Aesthetic Rationality

From Geography

Habermas' conception of communicative rationality moves along with these contemporary currents of philosophy. Concerning (1) it can be said that:

[Communicative] rationality refers primarily to the use of knowledge in language and action, rather than to a property of knowledge. One might say that it refers primarily to a mode of dealing with validity claims, and that it is in general not a property of these claims themselves. Furthermore…this perspective suggests no more than formal specifications of possible forms of life… it does not extend to the concrete form of life…(Cooke, 1994).

The clearest way to see this is to recognize that the validity dimensions implicit in communication signify that a speaker is open to the charge of being irrational if they place normative validity claims outside of rational discourse. Following Habermas, the argument relies that the following are given:

(a) that communication can proceed between two individuals only on the basis of a consensus (usually implicit) regarding the validity claims raised by the speech acts they exchange;

(b) that these validity claims concern at least three dimensions of validity (I, truthfulness; WE, rightness; IT, truth); and

(c) that a mutual understanding is maintained on the basis of the shared presupposition that any validity claim agreed upon could be justified, if necessary, by making recourse to good reasons.