Ray - Pragmatism and Critical Theory

European Journal of Social Theory
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Pragmatism and Critical Theory

Larry Ray
European Journal of Social Theory 2004 7: 307
DOI: 10.1177/1368431004044195
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European Journal of Social Theory 7(3): 307321

Copyright 2004 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
Pragmatism and Critical Theory

Larry Ray
U N I V E R S I T Y O F K E N T, U K
Abstract
This article discusses Habermass project of reformulating Critical Theory
through a pragmatic philosophy of communication, while defending post-
metaphysical reason and commitment to grounded critique. Habermass use
of pragmatics is contrasted with Rorty, who argues for a non-foundational
pragmatism that eschews the idea of science as the only site of reason and
social progress. The argument moves through three stages. First, it outlines
Habermass project of recovering critical activity with particular attention to
his debt to pragmatic philosophy and the departures from earlier Critical
Theory that this entailed. Second, it examines his theory of communicative
action and identifies some key areas of contestation with sceptical
approaches. Finally, it identifies some of the problems and limitations in
Habermass pragmatic turn, suggesting that his quasi-transcendental critique
is developed at the expense of a pragmatic commitment to grounding in
embodied agency-in-the-world. It concludes that the spirit of pragmatism,
rather than its detail, might help Critical Theory focus on political analysis
and resistances to domination.
Key words
communication Jrgen Habermas post-metaphysical pragmatism
Richard Rorty
The articles in this issue illustrate the current revival of interest in pragmatism
and the increasing links that are being formed between classical American prag-
matism and the concerns of European social theory. As a result of this, the
meaning of pragmatism is inevitably becoming widened to include Rortys neo-
pragmatism (1982), Strausss theory of action (1993), Latours (1993) arguments
about social science as practice, Frasers socialist-feminist pragmatism (1989), as
well as the main focus of this article, Habermass universal pragmatics. Joas
(1993) suggests that pragmatism turns on a number of claims: that human action
is creative, humans have situated freedom, action is adaptation fitted to the prob-
lematics of specific situations, and a problem-solving approach to science that
carries great potential for life in a democratic society. To these could be added
the principle that philosophy begins with persons living in the world, which
entails the capacity for reason, common experience and mutual understanding
www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1368431004044195

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308 European Journal of Social Theory 7(3)
through recognition, interpretation and action. Attempting to overcome both

Cartesian and Kantian metaphysics, pragmatism is committed to an anti-reduc-
tionist philosophy in which experience is the site of truth and knowledge and
there are no transcendental truths. Thus, it rejects Cartesian radical doubt and
the subjectobject dichotomy on which this is based, along with Kantian phil-
osophy of consciousness and postulates about the unknowable thing-in-itself.
Pragmatic philosophy argued that judgements about truth and morality are not
matters of mental processes or facts of consciousness but grounded in intersub-
jective practices and symbolic systems. This shifts the focus of inquiry into the
conditions of truth and judgement from the isolated subject to embedded social
and linguistic practices. Charles Peirce, whose work has been particularly import-
ant for Habermas, emphasized that The very origin of the conception of reality
shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, and
there is no element of consciousness that is not symbolic (Peirce, 2000: 65,
emphasis in original). Human symbols mesh with objects, carve them out from
flow of experience and constitute an objective reality. At the same time there is a
political programme inherent in classical pragmatism, associated with John
Dewey in particular, claiming that the conditions for establishing objective know-
ledge are the same as those sustaining a democratic polity. Indeed, American
philosophy must be born out of . . . the demands of democracy, . . . And . . . it
is to the needs of democracy in America that we must turn to find the funda-
mental problems of philosophy (Dewey, 197683: 734). That is, persuasion,
the ability to convince, using methods and conditions of debate and discussion
are common to the scientific community and the democratic process.1
Two major and competing lines of theoretical development have selectively
drawn on pragmatic philosophy in order to support contemporary theoretical
claims. On the one side, Habermas has attempted to reformulate Critical Theory
while defending post-metaphysical reason that retains commitment to grounded
critique. This has been the basis for critique of philosophies that in Habermass
view give up on the rational and emancipatory core of modernity, and has been
directed against the competing strand of neo-pragmatism represented by Richard
Rortys postmodern scepticism. On the opposing side then, Rorty argues for a
non-foundational pragmatism that (by contrast with classical pragmatists) no
longer views science as a first and final site for reason and social progress. Against
universal claims to foundational reason (such as Habermass universal pragmat-
ics), Rorty insists on the ethnocentric principle that we are constrained to privi-
lege the terms of reference of our own cultural group (Rorty, 1991: 21ff.). This
discussion will proceed through these issues in the following way. First it outlines
Habermass project of recovering critical activity with particular attention to his
debt to pragmatic philosophy. Second, it looks more closely at his theory of
communicative action and identifies some key areas of contestation with scepti-
cal approaches. Finally, it identifies some of the problems and limitations in
Habermass pragmatic turn, suggesting that Habermass quasi-transcendental
critique is developed at the expense of a pragmatic commitment to grounding in
embodied agency-in-the-world.

