Three Interpretations of Habermas' Theory of Truth

Strydom, ‘Three Interpretations of Truth’, Working Paper (version 1) extracted from Workbook IX, Entries 22-26, pp. 41-62, 15.08.2018

Three Interpretations of Habermas’ Theory of Truth: From the Perspective of Cognitive Sociocultural Theory Piet Strydom School of Sociology and Philosophy University College Cork Ireland Abstract Inspired by cognitive sociocultural theory, these reflections are devoted to a critical comparison of what is regarded as a more adequate interpretation of Habermas’ theory of truth as a three-moment theory with two different interpretations which are both based on his twofold conception of ‘Janus-faced truth’. Keywords Cognitive structures, Habermas, immanent transcendence, theory of action, theory of truth

Three interpretations of Habermas’ late theory of truth1 contrast rather sharply due to the distinct standpoints from which the authors start in order to make sense of it. The three referenced here are Steven Levine’s pragmatist interpretation, Alex Seemann’s realist interpretation, which are both based on Habermas’ twofold conception of the ‘Janus-faced concept of truth’, and my response to them couched in the terms of my understanding of cognitive sociocultural theory. I Two versions of the Janus-faced theory Steven Levine (2010) adopts a pragmatist perspective in order to make sense of Habermas’ new pragmatic theory of truth which he approaches in terms of the latter’s idea of ‘Janus-faced’ truth. Habermas himself circumscribes it as follows: ‘What is at issue in the lifeworld is the pragmatic role of a Janus-faced notion of truth that mediates between behavioural certainty and discursively justified assertibility’ (2002: 363); thus: ‘The stratification of the lifeworld into action and discourse sheds light on the different roles played by the concept of truth in the two domains’ (2003: 38). Proceeding from this twofold concept, Levine emphasises the nonepistemic action-based lifeworld concept of truth that is unquestioningly taken-for-granted and naïvely held-to-be-true in everyday practices. Following a certain set of Habermas’ (e.g. 2002: 370; 2003: 254) suggestions, he regards this lifeworld pole, the action-based face of the twofold Janus-faced concept of truth, as implicitly containing an unconditional universal concept of truth which plays a decisive, if somewhat ambivalently presented, role in Habermas’ account. Alex Seemann (2004), likewise accepting the Janus-faced idea, in contrast emphasises the opposite pole of the twofold concept. Adopting a realist perspective, he accordingly focuses on the epistemic discursive concept of truth that is at stake in processes of justification which arise once the lifeworld concept of truth proves no longer to be viable in a particular situation. Following yet another set of Habermas’ (e.g. 2003: 38, 101) suggestions, he also registers the presence of an unconditional universalistic concept of truth in Habermas’ theory, but differently from Levine takes it as being combined with the discourse pole, the argumentation-based face of the twofold Janus concept of truth. His absorption in unfolding his realist concern, however, leads him to leave this unconditional universalistic concept by the wayside. That these two authors take Habermas’ Janus-faced concept of truth at face value rather than pursuing his theory of truth more deeply may be explicable by their respective aims to criticise some selected aspect of Habermas’ account. Levine’s intention is to obtain an adequate understanding of Habermas’ new pragmatic theory of truth in order to argue that it suffers from the ‘yoking of truth to a concept of objectivity that is not consistent 1


