Sunday 12 January 2014

juergen habermas: communicative rationality and deliberative democracy

One of the most important living, post-war philosophers, Juergen Habermas, has had a lot to say about how we communicate:


Jürgen Habermas Interview - YouTube

Here are some points from Wikipedia of interest:

He is perhaps best known for his theories on communicative rationality and the public sphere. Global polls consistently find that Habermas is widely recognized as one of the world's leading intellectuals.

This framework rests on the argument called universal pragmatics - that all speech acts have an inherent telos (the Greek word for "end") — the goal of mutual understanding, and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding. 

According to Habermas, a variety of factors resulted in the eventual decay of the public sphere, including the growth of a commercial mass media, which turned the critical public into a passive consumer public

Democratic public life cannot develop where matters of public importance are not discussed by citizens. An "ideal speech situation" requires participants to have the same capacities of discourse, social equality and their words are not confused by ideology or other errors. In this version of the consensus theory of truth Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation.

He discerns a hope for the future where the representative democracy-reliant nation-state is replaced by a deliberative democracy-reliant political organism based on the equal rights and obligations of citizens.

Jürgen Habermas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jürgen Habermas | The Guardian

According to Habermas in the YouTube interview above, communication is all about giving reasons and giving answers to the questions "Why did you say that?" and "Why did you do that?"
Communicative rationality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See also: Jay Doubleyou: pragmatics
Jay Doubleyou: questioning and problem-solving
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