Life-World and Information Technology - a Habermasian Approach Bernd Carsten Stahl, University College Dublin Department of Management Information Systems Belfield, Dublin 4 Ireland Tel: +353 1 716 8340 Fax: +353 1 716 1120 Email:
[email protected] Web site: www.bc-stahl.de Abstract: This paper aims at clarifying the relationship between life-world and information technology. The concept of a life-world, originally found in phenomenology, has been used as a central idea in the theories of Jürgen Habermas. The first part of the paper will give an outline of Habermas' theory of communicative action and what role the idea of a life-world plays therein. It will be shown that the life-world is the basis of discourse, the reason for validity claims and their discussion and that discourses finally aim at producing congruent life-worlds in the participants of discourses. The second part of the paper will then analyse the impact that the use of computers and IT has on life-worlds. It will become clear that these influences are diverse and of different qualities. IT can improve discourses, strengthen validity claims and thereby equalise differing views of truth, morality, and personal authenticity, thus leading to consensus about life-worlds. The use of IT can also have the opposite effect and destroy consensus and negatively affect discourses. Through the course of the paper it should then become clear that the questions discussed, even though of a rather abstract and philosophical nature, have very direct repercussions for our perception of reality and thus for the management of IT.
Introduction One of the central terms coined by Husserl which is fundamental for his idea of phenomenology is that of "life-world". In this paper I want to explore the concept of lifeworld from Habermas' perspective. Habermas uses the term with a meaning that is derived from phenomenology but arguably different from the original concept. However, for Habermas' theory of communicative action the concept of a life-world is of central importance. It is the basis of discourse and can even be interpreted to be the final aim of discourses. In this paper I want to analyse the following question: which impacts do computers and information technology have on this concept of life-world? For that purpose I will concentrate on the impact of discourse and validity claims on the life-world and subsequently analyse the effect of IT on discourse. It will become clear during the course of the discussion that the effects of the use of computers and IT on the life-world are ambiguous. IT can create and expand our individual and collective life-worlds by facilitating discourse
and consensus. On the other hand it can create confusion, change power structures, diffuse ascriptions etc. which leads to diverging life-worlds. Also, computer and IT have different roles to play in life-worlds. They are simultaneously part of life-worlds, facilitators of change, and also creators and destructors of life-worlds. The emphasis of this paper will be on these fundamental philosophical considerations. However, I believe that management's interest in them will be clear. They have eminent implications for most of the managerial dealings with IT. The answer to questions such as: "\what is regarded as real, as right, or as admissible?" will clearly determine decisions in systems design and planning as well as implementation processes and managerial decisions with regard to IT in general.
Life-World in Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action The centre of Habermas' work is his theory of communicative action (1981 a/b). His aim is to develop a theory that can explain how human beings interact. In this theory several interrelated concepts are of importance. A good starting point for the description of Habermas' theory is his concept of rationality. Rationality for Habermas is a disposition of human subjects who are able to speak and act which shows itself in behaviour patterns for which good reasons exist. Communicative action is action which is based on this sort of rationality. There are several conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for communicative action to be possible. There has to be a language in which persons can interact. During communication the participants must be able to refer to a shared world and they can make statements about this world which must be acceptable and / or refutable. Communicative action is no end in itself. Rather, it aims at interpersonal understanding with the purpose of facilitating our social life. This in turn is necessary because humans are social beings that need to communicate in order to survive and prosper. Communicative action is not the only type of action. There is also pragmatic action which is relevant in situations where ends must be met by an optimal allocation of means and there is strategic action, in which other humans are present but are only recognised as opponents in a gametheoretical way. Each type of action is based on a corresponding type of rationality. Communicative action is the highest form of