with the larger pragmatic transformation of his thought’ (2010: 677). Although acknowledging Habermas’ shift from the Kantian concern with strong transcendental ‘a priori conditions’ to a Peircean ‘semiotic theory of mind’ based on the human ‘capacity to use signs’ (2010: 679) which underpins his formalpragmatic position, he exploits neither this theory of mind nor the formal-pragmatic framework to gain a more comprehensive grasp of Habermas’ theory of truth. But, as argued below, even if he spelled out what his acceptance of Habermas’ formal-pragmatics entails, the formal-pragmatic position in itself does not go far enough fully to cover the latter’s theory of truth. Although Seemann starts from and keeps in view Habermas’ concept of the twofold Janus-faced concept of truth, his intention is to probe the discursive justificatory concept of truth, particularly the truth predicate ‘idealized justified acceptability’, with a view to criticising Habermas’ treatment of realism at that particular juncture. While he interestingly finds that this conception is imprecise in that Habermas fails to distinguish between a ‘logical...truth predicate’ and an ‘epistemic…truth criterion’ (2004: 507-8), his main contention is that Habermas’ (2002: 370) explicit suspension of realism in discursive justification after having laboured on a pragmatic theory specifically to incorporate it in his theory of truth fractures his conception of idealised justified acceptability. A careful analysis of this conception and drawing of the logical consequences convince Seemann that there is no ground for rejecting realism; rather, the truth predicate idealised justified acceptability should be conceived in ‘a realist way’ (2004: 512). In parallel, he is indeed fully aware of the necessity of a justification-transcendent ‘universalistic concept of truth’ (506) and of Habermas’ (2002: 364; 2003: 38; 2003: 40) simultaneous proposal to relate it to this truth predicate while avoiding to conflate the two, but he allows his focus on the question of realism, conditioned as it is by the Janus-faced notion, to push it to the margins. In the figure below, the respective positions of Levine and Seemann based on the Janus-faced concept of truth are graphically put in place by being included in the context of the three-moment theory of truth introduced in the next section. Figure 1: Interpretations in the framework of the three-moment theory of truth _________________________________________________________________________ LIFEWORLD DISCOURSE COGNITIVE ORDER2 Platonic Hybrid Kantian detranscendentalised _________________________________________________________________________ Strydom IMMANENT Levine

TRANSCENDENT Seemann

context-immanent nonepistemic naïve lifeworld concept

context-immanent context-transcendent epistemic unconditional universalistic discursive validity concept concept + implicitly contains combines with unconditional unconditional universalistic universalistic concept concept _________________________________________________________________________

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II The three-moment theory In contrast to Levine’s pragmatist perspective and Seemann’s realist one, I operate with an immanenttranscendence perspective underpinned by a cognitive-theoretical understanding. Rather than keeping to Habermas’ notion of a twofold Janus-faced concept, accordingly, I follow instead his suggestion of a threefold theory of idealisation and thus of truth. This theory embraces, first, a ‘Platonic’ lifeworld moment, second a moment of projection of ‘Kantian totalities’ understood in a detranscendentalised sense representing the unconditional universalistic validity concept of truth and, finally, an intermediate ‘hybrid’ discursive moment that links the action-based and the unconditional universalistic concepts in processes of discursive justification (Habermas 2003: 99-100) to yield a discursive concept of truth. This three-moment conception entails that the unconditional universal concept of truth is regarded as a distinct component of the theory of truth that disallows reduction either to the lifeworld concept or to the discursive concept of truth: ‘Truth may be assimilated neither to behavioural certainty nor to justified assertibility’ (Habermas 2002: 364). As context-transcendent or justification-transcendent, it occupies a level beyond the immanent where the action-based and the discourse-based concepts are located: ‘a notion of truth that transcends justification although it is always already operatively effective in the realm of action (Habermas 2002: 372). Habermas reinforces the distinctness of this concept of truth by offering a variety of descriptions of it, some of which remain ambiguous since they seems to be attributed also to the lifeworld concept. These descriptions include: ‘context-independent’ (2002: 360, 371; 2003: 254), ‘unconditional’ (2002: 364, 370; 2003: 39), universalistic in the sense of ‘to be found in all cultures’ (2002: 367), ‘transcendent’ (2003: 3940), ‘transcend[ing] the justificatory process’ (2002: 366, 372), ‘absolutely valid’ (2003: 102) and ‘obviously no success concept’ (2003: 37) but rather ‘a concept of validity’ (2003: 227). Strictly speaking, this concept and it alone is worthy of being emphatically called truth, in contrast to the naïvely held ‘”truths”’ of the lifeword (Habermas 2002: 364; 2003: 253) and the discursive one that, due to its in principle ‘fallibility’, at best can only be called ‘the truth predicate’ used in a ‘cautionary’ manner (Habermas 2002: 358; 2003: 38 in italics) – which means that it is actually tantamount to contextimmanent veridicality or veridicity in distinction to context-transcendent truth. Throughout the elaborations of his late theory of truth, then, Habermas (e.g. 2003: 40; 2002: 372) unmistakably insists that there is a ‘difference’ or ‘gap [that] cannot be bridged’ between truth in its unconditional universal sense and what is at stake in and results from discursive justification, thus occluding the possibility of ever assimilating the former to the latter. III Cognitive coda It should be obvious that the three-moment theory of truth provides the overall framework within which the Janus-faced concept finds its place in explicating only a partial set of relations encapsulated by the whole which itself must be understood as having mutually implicated immanent and transcendent levels. One way of making clear this comprehensive theory of truth is to ask what it is that circulates in what Habermas conceives as the ‘circular process’ (2003: 363) from action via discourse back to action. Which properties circulating in this process allow the actors’, participants’ and their audiences’ understanding of the decisive moments in its unfolding: that is, understanding that a taken-for-granted belief or action has failed, that a truth claim has become problematised and consequently is no longer accepted by others, that argumentation and the mobilisation of reasons are required, that a justificatory discourse is in train, that the vindication of a truth claim has to be acknowledged, that the vindicated claim has been agreed upon, that a discursively mediated learning experience has occurred, that a ‘shift in perspective’ (Habermas 2002: 369) is unavoidable or liberating, and finally that such learning and perspectival shift lead back to the previously assumed background understanding so that the disputed truth claim can now be deproblematised, allowing the actors to return to their recuperated everyday practices and to engage 3


