt peonage.
He doesn’t draw the conclusion for moral and political claims himself, but it follows from putting his two books next to each other: the very thing a claim about what we owe each other had to answer to is the thing he says is disappearing, in an age dominated by exchanges on social media.
Social media merely makes communication cheaper, faster & more immersive. I suppose as more entertaining ways to pass the time are developed, the thing will decrease.
Around that time, I reached out to my advisor for help asking Habermas for a foreword to a collection I was editing on Habermas and democracy. He was known for guarding his time closely – very few people had his email address, and he accepted only a handful of the hundreds of such requests he received each year. A couple of months later, an email came from an address I didn’t recognise: he had accepted, and written to say so himself. Amid the logistics, he added one condition: ‘You should send me at least a substantive part of the book before I can and would sit down and settle a few ideas.’ At 92, he wanted the material in hand before he’d commit to anything.
He was a glutton for punishment. I suppose coprophagy can be as addictive as my own server case of chocoholicalism.
What came back was not a review of the interviews that make up the book one by one. He says so himself in the opening lines: it isn’t his task to comment on the conversations directly. Instead, he used the occasion to answer the standing objections to his view of deliberative democracy, and to close with the digital transformation that turned out to run through nearly every interview in the book – a theme he noticed himself, and named as central to the collection. One section was on experts, common sense, and the chain of translation that carries specialised knowledge into public reasoning: the same distinction he’d first sketched over a hotel breakfast, worked out now in far more detail, at the very end of his working life.
Being stupid is an advantage if you teach worthless shit.
At one point, he writes that what’s been lost, in the democracies now regressing, is ‘a conflict of opinions that remains recognisable as a dispute about which position is backed by the better reasons.’
In Germany, this was the question of immigration. Economically, the country does need skilled immigrants. It doesn't need unemployable rapists. Whatever the 'better reason' is, it has nothing to do with 'deliberation'.
That’s as close as he ever came, in anything he wrote for me directly, to stating my own premise in his own words.
It is a foolish premise. Different people have different economic and other interests. There can be no 'better reason' applicable to everybody.
He names the same loss again later in the foreword, describing people who retreat into whichever group already agrees with them
as he did. Meanwhile the smart people were using mathematical and economic ideas.
and lose their grip not just on the public sphere’s inclusiveness but on the idea of a shared standard of true and false.
Germany was divided. What was true on side of the wall was considered a mischievous lie on the other side. Habermas was so stupid, he was pretending things had gotten worse since re-unification.
What he doesn’t do here, any more than he did in 1999, is follow that loss when it concerns a moral claim once the discourse behind it comes apart. And that is what I tried to explore in my philosophical work since my dissertation.
A legal claim can sometimes be sustained even if its underlying facts are proven wrong. Why should moral claims be different? Thus the moral claim that masturbation is wrong because God hates it can survive 'the death of God'. Masturbation is wrong because it causes your genitals to continually increase in size. This means that I may accidentally knock the moon out of its orbit if I continue to sexually abuse myself.
He still believed the gap between expert and layperson could always, in principle, be closed by the right chain of translation.
This assumes that expertise has an algorithmic description. However, it is may be 'non-polynomial' & thus verification can be quick and cheap whereas running the algorithm incurrs exponential time.
It was the one thing he never revised: he revised his theory of the public sphere, his theory of truth, but never the conviction that under the right conditions people can still reach each other.
This is easier and more cheaply done electronically.
I am not persuaded that these conditions are as anywhere close to being met today
AI is helping a lot here. Complicated theories can be explained to stupid people in a 'customised' manner.
– but that’s a disagreement I never got to have with him.
Because he is dead. The Gods may struggle against stupidity in vain but death puts an end to even Teutonic stupidity.
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