Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 08:55:16 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Re: Habermas and Popper


Matthew:

How is "Popper's evolutionary epistemology....discernible in
Habermas's thesis on social evolutiuon as a developmental learning"?

I've read Habermas' sense of epistemology as pragmatically
discursive, rather than evolutionary in any sense of evolutionary
epistemology. Habermas' sense of evolution appears, first in
_Legitimation Crisis_ and _Communication & the Evolution of Society_,
then clearly in _Theory of Communicative Action_ as motivated by
anthropological thinking, Durkheim especially, rather than
physicalistic thinking. Also, Habermas' sense of developmental
learning is Piagetian. 

So, what do you mean by "discernible"?
  
--- matthew piscioneri <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com> wrote:
> Dear List,
> 
> The current discussion of Habermas's Popperian inheritance is - I
> believe - 
> vital to appreciating the background to Habermas's own version of
> critical 
> rationalism. What makes the issue even more interesting is the
> ambivalence 
> of Habermas's public reaction to many of Popper's doctrines.
>         Popper's three world schema is overtly present in the TCA.
> Also, 
> Habermas's engagement with the Adorno/Popper debate over positivism
> and the 
> social sciences in the early 1960s, is well known. There is NO
> doubt that 
> Habermas's relationship to Popper IS complex, especially given the
> fact that 
> Marx/ism was one of the main targets of Popper's Open Society.
>     Recently, reading a slim voume titled 'A Confrontation: Reform
> or 
> Revolution', which was a contrived debate between Popper and
> Marcuse, it was 
> possible to see Habermas as a synthesising agent between these
> strains of 
> thought: liberal democracy/critical theory/methodological 
> individualism/communal solidarity.
>      I think Habermas is strongly Popperian in both methodology,
> and in the 
> pragmatic espousal of his version of social/liberal democratic
> politics, in 
> a way which links him also to Rorty, for example.
>     It is not the falsificationist method which unites Habermas and
> Popper, 
> but the analogue of Popper's evolutionary epistemology which is
> discernible 
> in Habermas's thesis on social evolutiuon as a developmental
> learning 
> process wherein lays their methodoligical common ground. This picks
> up the 
> theme of Habermas and memetic theory discussed earlier on this
> list. I would 
> want to suggest that this also goes some part of the way towards
> explaining 
> the strength of Habermas's reaction to Derrida and Foucault in the
> PDM - an 
> evolutionary trial by fire or testing of competing theses.
> 
> Well, there you have it ( a revised version of my thesis in a
> nutshell I 
> suppose :-)) Actually saddened by Gore's apparent failure to win
> Office in 
> the U.S. The U.S could have had a decent and clever President all
> at the 
> same time. C'est la vie.
> 
> Matthew Piscioneri
> School of Philosophy
> University of Tasmania
> 
> 
> 
> 
>
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> 
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