Subject: HAB: Hab's sociocentrism
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 01:58:31 GMT



Dear Gary and John,

I hope a sufficient reply to both of your responses is contained in the 
following. On the issue of Habermas's sociocentrism - Gary is correct to 
point out that this forms the overriding framework of his critical social 
analysis. This is why the tensions in his use of Piaget's developmental 
psychology with his discussion of the development of normative structures is 
so interesting. I would still want to argue that in the essay quoted from 
below, there do appear to be traces of an extra-socialised individual 
identity being made available for Habermas's analysis of the connection 
between individual and social learning processes.

To try and briefly respond to John's specific query...I would have to say 
it's a bit of both.  I have reservations about Piaget's decentration  of the 
individual thesis by itself as I do with any standardised accounts of human 
development or being, and I worry about Habermas's uptake of Piaget's model 
EXCEPT as a heuristic or analogical device which I think it is clearly 
intended to be more than . On one level, I find Habermas's transpositioning 
of Piaget's developmental model onto societal evolution reminescent of the 
idea present in early evolutionary theory ( can't remember the name of it 
off the top of my head ! ) that the development of the foetus in utero 
reflected the grander story of the evolution of the human species' descent 
from the cellular level to a that of macro-organism. In this case vice 
versa. Too metabiological for me I suppose ;-)

On Gary's point re-mechanisms of learning; I would argue that this 
terminology sits OK with Habermas's lexicon in either _Legitimation Crisis_ 
or _CES_. Again I believe there is enough textual basis for a reading of 
Habermas's social systems theory in the writings of this period which can 
make explicit an implicit mechanical cyberneticism in his analysis. This 
fades in my opinion by the time of the _TCA_ admittedly, although there are 
traces of it in Habermas's theory of crises and the new social movements as 
a defensive (mechanical) reaction to the colonisation of the lifeworld. 
Habermas seems to try and tread a fine line between Parsons and Luhmann when 
he introduces  systems theory into his work. I sometimes think I can find 
changes of emphasis from the mechanical to the metabiological to the 
genetically structured in the space of just a few pages! The joys of trying 
to read Habermas.

Where I am attempting to 'imagine' something akin to Popper's evolutionary 
epistemology is in the explanatory gap which exists in Habermas's 
under-accounted for transpositioning of "individually acquired learning 
abilities" into "societal learning processes" _CES,1979,121_  Again the 
potential usefulness of memetic theory is suggested to me. If I am reading 
Habermas correctly in this essay _The Development of Normative Structures_ , 
then the advent of modernity has enabled newer ontogenetic potentials of 
will formation, which are carried through from the individual level to the 
societal level.

Social movements are held by Habermas to be one collective vehicle for the 
expression of the newer potentials for individual will-formations which have 
become available in modernity. Yet there are of course a multiplicity of 
interest groups operating and competing in a social system. It becomes a 
question of understanding the logic by which the "latently available 
structures of rationality" that are expressed in a social movement can come 
to be consolidated in a form of "institutional embodiment", especially given 
the multiplicity of interests operating in a social system.

It is to do with this logic of consolidation that I think Popper's and 
others' model of an evolutionary epistemology is worth paying attention to 
as possibly offering an insight into understanding this process of 
consolidation. As Gary has already pointed out, on one level Habermas's 
notion of evolution is Piagetian. However, I think in  between the lines of 
Habermas's essay there is discernible/imaginable (!) an emphasis given to 
the selective role of an environment which is comprised of both lifeworld 
and material moments. This environment finally delineates or indeed provides 
the range of possibilities of what changes to normative structures can be 
effected by the ontogenetic potentials..."the change of normative structures 
REMAINS DEPENDENT on evolutionary challenges posed by unresolved, 
economically conditioned, system problems and on learning processes that are 
a response to them" (emphases mine), even though Habermas allows for a 
circular individual/societal learning process, yet I take his statement that 
"It is only in a derivative sense that societies 'learn'" to grant primacy 
to the ontogenetic over the phylogenetic. This is the trace of 
extra-socialised individual identity maintenance referred to above.

And this brings me to Gary's comments on decisionism and understanding, 
which I probably do not still fully appreciate, to be honest. Interestingly 
enough this also picks up John's query re: my problems with Piaget. I guess 
what bothers me is whether or not there is a stage at which we are 
socialised in some completer sense as individuals, and then can remain as 
such for some relevant period of time on a plateau of Piagetian 
developmental progress or maturation. I am not suggesting that socialisation 
ever stops, and that we somehow grow into Robinsoe Crusoes  or  develop a 
transcendental ego of sorts. But there does appear to be the potential for a 
heightened degree of social self-consciousness - which may or may not simply 
replicate all the problems of the philosophy of subjective consciousness on 
another level - which can preform the individual actor's 'decisive' 
engagement with a communicative action.

Apologies Gary if I am writing at cross purposes to your comments, or if 
these comments do not bear critically on Habermas's conception of the 
process of reaching an understanding!

Regards to all

MattP



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