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Ray Pragmatism and Critical Theory 309
Critical Theorys Post-Metaphysical Turn
Habermas has drawn on some pragmatic themes to reconstruct Critical Theory,

although it is becoming unclear today what Critical Theory actually represents.
Although Habermas is still sometimes referred to as the most significant living
representative of Critical Theory, his grand theoretical synthesis incorporates
(albeit critically) functionalist, linguistic, phenomenological as well as pragmatic
approaches that earlier critical theorists regarded with anathema. Moreover, in a
way, Critical Theory has been a victim of its own success. So many of its original
themes (such as the demise of the historical subject, critique of the culture
industry, attention to psycho-social processes, critique of technology, science and
domination) have entered mainstream social theory that it is now unclear what
is its particular contribution. Further, the mid-twentieth-century world of
Adorno and Horkheimer, of Fordist and state-managed social organization was
radically different from that of the early twenty-first century. In particular, the
acceleration of globalization and informationalism (Castells, 1998), and the
post-communist emergence of the American Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000)
pose new theoretical challenges. In this context it is worth briefly recapitulating
the logic of Habermass theoretical manoeuvres. Marxism attempted to deploy a
method of determinant critique that would be located within the real possibilities
of social conflict and change rather than in imagined utopian possibilities. This
had already become highly problematic by the mid-twentieth century as a result
of the decomposition of revolutionary subjects identified by Critical Theory. But
this issue becomes particularly poignant in the post-communist, globalized age
in which it is commonplace to speak of an end to alternatives to capitalism (e.g.
Alexander, 1995). Habermass work potentially provides a way out of this
historical and theoretical dead end through a reconstructed determinant critique
that avoids reference to external narratives while resisting surrender to relativism
and scepticism.
He attempts to invigorate Critical Theory by embracing the real achievements
of bourgeois democracy while salvaging the project of modernity specifically
through a mobilized public sphere, revitalized public discourse and personal
involvement in politics. Crucial to this is the theory of universal pragmatics as
the core of the unfulfilled potential of modernity that offers a way out of the dead
end in which earlier Critical Theory had found itself. Unwilling to separate
societal rationalization or cognitive development from reification, supporters of
Critical Theory found themselves upholding spontaneity only in the irrational
powers of love and art (Horowitz, 1998). The theory of communicative action
locates the potential for an anthropologically grounded reason inherent in the
quintessentially human activity of reaching a linguistically mediated under-
standing. This potential offers a grounded critique of domination (such as the
appropriation of lifeworld contexts by systemic media) without recourse to a
subject of history (Ray, 1993).
In the process, Habermas looked to pragmatic philosophy and partially
reversed the negative judgements of Horkheimer on pragmatism.2 It is worth

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recapitulating these in order to judge how successfully Habermas draws on this

