Habermas as Theorist of Science

Johan Lindström

Habermas is known mainly as a sociologist of communication with a hermeneutical perspective^[1] , but he is also a philosopher with a critical eye on reasoning. With this turn of attention he emphasizes the sharp edged side of hermeneutics, with its focus on the logics and meanings of a text., which is the life nerve of scientific reasoning, forgotten by some of his a bit too Hegelian interpreters and overlooked by the positivistic social scientists.

The cross-combination or fusion of two different areas can give fruitful syntheses, here an example presented in the form of an aforism: “Philosohy without Psychology is empty, and Psychology without Philosophy is blind”, but the combination of both gives “Psychosofy”, reminding of the classical style of philosophizing. Now, if you add hermeneutics to this fusion, you are getting a platform for building a theory of science, which is a counter-pole to standard positivistic philosophy of science, with its overstressing of “quantitative methods^[2] ” and neglecting of the (intensional) meaning aspect. The latter is the focus area of the territory for such a hermeneutic theory of science and hermeneutic social science.

This Habermasian breed is especially apt for the application on psychology and the social sciences, to make them free of the straight jacket of positivistic methodology and its ideal of science.

The kernel of Habermas’ theory of science is to be found in his (1972) Knowledge and Human Interests, where he presents his theory of interests of knowledge. Those are at the same time philosophical categories and general and  socially overarching, so that “everybody has them internalized”, many times without noticing them^[3] . They are a complement to theory of knowledge^[4] .

Parallel to Habermas the American theorist of science, Ingo Swann, has developed complements to Habermas Hermeneutics.

It will be obvious to just about everyone that consensus realities are  always SOCIAL consensus realities, and that they can contain factors  that boost any number of activities. But it is well known that they can  prevent or deter any number of activities also. These deterring factors  can be overt. Or they can be subtle and merely implicit. And they can  have nearly invisible spin-offs. The deterring factors can also emanate  from  misconceptions not realized as such.

Social consensus realities are perpetuated by cloning their basic  concepts into others via association with them, or by the tried and  trusted method of educating, conditioning, convincing, or  propagandizing.

But the single, surest method of the cloning is one few could imagine --  language itself. For when one learns language, one learns its  nomenclature, PLUS the meanings assigned to it BY the consensus reality  that determines what the meanings are.
(Swann 1997)

A few Key-Words of Hermeneutics

For the reader, not familiar with Hermeneutics, a few key-Words-explanations could be clarifying.

1. The word Hermeneutics itself has an insecure(?) root^[5]in Hermes, who was the      messenger of the Gods, and thus, I conclude, Hermeneutics should be the      philosophy of communication, and — lo! — that’s also what it is, especially with      Habermas and his allay, Karl-Otto Apel.

  2. The so-called “Hermeneutical Circle” (HC) has puzzled many readers , but this 
     HC is not a logical circle, but instead a round going  process of interpretation in a      mental–cognitive system of co-working factors. All those processes are performed
     in the “Psycho-Hermeneutical^[6]”Dimension, and that is where words (signs,
     symbols) are transformed into meaning, and meaning is touching the mind.

  3. The HC is created or established by the third key-word factor, the
     Pre- Understanding (PU). This factor consists of all ideas and knowledge
      resources that you have in your “thinking box” (mind), already before you start
      reading a text.

     If a new text or a new theory is not possible to understand, we have to modify our      PU, in the first step by searching out different basic ideas and supporting
     knowledge resources. Then we make a next “round tour in the circle” with the
     modified PU, in order to see whether this equipment will make us capable to
     understand the message. And so on, with eventual further modifications of the PU.

    The general principle of the Circle HC, including the Pre-Understanding, PU, is that      every reading is an interpretation — i. e., there is no “reading word by word, exactly
   as it stands on the paper”. The latter should mean the spelling of a sentence, not the     understanding of its meaning.  

