Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 22:14:14 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Habermas / Popper....lifeworld vs. system


Matthew,

If you're going "to try and explicate the mechanism/s driving the
learning process...," is this presuming that learning is basically
mechanistic? 

It appears to me--with Habermas, I believe--that learning or
dispositions to learn express interests and intentions, desires and
needs, which can't be explicated as driven processes.    

In a manner of speaking, "Habermas takes onboard Piaget's
developmental model,..." but isn't this within a complex discourse of
Kohlbergian-Meadian social learning (not to mention
psychoanalytically-based ego identity theory, which is defined
in-and-through the alliance of interpretive interaction)?

How is it that "Habermas wants to keep the learning process on the
level of the individual,..." when the individual is constituted
interactively, for Habermas, as shown in his Meadian sense of
"individuation" and a Kohlbergian developmentality whose advancement
requires achivements of reciprocity? Methodologically, Habermas is
sociocentric through and through: discursively (_MCCA_),
interdisciplinarily (ibid.) and appropriatvely (_J&A_), extends the
work of _CES_ rather than connotating any break whatsoever with
_CES_. "Methodological individualism" doesn't seem plausible with
Habermas' work.

However, conjecture is a great mode of discovery. So, though your
"linking of Habermas's social learning and Popper's e.e [may be] kite
flying," I think Habermas' sociocentrism does call for better
explication of individuality, re: individuality's importance for
discovery, innovation, and critical conjecture--as least in
complement to his vastly important sociocentric concerns (After all,
can one account for Habermas' own singularity in terms of a
metatheory of communicative action and reflection modeled on dialogue
roles?). 

*    *    *    * 

You note that you find Habermas' degree of "anti-decisionism ...
problematic for [his] communicative rationality," but 'decisionism'
is perhaps the wrong term, since you're concerned about "the decisive
orientation of the individual... in...negotiation," which is a very
different matter: a matter of strategic action, toward which
decisionism is one perspective, not a description of strategic
action. 

Mechanism, drive, and derivatively decisionism are (or is altogether)
very different from learning, interest and derivatively clarity of
goals in strategic action.

Strategic action belongs to the lifeworld with communicative action
(communicative action OF one's lifeworld), but this is (both are)
another matter from systemic-physicalistic processes, involving
mechanism, etc. Habermas' distinction between system and lifeworld go
back at least as far as _Legitimation Crisis_. 

Correlatively, "the rationality built into the structure of human
language practice" can be understand either rationalistically, like
rational choice theory and "can be unleashed"; or this rationality
can be understood communicatively, from its basis: reasonability.
Rationalistic choice is explicitly concerned with decision
efficiency, but reasonability is implicitly engaged with generative
understanding.  

My view anyay....


Cheers,


Gary





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