action. It recognises others as equal and aims at the production of consensus by discourses. Before we proceed to the idea of discourses, however, the concept of the life-world can now be introduced. The life-world (Lebenswelt) is a complementary concept of communicative action. Lifeworld is the term that describes the reality in which each of us exists. It is the horizon in which communicative action can take place. The life-world is not a whole that consists of parts. Instead it develops from a network of communicative actions made of social spaces and historical times (Habermas 1998, 107). A problem with the life-world is that it is this horizon in which the actors are always moving (Gripp 1984, 93) but like a real horizon it is not subject to scrutiny. Whenever the life-world becomes the subject of direct attention it vanishes. Habermas calls it the "strange thing that disintegrates and disappears before our eyes" (Habermas 1985, 186) as soon as we want to look at it piece by piece. All of our social and communicative action must take place in the life-world, which makes the life-world the transcendental place where humans, where speaker and listener meet. Transcendental in this sense means that the life-world is the condition of the possibility of communication. Every act of communication transports different types of claims. Corresponding to the three possible functions of speech (that Habermas adopts from Austin), Habermas supposes that there are three types of speech acts and three types of validity claims: There are claims of (objective) truth, (normative) rightness, and veracity / authenticity. These three claims 37
accompany every possible statement or proposition. Whenever someone says something the assumption is that it is true, right, and truthful. All of these claims can be doubted and whenever a validity claim is not universally recognised there can be a discourse with the aim of clarifying the claim. The aim of the discourse is to achieve a consensus which is based on the intersubjective recognition of validity claims (Habermas 1981a, 37). The individual lifeworld is the background of such discourses. At the same time it is also the reason for differing validity claims. Discourses about different validity claims take their start in the life-world, must refer to a shared life-world, and end by changing and equalising life-worlds. One can see that life-world, rationality, validity claims, and discourse are closely related and mutually dependent. In order to show how IT affects the life-world there are two more aspects worth mentioning: First, the term "life-world" is also used as the opposite of another term, of "system". While life-world refers to communicative action, system refers to systemic action, meaning action in which there is no mutual recognition of humans with the purpose of finding consensus which should lead to successful social action. Systemic action is another way of coordinating human life but it is a way in which the individual is of no importance. Two of Habermas' examples for systemic action are markets and the legal system. Both function without reference to individuals. Second, it is necessary to say a few words about discourses. Discourses are not simple discussions but they follow certain patterns, they aim at resembling the ideal speech situation as closely as possible. In an interview Habermas described the ideal discourse as follows: “We endeavour to ensure that (a) all voices in any way relevant can get a hearing, and that (b) the best arguments we have in our present state of knowledge are brought to bear, and that (c) disagreement or agreement on the part of the participants follows only from the force of the better argument and no other force” (quoted in Ess 1996, 216). Real discourses can only fulfil their purpose and produce universally acceptable consensus in the measure that they live up to this ideal. Let me briefly recapitulate the outlines of Habermas' theory in order to proceed to the impact that IT has on his idea of life-world. Everybody lives in the horizon of their individual life-world, which is acquired by socialisation. Human beings interact on the basis of these life-worlds. However, in some cases the life-worlds do not converge and therefore the implicit validity claims of communication diverge and become unacceptable. If this is the case the differences between validity claims can be overcome by discourses in which the force of the better argument will re-establish a consensus concerning the validity claims. This consensus then will become implicit knowledge part of the life-world. We now have the necessary components of a theory to analyse the impact of computers on the life-world.
The Impact of IT on the Life-World The argument in this section will be based on the importance of validity claims for the establishment of the life-world and demonstrate that computers and IT can change validity claims and their acceptability in different ways. In order to follow this argument it seems useful to say a little more about the different sorts of validity claims.