4. The General Language Community, (GLC), contains the cultural network, whose      internalization in the members of a culture is the factor or intellectual field, that
     makes it possible for us to use our language.

Knowledge Interests

The three main forms of knowledge interests (KI) are:

1) The Technological, aiming at the making and using of tools, in order to form
     objects.

     This interest  contains the aim of controlling the objects, i. e. during the period of      making and using them.

     If this interest is taken over by the social sciences, they will build in the control
     aspect in the social sciences, thus making them good tools for ruling the 
     totalitarian state.

  2) The Hermeneutical, aiming at mutual co-understanding

  3) The critical, aiming at the disclosal of errors in our systems.

Here Habermas is stressing that critique is a form of knowledge, and something more
to it BY the consensus reality  that determines what the meanings are.
Than merely saying “no” to something — it contains the articulation of arguments,
saying why something is wrong.

The technological interest has a self-evident foundation in the human need of tools and instruments for survival, that even a dictator has to admit. The critical interest does not have the same given relevance — instead it has an exposed position, subjected to counter criticism or the interference of the political police. This is because critique has the potential ability to change social structures. Here we can see the roots of those KI:s in power  as the medium, for both the critical and the negative interests. The critique is potential power, but it also needs some power as support  in order to reach the channels of communication and get published. In totalitarian systems the censorship aims at stopping expressions of critique.

An Example of Habermas’ Critical Theory of Science

From Habermas’ analysis in the following follows that the experiment in positivistic social science means to make violence on the sociocultural surroundings, in which all of us are living. The experiment creates an artificial situation, whose distorting effects on the social reality often escapes attention, because the researchers believe that the onset controls mean a “purification” of some presupposedly important variables.

In controlled observation, which often has the form of an experiment, we generate the initial conditions and measure the results of the operations that are performed on those conditions. Empiricism tries to base the objectivistic illusion on the observations whose results are expressed those basis sentences. The observations are supposed to be reliable by offering immediate evidence without any added subjectivism. In reality the basic sentences are not any simple representations of pure facts in themselves, but are expressing success or failure for our operations. We might say that facts and the relations between them are descriptively conceived.

Comprehensively one can say that those two factors, i. e.

(1) the logical structure of permissible systems of sentences,
      and
 (2) the type of conditions for verification, are implying that theories
      in the empiri (cisti)cal sciences are hiding^[7] the reality that is the
      the object of the constitutive interest in order to secure an expansion
      by informing and feed-back-geared action. This is  the interest of
      knowledge that constitutes the technical control of objectified processes
(Habermas 1972, s 308 -- 309)

When the technical interest is dominating the field, people automatically believe that different forms of knowledge, among them the hermeneutical ones, are “unscientific”
and that the critical form is a kind of “philosophy” in a dismissal sense. The latter is an
example of Habermas’ analysis of “objectified processes”, quoted above.

A Basic Criterion (?)

Traditional rationalism has one of its criteria’s of science in the requirement of logical consistency^[8] , i. e., that a knowledge system/theory must be free from self-contradictions.

Habermas agrees, but, to the formal logics — especially in logical empiricism — he adds the dimension of meaning, and thus gets the performative self-contradiction. This means that the saying/writing of a sentence (or exposition of a theory) contradicts its message.

This can be explained by an example. In a Swedish slap-stick film its main character — Stupid Joe^[9] , comes running, haunted by a police. Stupid Joe runs into the wood-house.
After a while comes the police who opens the door and asks: “Is anyone here?” and
Stupid Joe answers: “No!”. In this case the saying of the “No” shows that someone “is  here”.

An example from a  more scientific milieu is the following: “I can’t understand what is meant by the word ‘understanding’. Here the speaker is first using the word “understanding” marked by the superscript ^u , but later he is mentioning the same word, marked by the quotes. Of course he can problematize the mentioning of a word, but because he at the same time is also using the same word, this shows that he understands it. Thus he is contradicting himself in a performative way.