in the coordination of their actions?3 The clarification of these properties would clearly serve to dispel any ambivalence in Habermas’ account of the relations among the three distinct concepts of ‘truth’ which inadvertently misdirects attention to the twofold Janus-faced concept: lifeworld ‘truths’, the carefully used discursive concept of ‘truth’ and, finally, the unconditional universalistic validity concept of truth. This perturbing quality is present in a number of his formulations that leave opaque not only the sense in which the lifeworld concept is supposed to ‘provide[] a justification-transcending point of reference…guarantee[ing]…the difference between truth and rational acceptability’ (2003: 39-40), but also the exact relation between epistemic discursive truth and the universalistic validity concept of truth invoked by such verbs as ‘guid[ing]’, ‘orient[ing]’, ‘reflect[ing]’, ‘regulat[ing]’ and ‘operat[ing]’ as a ‘concept of validity’ rather than as a regulative (2002: 372; 2003: 93, 102, 91 and 227) – all of which are in dire need of explication. The properties in question here must obviously be ones that are of such a nature that they, while being embedded in multiple relevant substrates, must all at least in principle be understandable not only to academic specialists, but also to lifeworld actors, discourse participants and their audiences. Properties possessing these characteristics of embeddedness and structurally secured intelligibility are by definition of a cognitive nature. Thus, what goes round in the circular process on which Habermas bases his account are cognitive properties that can be specified with reference to their respective substrates. A very brief circumscription of these is all that can be ventured in the present context (see Strydom 2017, 2018). As just intimated, the circuit of cognitive properties is readily explicable in terms of the model Habermas (2002: 363; 2003: 39-40) draws from the theory of action for the presentation of his theory of truth. The picture he paints is that of the circular process that starts with the breakdown of action or communication and the unavoidable problematisation of the implicated validity claim, passes through competitive yet procedurally regulated discursive justification, only to return changed and enhanced again to lifeworld engagement once the claim has been deproblematised and the concomitant justification has been rationally accepted. This process must obviously be borne by a series of substrates of a psycho-socio-cultural kind such as the human mind, personality structures, the action and practice competences of actors manifested in their actor frames, discursive and justification processes spearheaded by competing protagonists who frame the situation and issue involved, cultural models recursively regulating all the foregoing, and finally procedural communicative presuppositions. Note well, however, the latter themselves in turn presuppose metacultural structures that are not sufficiently acknowledged by Habermas although they are implied by the third moment of his theory of truth.4 Each one of these underpinning substrates has at its core intelligible cognitive components that render the overall process possible. Following the processual sequence, these properties respectively stretch from the micro, via the meso and macro to the meta-macro. Lacking the necessary cognitive wherewithal – that is, lacking the capacity for cognition and the competences to engage in speech, action, practices, discourse and justification processes, lacking both substantive symbolic semantic-pragmatic cultural models and abstract cognitive cultural models recursively exercising regulation at various levels, lacking pragmatic procedurally effective presuppositions, and finally lacking the metacultural cognitive order constitutive of the human sociocultural form of life – lacking any or all of these, there simply would be no possibility whatsoever for the process to come off the ground, not to mention taking off and unfolding. The inherent limitations of the action model and hence of Habermas’ account become apparent, as already intimated, as soon as one considers that it is confined to a theoretically envisaged action situation and, due to this situational focus which is strengthened by the notion of its procedural organisation, unavoidably screens out a crucial part of the structures giving form to the situation and whatever transpires within its bounds. This crucial dimension contains the ultimate transcendent metacultural cognitive structures that incursively structure the sociocultural world and indexes all its content – what I proposed to call ‘the cognitive order of society’. This sociocultural genomenology, as it were, have structuring and indexing implications for the whole series of cascading cognitive structures progressively lower down the scale immanent to the situation – including: from abstract cognitive cultural models, such as Habermas’ ‘idealised justification assertibility’ which among others5 regulates 4