source for a reconstitution of Critical Theory. For Horkheimer, pragmatism was
part of the self-destruction of reason in which instrumental meansends calcu-
lation (subjective reason, Verstand ) subverts objective, critical reason (Vernunft).
In these terms, pragmatism represented a positivistic apologia for capitalism and
belief in the existence and advantages of free competition (Horkheimer, 1993:
196). It projects a harmonious illusion of society that is formalistic and abstract
within which critique cannot be expressed since there is no appeal to any criterion
of truth beyond probability, calculability and success (Horkheimer, 1973: 45).
Although it presents itself as pluralistic, pragmatism makes everything the same
since truth is reduced to the experimental method, which is the counterpart to
modern industrialism and the conveyer belt (Horkheimer, 1973: 54). Subjective
reason closes all power of spontaneity and the ability to discover and assert new
ways of living (Horkheimer, 1973: 55). Pragmatism, then, could not grasp the
deep crisis of the 1930s in which liberal capitalism found itself in transition to
monopolistic and state-regulated forces and a commercial mass culture that
destroyed conditions for true individuation.
Is this line of critique valid? Joas argues it is not, since Adorno and Horkheimer
were unable to recognize pragmatisms post-metaphysical justifications for
democracy nor Cooley, Mead and Deweys critique of behaviouristic psycho-
logical reductionism (Joas, 1992, 1993: 2). Similarly, Bohman (1999) argues that
in contrast to German Idealisms overly ambitious theoretical pretensions, prag-
matism proposes a pluralistic and procedural form of politics grounded in experi-
mental and flexible practices. However, Denzin (1996) indicates that it might in
part be valid. For the early modern pragmatists, Dewey, Mead and Peirce, prag-
matic instrumentalism identified validity with the scientific method and truth
with those ideas and actions whose consequences satisfy needs and desires defined
by the public good. Pragmatists emphasis on applying scientific methods to
moral and social problems led to specific proposals concerning education and the
problems of integrating European immigrants into the new urban social order.
While pragmatism became a social philosophy of democracy, it was a peculiar
moral philosophy since it refused to endorse in advance any specific ethical stance
(Denzin, 1996). These pragmatists would not commit themselves to any substan-
tive cultural values since lines of action had meaning only when consequences
were produced. This blunted their capacity for critical explanation of the events
of the early twentieth century. While they welcomed the possibilities for the
creation of a peaceful international order following the First World War, they
could not explain why nations went to war since this is not adaptive behaviour.
Nor could they explain slavery (and racism), nor the systematic exclusion of
women from the workplace (Diggins, 1994: 225; Denzin, 1996). In short, its
commitment to democracy was nave and ignored the structural forces of domi-
nation and destruction. Later I will consider whether Habermass pragmatism
avoids these difficulties.
Habermas draws extensively on Peirce in Knowledge and Human Interests
(KHIs)(1973) in which he plays off the latters conception of the foundations of

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scientific inquiry against positivism, the principal target of his study. In contrast
to the positivists, Peirce rejected any recourse to original impressions of sensation
and focused instead on the intersubjectively acknowledged cognitive progress
that was the exemplary feature of natural-scientific knowledge.3 Inquiry is a
process by which we move from doubt to belief and Peirce centred his analysis
on the procedures through which an uncompelled and stable consensus among
members of the community of investigators (the fixation of belief ) could be
achieved. Peirce developed three forms of inference necessary for the logic of
inquiry deduction, induction and abduction which, taken together, consti-
tute a procedure that generates intersubjectively recognized beliefs. The essence
of belief is that we orient our behaviour towards it so that it becomes a guide for
action, and its validity remains unproblematic as long as the modes of behaviour
that it guides do not fail in reality. When this occurs, belief is subject to doubt
and there follows an attempt to discover new beliefs that will restabilize the
disturbed behaviour. Thus, the meaning of validity can be viewed in the context
of habitual action that is subject to reflexive examination. This is a view to which
Habermas would later add a phenomenological twist, arguing that the lifeworld
constitutes a horizon of unexamined background consensus that is progressively
problematized, the more norms lose the status of unquestionable conventions
(Habermas, 1989: 328).
However, his initial appropriation of Peirce in KHIs was highly selective and
critical. In his attempt to move beyond the aprioris of Critical Theory and to
reconstruct the ground of determinant critique, Habermas fused Critical Theory
with American pragmatism and linguistic philosophy. His judgement does not
initially dissent from Horkheimers view that pragmatism is a species of instru-
mental reason it answers the question, How is scientific progress possible? by
legitimating the validity of synthetic modes of inference on the basis of a tran-
scendental structure of instrumental action (Habermas, 1973: 121). Its aim, he
says, is to formulate practical maxims in the conditional form of event E will
occur under conditions C1 . . . Cn, the latter then being available to manipu-
lation. So, the meaning of the validity of statements is determined with reference
to possible technical control of empirical variables (Habermas, 1973: 121). Thus
within Habermass (soon to be superseded) tripartite system in KHIs, pragma-
tism is located within the knowledge-constitutive interest in possible technical
control objectification of reality as an object of control, in which the general
conditions of communicative action do not apply (Habermas, 1973: 193).
Habermas then proceeds to draw on a range of theorists (especially Dilthey, Kant,
Fichte and Freud) to develop the concepts of historical-hermeneutic and eman-
cipatory interests, the latter subsuming the former and the empirical-analytical
interest.
Habermas adopts an essentially Marxist stance of retrospective arbiter of
philosophical correctness. On the progressive side, Peirce was the first to gain
clarity about the systematic meaning of scientific progress and to understand the
intersubjective nature of scientific propositions, which contain the possibility of
uncompelled linguistically mediated consensus. What separates Peirce from both

