Validity Claims

From Geography

Latest revision as of 14:07, 18 September 2012

Validity Claims are declarations of something to be true. Though, that might be what one assumes at first. A validity claim is actually more about the justification of a thought. If someone is convinced of something, he would try to place a validity claim on that, which means as much that he will try to justify his thoughts about this matter. But this is where it becomes problematic, because there needs to be some frame of reference. Because validity claims discuss truth or at least the acceptance of certain statements, this subject therefore is about as much as the constitution of social reality. There exist different interpretations of ways in which validity claims are constituted. The different interpretations correspond with the different perspectives on the construction of reality.

From an essentialistic perspective knowledge is build up within certain categories. Statements are seen as valid when they are in line with the already existing 'structures of meaning'. The existence of these structures, which are mainly divided into the categories nature and culture, were taken-for-granted or seen as transcendental. At least until the beginning of the 20th century, when "the world came to be understood as a network of relations among hybrid entities" (Zierhofer, 2002, p.1356). Thus, it was seen that a validity claim could stand on it's own, but that it would always be intertwined with other validity claims.

From a nonessentialistic perspective "the acceptance of knowledge as valid and the corresponding criteria of validity are both discursively achieved" (Zierhofer, 2002, p.1357). From this perspective, which can be seen as 'poststructuralist', validity claims are seen as autonomous. The acceptance of different validity claims depends on the context, meaning that "the evaluation of validity is logically related to the context of application" (Zierhofer, 2002, p.1358).

Seen from language-pragmatic action theory, language as a framework of reference enables us to interpret something as valid. This is in sharp contrast with the idea that by thinking and logical reasoning (which includes referencing to transcendental categorizations) validity claims can be made. "In our minds, statements are thoughts. In order to evaluate if they are true or right, we should be able to compare them with independent statements" (Zierhofer, 2002, p. 1360). Within this language-pragmatic line of interpretation, independent statements can only be found in the form of language, spoken or written.

References:

Zierhofer, W. (2002). Speech acts and space(s): language pragmatics and the discursive constitution of the social. in Environment and Planning A, volume 34.

Published by Lorenzo Goudsmits & Lisanne Dols