justificatory discourse in general; via lower level substantive cultural models such as those guiding social practices, e.g. the presentation and deciding of a hypothesis in physics or in environmental science according to specific scientific and disciplinary criteria; to the abductive perspectives or frames adopted by actors and discourse participants and their undergirding personality structures. Habermas (2003: 99-100; 1987: 120) indeed approaches the crucial metacultural cognitive dimension through the notion of the ‘projection’ or ‘idealisation’ of ‘Kantian totalities’ in the detranscendentalised form of ‘formal-pragmatic worlds’ and their complementary concepts, including truth corresponding to the objective world. Such projection or idealisation is undertaken from within the lifeworld situation conceived in terms of the action-theoretical model, however, and consequently the dimension concerned is effectively treated, in a manner reminiscent of ethnomethodology, as composed of fleeting structures that get temporarily instantiated under the prevailing situational conditions. This approach is of course entirely acceptable as long as one proceeds from situational assumptions inspired by the theory of action, but it is by no means sufficient from a broader theoretical perspective. Besides Habermas’ pragmatic procedural communicative presuppositions falling short of the structural dimension represented by the cognitive order, the latter outstrips also the formal-pragmatic worlds, lying further beyond and cutting deeper than them. Habermas did have an opportunity to develop a more structurally convincing version of his theory of truth, one that would have accounted specifically for the possibility of the unconditional universalistic validity concept of truth, but he did not avail of it. This opportunity arose when he introduced the extremely important idea of ‘weak naturalism’ (2003: 27-8). It effectively entails the recognition of the natural-sociocultural co-evolutionary origin of ‘the structures that form the transcendental conditions of possibility’ of the human sociocultural form of life, without surrendering, despite having brought Kant’s other-worldly idea of the transcendental down to earth by confining it to the human world, ‘the transcendental difference between the world and what is innerworldly’ (2003: 27). It should be noted that the detranscendentalised transcendental structures Habermas has in mind are nothing less and nothing more than cognitive structures, intelligible structures that are in principle kept cognitively available by and for competent human beings who populate the sociocultural form of life and are engaged in reproducing culture-cum-metaculture. This transcendental or metacultural dimension harbours the very structures that make up the cognitive order of society of which the validity concept of truth forms a part. Furthermore, it should be noted that the difference between whatever belongs to the world and the world as such coincides not only with the concept of immanent-transcendence, but also with what may be called the cognitive metaproblematic – that something belonging to the world, a cognitively competent human being, is through cognition able to take a distance from the world, to established any of a variety of possible relations to the world according to corresponding communicatively mediated intersubjectively common cognitive form principles, to adopt a cognitive framing perspective on the world and to act upon the world within the structural constraints laid down by the form principles of the metacultural cognitive order and the lower level cultural models incursively structured by it. As for the unconditional universalistic validity concept of truth, it is but one of those transcendent cognitive order form principles possessing incursive structuring and indexing force relative to immanent structures and dynamics. As far as the origin of the transcendental structures making up the cognitive order of society is concerned, finally, the weak naturalistic perspective holds the key. An explanation of this origin can be provided in terms of the processes of natural-cum-sociocultural co-evolution and sociocultural evolution. The particular structures that became stabilised in the wake of these evolutionary processes at the secondary level were generated at the primary level by natural historical events and by human historical actions and relations respectively (see Figure 2 below). On the one hand, natural evolution in the form of the enlargement of the brain (encephalisation) and the formation of mind (acquisition of the prefrontal cortex and working memory) in an increasingly complex social environment culminated between 60,00030,000 years ago in the stabilisation of the modular cognitively fluid brain-mind characteristic of 5


