Abstract
In the history of hermeneutic philosophy and the empirical hermeneutical disciplines, various attempts have been made to demonstrate the distinctive nature of linguistic understanding and to mark it off against the ways in which knowledge is acquired, and the type of knowledge produced, in the natural sciences. The reasons that have been given for distinguishing between the hermeneutical disciplines, including the social sciences in so far as they deal with linguistic data, and the natural sciences have varied. In recent times Hans-Georg Gadamer and his followers have argued, based on Heidegger’s ontological analysis of Verstehen as an Existenzial, that the experience of truth in the Geisteswissenschaften is independent of scientific method. More recently still, Karl-Otto Apel, a close though increasingly critical collaborator of Jürgen Habermas, has argued that while hermeneutic processes of understanding form a necessary part of all the sciences, including the natural sciences, such processes are complementary to the objectifying procedures of science.1 In this paper I wish to focus on a somewhat different but related attempt by Habermas to show that the hermeneutical disciplines, in particular those he regards as non-objectifying critical social sciences, are necessarily distinct from the natural sciences and from any form of social science modeled on the natural sciences.
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Notes
For a critique of this view see my “Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim and K.-O. Apel’s Idea of a Complementary Hermeneutical Science.” In Peirce’s Doctrine of Signs: Theory, Applications, and Connections, ed. by V. Colapietro and T. M. Olshewsky, Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996, pp. 415–428.
J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
Habermas makes the link between semantic knowledge and world knowledge very clear in his essay “Zur Kritik der Bedeutungstheorie.” See his Nachmetaphysisches Denken, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988, p. 128.
John R. Searle, Speech Acts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 25.
Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, p. 291.
Ibid., p. 293.
As Allen W. Wood has suggested, reaching agreement (Verständigung) is something a speaker will aim at and try to achieve by means of illocutionary acts. Verständigung is thus a perlocution- ary aim rather than an illocutionary one. See his essay “Habermas’ Defense of Rationalism,” New German Critique 35, 1985, p. 162.
It should be noted here that Apel does not agree with Habermas on this point. In his paper “Linguistic Meaning and Intentionality. The Compatibility of the ‘Linguistic Turn’ and the ‘Pragmatic Turn’ of Meaning-Theory within the Framework of a Transcendental Semiotics” in H. Silverman and D. Welton (eds), Critical and Dialectical Phenomenology, Albany: SUNY Press, 1987, pp. 2–53, he puts forward the same argument and suggests that we distinguish between perlocutionary effects achieved directly through strategic communicative acts and those, like convincing someone, that are achieved through a prior understanding of the illocutionary force.
To what extent Dummett supports a falsificationist rather than a verificationist theory of meaning is unclear. His writings do not always and unambiguously indicate a preference for verificationism. One reason Habermas might have for regarding Dummett as a potential ally is Dummett’s anti-realist position. For a trenchant critique of Dummett’s anti-realism see Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth, 2nd edition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991, particularly chapter 14. 10 See Michael Dummett “What is a Theory of Meaning?” in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 103.
See N. Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use, New York: Praeger, 1986, p. 257ff. It is important to bear in mind here that Chomsky is concerned with more than just a theory of meaning. His theory of language is clearly an empirical theory. My own argument is that when we deal with semantics, it seems impossible to have a non-circular theory, i.e. a theory that would go beyond representing the meaning of expressions in a canonical form.
Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, p. 318.
In his Erlaiiterungen zur Diskursethik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991, p. 165), Habermas argues that there are no evidential or evaluative criteria that could precede discursive procedures. But this is incorrect. As we have seen, speakers must be able to validate the use of referential terms on the basis of a pre-discursive cognitive capacity without which the exchange of arguments with other speakers would be impossible.
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Freundlieb, D. (1999). The Difference between Science and Hermeneutics: Habermas’s Theory of the Necessarily Normative Nature of Linguistic Interpretation. In: Fehér, M., Kiss, O., Ropolyi, L. (eds) Hermeneutics and Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9293-2_24
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