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early and modern positivism is his understanding that the task of methodology
is not to clarify the logical structure of scientific theories but the logic of the
procedure with the aid of which we obtain scientific theories (Habermas, 1973:
91). However, Peirce did not solve the problem because he did not realize the
necessity of using the logic of inquiry to compensate for denial of the thing-
in-itself. He calls real the connotations of all predicates appearing in true pro-
positions of which sensation is the material substratum of symbolic content
(Habermas, 1973: 106). This must entail reference to an ontology and realm
beyond the linguistically mediated object. Reality for Peirce is understood as
correspondence to the totality of true propositions, that is, those that have stood
up to indefinitely repeated intersubjectively recognized tests (Habermas, 1973:
107). Peirce limits himself to a concept of reality that is exhausted as the corre-
late of all possible true statements, and thereby returns to a contemplative
conception of knowledge, which of course was at this point, central to
Habermass critique of the positivist epistemology.
Even in KHIs, of course, Habermas does dissent from earlier Critical Theory
in that his objection is not to the interest in technical control per se but rather
the generalization of procedures of empirical-analytical science to all forms of
knowledge (see also Wellmer, 1971: 41). Thus, Peirce cannot conceive of a
subject in a self-formative learning process because he applies the pragmatist
criterion of meaning to both mind and matter. Although having crucially posited
the importance of intersubjectivity and linguistic mediation in scientific judge-
ment, Peirce did not recognize that intersubjectivity is not confined to the limits
of technical control over objectified natural processes. Symbolic interaction
between societal subjects who reciprocally know and recognize each other points
towards a system of reference that cannot be reduced to instrumental action. As
Habermas proceeds to argue in KHIs, there are two further anthropologically
grounded KCIs in hermeneutic understanding and emancipation.
Largely leaving behind the epistemology of KHI, in Habermass subsequent
work Peirces theory of intersubjectively founded validity, if anything, acquires
more central significance. Later Habermas says that pragmatism steps resolutely
outside the parameters set by the philosophy consciousness and its cognitive
paradigm . . . out of the traditional notion of the solitary subject that confronts
objects and becomes reflective only by turning itself into an object (1990: 9).
Habermas places considerable weight on the procedures of intersubjective agree-
ment that he hopes will resolve the difficulties with Peirces pragmatism. In place
of the solitary subject, pragmatism puts the idea of cognition that is mediated by
language. However, Habermas again claims that Peirce remained ensnared in the
legacy of metaphysics, for although he insisted that interpretability must be part
of the quality of a sign, he also retained the metaphysical realism of universal
semiotics (Habermas, 1995: 89).4 The pragmatic turn for Habermas undermines
the architectonic of subject and object by giving semiotic reinterpretation to the
fundamental concept of representation (1995: 95). An assertion receives force
through the fact that the speaker offers a reason to an addressee, thus validity is
not based on correspondence with an object but reasons are judged convincing