contemporary humans (Mithen 1998; Sperber 2000; Wynn and Coolidge 2011; Stringer 2012; Wilson 2012). Intricately intertwined with this socially conditioned natural process, sociocultural evolution on the other hand selected and led to the stabilisation of metacultural structures corresponding to the major cognitive domains of the modular cognitively fluid brain-mind and more or less explicitly available in all sociocultural contexts. It is here in the metacultural complement that the cognitive order of the human sociocultural form of life is to be found. Figure 2: Origin of the Cognitive Order second-level processes of evolutionary structure formation & stabilisation: (i) natural-sociocultural co-evolution

modular cognitively fluid brain-mind COGNITIVE ORDER: conceptual conditions of sociocultural form of life, including truth

(ii) sociocultural evolution

primary processes of natural history & human historical-constructive activities Important to keep in mind is that, although the origination of the transcendent cognitive order must first be traced back to natural-cum-sociocultural co-evolution, this complex of socially effective metacultural structures that humans cognitively keep virtually available lies well beyond nature and, containing potentials for a world humans are yet to construct and inhabit, also beyond the historical action- and interaction-based immanent social reality. While the validity concept of truth forming part of this complex can only be activated and mobilised from within specific social situations and become structurally effective only at that immanent level, it is in principle always already available to competent human beings prior to and beyond any and every situation,6 irrespective of whether a lifeworld action situation with its naively held ‘truths’ or a discursive justificatory situation in search of and finding a fallible ‘truth’. Habermas’ comprehensive theory of truth becomes intelligible only once this decisive insight takes hold.

Notes 1 The sources of Habermas’ late theory of truth were published towards the end of the 1990s, available in English since 2002 and 2003. 2 The concept of ‘the cognitive order’ of the human sociocultural form of life (e.g. Strydom 2015) is taken up in the final section below. 3 ‘Understanding’ (Verständigung) and the related ‘agreement’ (Einverständnis) enabling the ‘coordination of action’ are of course central to Habermas’ (1979: 24, 1987: 120) formal-pragmatics and theory of communicative action, but the question of the nature of the properties making possible the whole process carrying these achievements needs to be posed. In founding his characteristic position, Habermas (1979: 24) indeed displaced the ‘epistemological model of the constitution of experience’ by ‘the model of deep and surface structure’ for the purpose of ‘the analysis of general presuppositions of communication’. However, by confining this analysis to the formal-pragmatic framework, notwithstanding the necessity and importance of the latter, the structural inquiry was prevented from reaching and giving an explication of the most entrenched layer of deep structure. 6


