A pluralistic mode of critical inquiry suggests a different norm of correctness: that criticism must be verified by those participating in the practice and that this demand for practical verification is part of the process of inquiry itself
In the absence of any such general theories, the most fruitful approach to social-scientific knowledge is to bring all the various methods and thoeries into relation to each other.......Critical Theory takes on the task of critically unifying the various theories and their heterogeneous methods and presuppositions
......his own distinctive definition of rationality, one that is epistemic, practical, and intersubjective.......see interpreters as competent and knowledgeable agents (查看原文)
The fundamental form of coordination through language......a practical stance......reading understanding......
COMMUNICATIVE ACTION, which he distinguishes from strategic forms of social action......speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals on the basis of a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit-worthy......succeeds insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behavior (查看原文)
we understand a speech act when we know the kinds of reasons that a speaker could provide in order to convince a hearer that he is entitled in the given circumstances to claim validity for his utterance--in short, when we know what makes it acceptable (查看原文)
fact-stating modes of discourse......claims to moral rightness, ethical goodness or autheticity, personal sincerity, and aesthetic value......a richer social idea--that a claim (statement) merits the addressee's acceptance because it is justified or true in some sense, which can vary according to the sphere of validity and dialogical context (查看原文)
allowing for weaker forms of communicative action (in which not all three types of validity claims are at stake) or strategic action (in which actors understand that everyone is oriented toward individual success) (查看原文)
shared cultural systems of meaning, institutional orders that stablize patterns of action, and personality structures acquired in family, church, neighborhood, and school (查看原文)
As a "virtual participant," the social scientist must take a position on the claims made by those he observes......no disjunction between the attitude of the critic and the interpreter as reflective participants. (查看原文)
McCarthy and others......it is not a necessary condition that interpreters take a position in order to understand reasons, even if we have to rely on our own competence to judge the validity and soundness of reasons and to identify them as reaons at all (查看原文)
.....modern culture has unleashed communicative rationality from its previous cultural and ideological constraints......social norms are no longer presumed to be valid but rather are subjected to critcal reflection (查看原文)
In a sense consistent with the Enlightenment imperative to use one's own reason, the everyday "lifeworld" of social experience has been rationalized, especially in the form of discourses that institutionalize reflective communicative action, as in scientific and democratic institutions (查看原文)
......went hand-in-hand with the growth of systemic mechanisms of coordination already mentioned above, in which the demands on fully communicative consensus are relaxed (查看原文)
Modernization can become pathological, as when money and power "colonize the lifeworld" and displace communicative forms of solidarity and inhibit the reproduction of the lifeworld (e.g. when universities become governed by market strategies) (查看原文)
law comes to invade more and more areas of social life, turning citizens into clients of bureaucracies with what Foucault might call "normalizing" effects (查看原文)
Democratic institutions......supposed to ensure that the law does not take this pathological form but is subject to the deliberation of citizens......see law not as part of the problme, but as part of the solution (查看原文)
insisting upon popular sovereignty as the outcome of the generation of "communicative power" in the public sphere
Radical democracy may no longer be the only means to social transformation, though it is clear that it remains "the unfinished project of modernity": realizing and transforming democracy is still a geniune goal even for complex and globalizing societies (查看原文)
Habermas' emphasis on the limiting effect of complexity on democracy and his rejection of a fully democratic form of sociation continue the basic argument of the necessity of systems integration, even with its costs (查看原文)