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among an interpretative community. Peirce does, however, raise the question,

how is objectivity then possible? He attempts to resolve this through further
nomenclature sin-signs depend on a causal nexus or pre-existing similarity in
form, thus empirical processes have their root in pre-conscious layers of sense
stimuli. But Habermas points out that information inputs are no less fallible than
judgements obtained from them (i.e. another version of the basis problem)
although he suggests that when truth propositions are rendered problematic, they
can then be evaluated according to intersubjectively shared rules. Since nature
cannot direct our hypotheses, the burden of proof rests on arguments that lead
to consensus reached under communicative conditions extended to ideal limits
in social space and historical time (Habermas, 1995: 100). This follows Peirces
view in The Fixation of Belief that the sign must establish its relation to the
intersubjective world of interpretation, from which Habermas concludes that
there is no higher court of appeal than agreement of others that is rationally moti-
vated (1995: 100).
Two problems here might be noted at this point, however. First, the notion
of argumentation in ideal conditions does not really resolve the correspondence
problem because it focuses on descriptive adequacy, not theoretical knowledge.
We may reach an agreement about the meaning of certain information inputs,
for example, astrophysicists may agree that radio waves from space received at
1.40 rotations/sec. points to the presence of a typical pulsar. But seeking vali-
dation of wider theoretical claims (e.g. of stellar evolution) is difficult without a
more clearly defined logic of inference than Habermas provides. Second, to view
all such agreements as provisional is probably required by Habermass interpre-
tation of pragmatism but could leave him more vulnerable to scepticism than he
would like. If all observation statements are dependent on intersubjectively
achieved agreements that could in the future be revised, then it is perhaps open
to Rortys (1999) claim that there are no acts called assent or commitment
which we can perform that will put us in a relation to an object different than
that of simply talking about that object in sentences whose truth we have taken
into our lives. Indeed, Habermas concedes that even propositions that were
agreed under ideal epistemic conditions could still be subject to error and the
limitations of human abilities (Habermas, 1998: 359). One alternative for
Habermas would be to regard successful intervention as an additional criterion
of truth in empirical-analytical sciences (which he seems to do in KHI) but this
would detract from his emphasis on truth as agreement motivated by the force
of better argument.
His use of pragmatism is then selective. But it is reasonable to view Habermass
theory as pragmatic to the extent that it focuses on the use of language (on speech
acts rather than semantics) and develops a decentred view of the world in which
actors take up different attitudes to the world objectivating, normative, and
expressive corresponding to objective, social and subjective worlds (Cook, 1997).
Every utterance contains a propositional content p that predicates an object but
its full meaning depends on its illocutionary component; on how this is put
forward asserted, commanded, confessed, promised, etc. The three distinct

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validity claims (truth, normative rightness and truthfulness/sincerity) are

universal features of linguistic communication possessed by every subject capable
of communication and action. They transcend any particular context or linguis-
tic community (pace Rorty) (Habermas, 1995, passim). The pragmatic trans-
formation of the world can no longer be regarded as grounded in monological
consciousness possessed by atomized interacting subjects. Rather, social individ-
ualization based on functional differentiation is both intersubjective and allows
for moral and cognitive autonomy. Following Mead, Habermas further argues
that the subject only comes upon itself via mediation of its object which is the
wider universal community of the generalized other.
There remain some ambiguities in Habermass claims about ideal speech,
despite several modifications to his original position. Crucial to Habermass
reconstruction of Critical Theory is the claim that the possibility of uncoerced
agreement is not a wishful utopia but is both presupposed in everyday speech and
is the primary mode of language use. These are expressed as the conditions for
ideal speech and cognition, moral, linguistic species competencies. An idea
central to the foundation of determinant critique is that questions of normative
rightness are not merely matters of opinion (a view earlier critical theorists
regarded as decisionism) but are subject to discursive processes comparable, or
as Habermas now says, analogous to deliberations on propositional truth (1995:
75). Like truth claims, norms are subject to possible consensus among putative
participants in unconstrained dialogue that, as is well known, presuppose
conditions which, if realized, would achieve societal reconciliation and freedom
through communicative socialization (Antonio and Kellner, 1992).5 Normative
rightness is truth-analogous in the following ways. Participants to dialogue take
up relations to the subjective world of the speaker as lived experience that entails
simultaneously taking up relations to the subjective, social and objective worlds.
Familiarity with language is interwoven with knowledge of how things do
actually stand in the world, the kinds of reasons the speaker could cite. This
enables us to judge the adequacy, sincerity, and normative rightness of normative
utterances (Habermas, 1995: 756). These universal conditions of communi-
cative action are prior to forms of strategic action (the latter are parasitic on the
former), they are therefore grounded within the self-formative process of the
species.6
Let us accept for the moment that Habermass account does reconstruct the
implicit assumptions embedded in everyday speech (though this will be ques-
tioned later). An important area of uncertainty exists as to the historicity of his
critique and the consequences that follow this. Do the conditions of ideal speech
exist (potentially) in all societies and at all times, in which case Habermas is
making a universal and transcendental (or at least quasi-transcendental) claim?
For example, he refers to the formal and processual characteristics of justifica-
tory practices in general that . . . are found in all cultures (Habermas, 1998:
367). This claim is consistent with the universal nature of pragmatics, but might
detract from his critical intent, which is then detached from any particular
historical conditions of rationalization. However, Habermas often does suggest