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To account for this gap in Habermas’ presentation of his theory of truth would require a detailed analysis of his concept of the lifeworld which cannot be offered here (for some initial indications see Strydom 2015). Suffice it to say that the source of the problem is to be found in his insufficiently analysed notion of the ‘broad background of intersubjectively shared convictions constitute[ing] the rails along which behavioural certainties run’ (2002: 363; also 1987: 135 and 2003: 39) as well as, it should be added, also the unfolding of discursive processes. Earlier, Habermas (1987: 136, 124, 134, 125) indeed presented the lifeworld as ‘a cognitive reference system’ and language and culture as having ‘a certain transcendental status’ allowing them to effectively operate as deep-seated ‘resources’ that are ‘constitutive for the lifeworld itself’, but this cognitive dimension, which the concept of the cognitive order seeks to salvage, remains undeveloped in his writings. Moreover, while Habermas does insist on observing not just the ‘symbolic’ but also the ‘material’ dimension of the lifeworld, he nowhere extends this demand by relating his own weak naturalistic perspective to the concept of the lifeworld – on which see below. 5 Other regulative ideas Habermas mentions throughout the presentation of his theory of truth include: discursive redeemability, orientation to truth, ideal ascertaining of truth, rational/ideal warranted/justified acceptability. All these ideas effectively are abstract cognitive cultural models that operate in actual discursive processes regarding truth claims (Strydom 2017). Seemann’s (2004: 508) insistence that the logical truth predicate ‘idealized justified acceptability’ is of a ‘general’ nature, in distinction to the specific epistemic ‘truth criterion’, corresponds to this cognitive-cultural interpretation. 6 As regards the expression ‘in principle always already available…prior to and beyond’, a vital distinction between two distinct senses of the past has to be observed here: first, remembered experiences and events which bear directly on a social or collective actor’s being in the present; and, second, the conceptual conditions underpinning the human social form of life which had been historically accumulated and stabilised through sociocultural evolution and, in a feedback loop, have an incursive structuring effect on the present but are not necessarily to the forefront of the mind or explicitly remembered. Peirce (1992), for example, already recognised the importance of this distinction. More generally, it accords with the left-Hegelian principle of practically available accumulated rational potential. References Habermas, Jürgen (1979) ‘What is Universal Pragmatics?’, in J. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society. London: Heinemann, pp. 1-68. Habermas, Jürgen (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1999) Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen (2002 [1998]) ‘Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn’, in Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication. (Edited by Maeve Cooke). Cambridge: Polity, pp. 343-82. Habermas, Jürgen (2003 [1999]) Truth and Justification. Cambridge: Polity. Levine, Steven (2010) ‘Habermas, Kantian Pragmatism, and Truth’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 36(6): 677-95. Mithen, Steven (1998) The Prehistory of the Mind. London: Phoenix. Peirce, Charles S. (1992) ‘The Law of Mind’, in C. S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 1. (Edited by N. Houser and C. Kloesel). Bloomington: Indiana University Press., pp. 312-33. Seemann, Alex (2004) ‘Lifeworld, Discourse, and Realism: On Habermas’ Theory of Truth’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 30(4): 503-14. Sperber, Dan (2000) ‘Metarepresentation in Evolutionary Perspective’, in D. Sperber (ed.) Metarepresentation: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 117-37. Stringer, Chris (2012) The Origin of Our Species. London: Penguin. Strydom, Piet (2015) ‘The Latent Cognitive Sociology in Habermas: Extrapolated from Between Facts and Norms’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 41(3): 273-91.

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Strydom, Piet (2017) ‘Normative Rightness – Can an Achievement Concept take the place of a Validity Concept? Reflections on Habermas’ Distinction between Truth and Rightness’, Working Paper Version 1, available at: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Piet_Strydom, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.233373.20960. Strydom, Piet (2018) ‘The Problem of Limit Concepts in Habermas: Toward a Cognitive Approach to the Cultural Embodiment of Reason’, Philosophical Inquiry 42(1-2): 168-89. Wilson, Edward O. (2012) The Social Conquest of Earth. New York and London: Liveright. Wynn, Thomas and Coolidge, Frederick (2011) ‘The Implications of the Working Memory Model for the Evolution of Modern Cognition’, International Journal of Evolutionary Biology, DOI: 10.4061/2011/741357.

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