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Article contents
Response to Critics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
Like most books in philosophy, Communicative Action and Rational Choice contains a large number of arguments (six big ones, by my count, plus dozens of smaller ones). Each of these arguments I adhere to with a greater or lesser degree of conviction. Some of them I think are pretty decisive. In other cases, I was doing the philosophical equivalent of throwing things against the wall just to see what sticks. Of course, I did not present things that way in the book, choosing instead to dress up my scruffier arguments in the hope that they might appear to share the same pedigree as my more refined ones. It is thus a testament to the astuteness of my critics here that they have focused their criticism almost entirely on my more tentative arguments—especially my so-called “pragmatic theory of convergence,” which is less a theory than a set of suggestions about how a theory might be constructed. Thus my desire to defend these arguments against criticism, which predominates in what follows, should be understood also as tempered by the recognition that much of what I say may ultimately prove to be unsustainable.
- Type
- Book Symposium/Tribune de Livre
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , Spring 2005 , pp. 391 - 398
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2005
References
Notes
1 I would like to thank Pablo Gilabert for organizing the CPA symposium from which these articles are derived, and for taking the initiative to secure their publication. Thanks also to Eric Dayton, editor of Dialogue, for working both with the authors and me to develop versions that would be suitable for publication.
2 Charges, for example, of the sort that I levelled against Habermas in Heath, Joseph, “The Problem of Foundationalism in Habermas's Discourse Ethics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 21 (1995): 77–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 See Habermas, Jürgen, Justification and Application, translated by Cronin, Ciaran P. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 90.Google Scholar
4 I am using the term “bias” here in the sense found in Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985).Google Scholar
5 Habermas, Jürgen, Truth and Justification, translated by Fultner, Barbara (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 268.Google Scholar
6 Aumann, Robert, “Agreeing to Disagree,” The Annals of Statistics, 4 (1976): 1236–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Habermas, Justification and Application, pp. 10–12.
8 As I have tried to demonstrate, at somewhat greater length, in my book The Efficient Society (Toronto: Penguin, 2001).Google Scholar
9 Heath, Joseph, “Problems in the Theory of Ideology,” in Rehg, William and Bohman, James, eds., Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).Google Scholar
10 Heath, Joseph, “Rational Choice as Critical Theory,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 22 (1996): 43–62, at p. 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 In his Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 248–70.Google Scholar
12 For a stand-alone version of the theory, see Heath, Joseph, “A Pragmatic Theory of Convergence,” in Misak, Cheryl, ed., Pragmatism (Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press, 1999), pp. 149–75.Google Scholar