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that these conditions are historically emergent, since the potential for critical
argumentation develops within post-traditional world-views that have undergone
the linguistification of the sacred where the spellbinding power of traditional
legitimations have been eroded (Habermas, 1989: 3357). With the conditions
of modernity also emerge cultural value spheres, pluralistic decentred social iden-
tities, and post-conventional forms of morality and autonomy. As the binding
force of traditional world-views diminishes, reflection on the background consen-
sus opens the way for critical subjectivities, and action is co-ordinated less
through unreflective consensus and more through argumentative procedures and
criticizable validity claims. This claim is at least implicit in Habermass defence
of the unfulfilled potential of modernity directed against both earlier Critical
Theory and postmodernism. If this account is correct, that the potential for
communicative discourse is historically emergent, it is reasonable to attempt to
specify under what circumstances the critical potential of language might be
released a line of argument that is pursued in Ray (1993). However, if the
conditions for communicative discourse are historically grounded, then the rules
and conventions that constitute it are dependent on complex processes of social
change and cannot be treated as always present. They become dependent on
wider social and institutional processes of embedding and encoding subjectivity.
The Limits of Procedural Ethics
The attempt to develop a quasi-transcendental justification for critique that

nonetheless addresses the pragmatics of everyday language use is likely to get
caught in dilemmas of universality and particularity and theory and history. This
is illustrated by Benhabibs (1992) critique of Habermass disembodied transcen-
dental rational ego, which she sees as implicit in the subject of ideal speech.
Benhabib draws on communitarian critics of the unencumbered self to question
the concept of the generalized other that Habermas develops from Mead and
Kohlberg. She sees here a legislating reason that articulates the conditions for a
moral point of view, and cannot deal with the multiplicity of issues of practical
reason. While applauding Habermass shift to communication, which moved
away from reason as a psychological attribute of consciousness to inter-
subjectivity, Benhabib argues that discourse ethics involve actual dialogue, rather
than the kind of hypothetical discourse constructed by Habermas. Subjects are
finite and social, therefore, contexts of gender and community are central. People
are not only generalized but concrete others and the negotiation between
generalized other (other as a moral person with reason) and collective concrete
others takes place in the political public sphere. However, in the private/public
divide (Fraser, 1989) women disappear as rational agents and Norms of freedom,
equality and reciprocity have stopped at the household door. Womens absence
from the public realm cannot be corrected by a simple adjustment because
it points to some categorical distortions . . . Because they exclude women,
these theories are systematically skewed (Benhabib, 1992: 13). For Kohlberg,