Types of Validity Claims Corresponding to the three functions of speech acts there are three types of validity claims: the claims for truth, normative rightness and veracity or authenticity. This means that every proposition simultaneously claims to be true, to be normatively adequate and that the speaker 38
is authentic. In real speech acts these three types of claims are interwoven and mutually dependent (Ulrich, W. 2001). However, the analytical distinction helps identifying the problems each of them produces.1 The claim for truth is understood as universal because we believe that true propositions deserve agreement independent of which language it is made in (Habermas 1981a, 92f). However, since the claim for truth can be doubted and subjected to discourses this universal property of truth does not mean that there is an absolute reality which leads to true statements according to a correspondence theory of truth. In Habermas' theory truth is understood as the consensus which can be found in the ideal discourse (Ilting 1994, 69). Real discourses can only approximate such an ideal and therefore our truths are always provisional. The next claim is that for rightness. Habermas develops a cognitivist ethics, which means that he believes that one can make true or false statements about ethical facts or relationships. Even though he is aware that this assumption is highly contentious in philosophical ethics he argues that in every-day situations nobody would discuss normative problems if they did not think that a consensus were possible (Habermas 1981a, 39). The method of settling differences in opinions concerning norms or ethics is the same as that for truth, it is discourse. Again, his theory of communicative action and its normative result, discourse ethics, do not offer material advice but rely exclusively on the formal mechanism of discourses for the establishment of valid claims. In ethics that means this means that those norms are valid which can be agreed to by everybody affected when participating in a rational discourse (Habermas 1998, 138).2 Finally, there is the claim for veracity or authenticity of the speaker. This, too, can be subject of discourses but the problem is that the validity cannot be proven. As Ulrich (2001) points out, the validity of this claim can only be substantiated through consistent behaviour. The next question, now that the types of validity claims are clear is how they are affected by the use of IT and how this can affect our life-worlds.
IT, Validity Claims, and Life-World The use of IT can affect our life-worlds in many different ways. A first example can be the change of reality and thus of truth introduced by IT has. On a basic level this means that IT is already part of the life-worlds of most Westerners. This affects what we believe to be right and real and it furthermore affects the general assumptions that can be made in a discourse. There are words and concepts that seem completely normal and understandable to us such as "virtual reality" or "broadband" which allow discourses about realities and validity claims that simply would not have made any sense just a few decades ago. Of course this is true not only for information technology but for all sorts of society-wide developments. The use of information technology affects truth claims and therefore the objective part of our life-world in many other aspects. We collectively accept socially constructed facts that were designed specifically with regards to information technology. An example here would be the idea of intellectual property in data or programs. A large part of the normative problems resulting from information technology are in some way or other connected to the topic of intellectual property. This is also a good example for the fact that the different validity claims
1
Some authors identify an additional fourth validity claim, that of understandability. However, as far as I see, for Habermas understandability is implied in the other claims. 2 This basis of discourse ethics is understood as a reformulation of Kant's ethics which overcomes the Kantian danger of solipsism in ethics.
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tend to appear together. Postulating the existence of intellectual property in programs will lead to normative claims with regard to this sort of property and also to claims of authenticity by users or abusers. The epistemological bases of truth claims also have another feedback to normative claims. As van den Hoeven (2000, 152) points out, in a modern knowledge society (he refers to the knowledge enterprise but the thought can be extended) knowledge means reliance on others. Epistemology is thus shown to depend on ethics and it is highly unclear which role technology can play in ethics. If knowledge is based on trust in others, does that mean that one must trust computers in the knowledge society, and if so, what does it mean to trust a computer? Another way in which the use of information technology affects claims to truth and thus reality is by its epistemological assumptions. Information technology is not only a means for the transmission and processing of data, it is also a source of information and truth. This means that in our society we tend to take what computers do and produce for granted and we rarely doubt the reliability of computer information. Postman (1992, 115) goes so far as to say that in our technopoly the sentence "the computer has determined …" is roughly equivalent to the traditional expression: "it is God's will…". Computers also influence our epistemology by being used as instructional tools. E-teaching and e-learning are being used increasingly all over the world, or at least in the industrialised