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kinship, friendship, love, sex are excluded from rationality into personal
decision-making, thus women (for whom she suggests these are a more central
experience) are excluded from rationality and placed into nature.
This seems to be a crucial point can Benhabib argue this without adopting
an essentialist view of men and womens orientations? She insists that the
gender/sex system is not contingent, but essential to social organization the self
develops an embodied identity. But for the rational (narcissist, male) ego, the
world appears in his own image which is of an autonomous self without history.
Thus, in Kohlbergs moral theory, the self has grown up before it was born. The
female has no place here, and is excluded by being defined as a lack of
autonomy, independence and phallus. Banned from history into nature, this
creates oppressive binary oppositions of autonomy vs. dependency; justice vs.
caring; and public sphere vs. nurture and domesticity. Ignoring the standpoint
of the concrete other leads to epistemic incoherence because the other as different
disappears and becomes irrelevant. Even so, Benhabib asks, would a moral theory
restricted to the standpoint of the concrete other be sexist, racist, culturally
relative and discriminatory? A similar anxiety is voiced by Lovibond (1994) who
says, As a thinker in general, I want my thinking to be such as to win acceptance
from anyone else who may qualify in my judgement as a competent thinker.
Benhabib responds by saying, Rights must be an essential component of any
such theory. The problem here surely (as Soper, 1989, notes) is that rights must
involve abstraction from particularity, otherwise the grounding for the demand
for equal treatment is removed. Social theoretical pragmatics needs to address this
process of reflexive oscillation between the particular-concrete and universal-
abstract levels. The problem though is that the more embodied flesh is put on
the Habermasian skeleton, the more difficult it becomes to ground critique
purely in the possibility of ideal speech. Indeed, Habermas himself comments
that it is paradoxical to strive for realization of an ideal whose realization would
be the end of human history (2001: 365).
A further though potentially more destructive challenge has come from Rortys
postmodern neo-pragmatism. Following Peirces rejection of foundationalism,
Rorty suggests that for pragmatism objectivity does not escape the limitations of
community but only desires for intersubjective agreement, and what it is rational
for us to believe currently may not be true (Rorty, 1991: 28). This is not merely
the idea of truth as provisional agreement (from which Habermas would not
dissent) but the stronger claim that the terms used in another culture cannot be
equated in meaning or reference with any terms or expressions we possess. We
must work by our own lights and be ethnocentric we do not have axiomatic
structures, no rules of language, only shared habits. Pragmatisms justification of
toleration and free inquiry entails no ahistorical standpoint from which to
endorse the habits of modern democracies. Modern forms of scepticism were
born with science and there is no way the sceptic can be answered since any
grounding justifies itself with reference to an artificial dilemma. The need for
grounding is vacuous and appeals to grounding imply renewed scepticism. We
must therefore grasp the ethnocentric horns of the dilemma (Rorty, 1991: 33)

04 044195 (jr/t) 7/7/04 8:55 am Page 317
and in practice privilege our own group, even though there can be non-circular
justification for doing so. To be ethnocentric is to divide the human race into the
people to whom one must justify ones beliefs and the others. The first group (the
ethnos) comprises people who share enough of ones beliefs to make fruitful
conversation possible. This he insists is a philosophy of solidarity, not despair.
There are several lines of response to this species of relativism.7 Not least that
Rorty idealizes contingency and incommensurability to the simplistic narcissis-
tic fantasy that because nothing is certain, nothing is true (Halton, 1992). Again,
his suspicion of theory results in abandoning all theoretical reflection for politics
and producing an unsatisfactory conception reduced to banal features . . . unable
to grasp the structure of power relations (Mouffe, 2000). A further challenge
would be to require Rorty to define community, which in a world of global
communication will transcend traditional spatial locations. However, Habermass
critique (as with what he directs against other sceptics and relativists) relies
heavily on the accusation of performative contradiction (Matustik, 1989). This
is any argument that transgresses its own communicative intent and thereby
undermines its own presuppositions. Since communication is not a matter of
decidability (we cannot decide or not to use language), to be a potential partici-
pant is to be human. Since linguistic communication presupposes redemptive
competencies of understanding, which must be acknowledged by speakers at least
implicitly. Thus, for Habermas, Rortys radical post-metaphysical scepticism both
presupposes the critique of theological world-views but also unmasks modernitys
own pretensions to rationality, leaving only groundless assertions. This use of
reason to unmask itself undoes its own critique and leaves the way open to
unreason while violating the inescapable structure of linguistic action. Pragma-
tism thus pulls the rug from under scepticism since in everyday practices we
cannot use language without acting adopting an illocutionary (performative)
attitude (Habermas, 1998: 34383).
There are several difficulties here though. First, there are too many contingent
links in the argument for Habermas to justifiably describe Rortys (or other scep-
tical) positions as contradictions in a logical sense. That is, the alleged contra-
diction is dependent on at least the following claims: (a) that communicative
norms are embedded in illocutionary acts; (b) that this is an anthropologically
prior mode of speech to strategic action; and (c) that there are ways of asserting
argumentative validity common to the differentiated validity spheres of science,
morality-law and art (otherwise validity is confined to the truth requirements of
each sphere). Second, consistency and avoidance of contradiction are values (that
may be widely held by professional academics qua academics) but are no more
fundamentally grounded than any other value. In practice, anyway, a better
argument either fails to prevail or does so for non-rational reasons (Bronner,
1994: 303). Third, while it may be correct to say that communicative socializa-
tion is interwoven with knowledge of the kind of reasons speakers could cite
these may in a particular speech community include appeals to substantive
values that are unintelligible to those outside it,8 which opens the way to a
kind of ethnocentric principle. Fourth, in less theoretical writing, Habermas