world. It is not really clear which consequences this will have in the long run. One consequence to be expected, however, is going to be the increased belief in the correctness of information generated by information technology. This can lead to problems with regard to our collective life-worlds because computer information is partial. Computers work using models which have been programmed by human beings. In this sense computers are similar to humans themselves because we, too, must use models of reality as bases of our action. The potential problem is that computer models are of a different nature from the models that human brains construct. Therefore some parts of our traditional realities will be systematically neglected. It is clear that computers can only deal with information that can be digitised and so far this emphasises texts. In the age of multimedia pictures, sounds, and motion can also be transmitted. Other aspects of human reality such as smell, touch but also emotions do not find an adequate space in these systems. From the point of view of phenomenology which emphasises the being in the world of humans this is clearly a problem. Heidegger's Dasein, the being in the world and being towards death does not have a place in the objectivist reality of information technology. The use of information technology as a medium for the transportation of validity claims limits the sorts and contents of claims in other ways as well, leading to a changing life-world in the process. This can be demonstrated by looking at the two most important forms of communication in today's IT environment, email and the Internet. Email is an interesting form of exchanging ideas because it lies in between traditional media. In some respects email allows communication as quickly and with as little complication as a telephone call. On the other hand it is still a form of written communication and therefore can be likened to letters. Being in between these two traditional media email communication produces the problem of leaving open to which sorts of rules and conventions one should adhere. It is clear that emails are rarely written with the same amount of care and foresight as letters but they can easily be stored and reproduced. Another interesting observation about email from the point of view of discourse theory is that they allow a new sort of discourse, especially a much quicker exchange of ideas and arguments about certain validity claims (cf. Kolb, D 1996). Academic listservs are good examples for this. The importance of a short response time becomes particularly clear when one thinks of the traditional alternatives, of academic publications in journals where the exchange of ideas can take years. The Internet offers another example of a technology which affects our perception of reality by changing the way we exchange validity claims. The Internet, and especially the World 40
Wide Web with its reliance on hyperlinks and hypertext allow a different way of dealing with thoughts. Few people use hypertext the same way they would use an article or a book. Thoughts are generally shorter, maybe more to the point, and links allow the changing from one text by one author to another text by another author in mid-sentence. Drawing on other authors Ess (1996, 11) observes that "the hypertextual, ephemeral, and ludic qualities of CMC [Computer Mediated Communication, BCS] will directly undermine especially one form of philosophical discourse and argument—namely, the carefully crafted, largely linear accumulations of argument and scholarship closely associated with literacy and print culture. Such discourse is likely to disappear, replaced by the playful and the evanescent." What effect this will have on discourses and thereby on validity claims and finally on our life-worlds is not easy to predict. However, it stands to reason that these changes in communicational patterns will not go without changing our world. Another potentially detrimental effects of the use of IT on discourses is that technological means tend to formalise information in a way that does not always conform to the human perception. Lyytinen and Hirschheim (1988, 24) emphasise this fact and point out that communication via information systems for this reason does not conform to the basic rules of discourse. They believe that the chance to express opinions through argumentation is diminished because of the formal nature of these systems. Even though this argument was aimed mostly at information systems as used in a business environment and technology has advanced since, the basic argument is still compelling. Information systems are also often designed against discursive principles in that they aim not at communication but at action. That means that the information derived from IT, especially in technical and business environments, is not meant to be discussed but to be acted upon. This is so despite the fact that there are frequently questionable assumptions which lie at the base of these systems but that cannot be discussed later on. In terms of Ulrich one could say that "discourse gets frozen in objectified form" (Ulrich, W. 2001, 59). Another obstacle to discourses using new media is that the amount of information that we all have access to today far exceeds our capacity of dealing with it. The much-discussed information overload can lead to resignation and to a lack of interest in the face of the unmanageable multitude of competing validity claims. On the other hand new technologies, especially the Internet also offer a host of new possibilities for discourses. Everybody with access to the Internet has the chance to access new sources of information, to virtually meet new people, develop new interests, form new groups etc. In terms of ilfe-world this means that our individual life-worlds become less and less dependent on our immediate surrounding. At the same time the content of our life-worlds increasingly becomes a subject of our own and conscious decisions. I can decide whether I want to spend my time dealing with traditional and local issues or whether I want to become active as a defender of the rain forest or of human rights in China. The new richness of individual life-worlds allows new discourses that transcend traditional geographical borders. At the same time it also fragments the basis for traditional discourses. In a modern multiethnic multi-cultural society the shared aspects of life-worlds which are necessary as a starting point of discourses become less. While this development may lead to problems with practical discourses at the same time it is also a reason for more discourses. Returning to the original intention of the theory of communicative action, to the coordination of mutually beneficial action, one can state that the explicit coordination is gaining in importance because of a decreasing correspondence of existing life-worlds. The positive view of this is sometimes reflected in texts concerning the political aspect of IT. The impact of the Internet on democracy is depicted as producing the global village in which every inhabitant has the chance to influence policy and thus develops a new interest in political institutions. Another question that might be of interest with regards to life-world and IT is whether there is such a thing as a life-world of a computer. It can be argued that computers serve not 41
only as media of communication but that they also produce communication of their own. If this is correct then it should follow that computer communication also contains validity claims and that they must have a life-world. While this seems a preposterous notion when looking at the sort of computers used today it is an interesting question whether this is possible in principle or whether there are fundamental reasons excluding computers or information systems from having relevant life-worlds. However, this question is not urgent at the moment and I will therefore return to one last aspect of IT and life-world, to the question of systemic action. As mentioned earlier, Habermas sees systemic action as the opposite of communicative action. Both sorts of action aim at interpersonal coordination. Where communicative action is based on the impartial exchange of ideas and arguments, systemic action is based on anonymous rules. A strong argument can be made that modern societies generally move away from communicative action towards systemic action. However, as Habermas points out the systems themselves require legitimacy if they are to work and that can only be acquired in communicative action. He demonstrates the difficulties of this point in his excellent analysis of legal and moral rules in Faktizität und Geltung (1998). Computers and information technology generally seem to be more part of a systemic world than of a communicative world. The most frequently discussed applications of IT today are open for both sorts of action but they seem to generally develop in the direction of systemic action. A proof of this is that there is far less discussion about how ideas can be exchanged on the Internet than how commerce, a typical example of systemic action, can be furthered.
The Role of Management So far in this paper I tried to demonstrate that the use of information technology impacts on our individual and collective life-worlds. It was shown that IT is increasingly part of our lifeworlds and that at the same time our life-worlds influence the design and use of IT. The use of IT for the purpose of communication influences our life-worlds and thereby also our realities. While this may be of interest to philosophers, many managers and practically oriented academics might ask what the point of these ideas is. Apart from standard answers to this sort of question which might stress that every theory is automatically practical because it can change our understanding of the world, this relationship between IT and life-world can have immediate practical impacts. On the one hand all sorts of practical managerial problems are based on the managers' or employees' life-world. In order to make good decisions one should consider this fact and thereby move away from an objectivist view of the world. On the other hand there are many problems where more than one aspect of the life-world play a role and where more than one validity claim is challenged at a time. This refers to most normative and ethical problems that management may have to deal with. Ethical questions are rarely of an exclusively normative nature and usually refer to factual problems at the same time. The Habermasian concept of life-world allows the simultaneous discussion of these different aspects and therefore a much more adequate description of ethical problems. This leads us to the area of computer ethics, information ethics, and business ethics, where it now becomes clear that information technology plays more than just one simple role. Computers not only pose ethical problems, they also affect the life-world which is the basis for the evaluation of these problems. At the same time the use of IT in communication can have repercussions on the life-world of the affected parties, on the ethical problem, and the feedback between the two. While this entire theory does not lend itself to instrumentalisation or to strategic use by management it can help in clarifying situations and in showing directions concerning potential solutions. 42
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