04 044195 (jr/t) 7/7/04 8:55 am Page 318
acknowledges a disjuncture between formal pragmatics and social solidarity. For

example, he comments that national belonging is rooted in a pre-political
community of fate which presupposes particular collective identities which in
turn made social solidarity through the welfare state possible (Habermas, 2001:
108). He further says that civil solidarity is rooted in particular collective identi-
ties whereas attempts to construct cosmopolitan solidarity (such as the EU) have
to support themselves on the moral universalism of human rights alone which
is problematic (2001: 108). Whether or not this is true, his invocation of a
Schicksalsgemeinschaft against procedural formality raises questions about the
possibilities of action co-ordination through communicative rationality, as
opposed to more substantive forms of solidarity. More generally, it has been
observed that Habermass post-metaphysical claims collapse when social or
historical specificity is raised and his fundamental categories lose their analytical
power (Bronner, 1994: 310). This is because choosing among generalizable
concerns is always a political question that is resolved in the realities of compro-
mise, violence and structural imbalance of power. Thus, distortions will enter
from outside the field of argumentation although discursive rules are followed
by the American legal system, one in four African-Americans is in jail, awaiting
trial or on probation (Bronner, 1994: 306). Indeed, Habermass lack of attention
to violence, threats and emotions is a serious lacuna in his ability to grasp the
realities of the social (Halton, 1992). He concentrates on verbal communication
while downplaying non-verbal intelligence to the exclusion of feelings, senti-
ments and emotions by contrast with the pragmatist view of intelligence of
feelings and sentiments.
These attempts to evaluate Habermass theory with reference to the exigencies
of social life may appear to miss the point that his project is to reconstruct the
counter-factual grounds of discourse. However, pragmatism aims to demonstrate
how the self is embodied as agency-in-the-world and begins with critical appro-
priation of the horizon of social inheritance (Colapietro, 1992). Despite his use
of some themes from pragmatism, Habermas overlooks indeterminacy, contin-
gency and chaos as experience shrivels into verbal intellect and excludes non-
cognitive elements (Shalin, 1992). This, in turn, has implications for his political
project of republican democracy which understands law as a social institution
arising out of the common will of a people who were already a community united
by a linguistic bond prior to becoming legal consociates (Habermas, 1996:
3048). Even if this consensual theory of governance were valid, the most it
seems the theory of communicative action can prescribe is a Rechtsstaat a
Critical Theory in which substantive issues such as material inequality or global
organization of capital are not addressed, at least at the level of theory.
However, this criticism should lead neither to abandoning the search for a
grounded critique nor back to the nave liberalism of classical pragmatism. Domi-
nation, disjuncture and difference define the global cultural economy exercised
through new determinations of mobility and migration, biosemiotic capacities
and computer-mediated networks that stretch well beyond the narrowly linguis-
tic terrain. Habermas (despite his post-metaphysical claims) relies on a

04 044195 (jr/t) 7/7/04 8:55 am Page 319
standpoint placed outside the embedded consequences of globalization, power

and domination. The social critic seeks out forms of resistance to domination
that cannot be inscribed in advance but open the terrain for dignity, respect,
recognition and non-violence. The spirit of pragmatism rather than its detail
might help Critical Theory focus on political analysis and resistances to domi-
nation rather than a concept of practice derived from the structure of language
or the putative methods of science.
Notes
1 It could be noted that classical American pragmatism was developed in the context of
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century optimism that the application of scientific
principles to local, national and international problems would result in peace and well-
being.
2 Habermas credits Peirce with the idea, core to communicative action, that a proposi-
tion is true if justified under ideal epistemic conditions (Habermas, 1998: 360).
3 Someone whom Habermas did not discuss greatly either in this context or subse-
quently, was Karl Popper, at least after the acrimonious exchanges in the Positivis-
musstreit (Adorno et al., 1976). Though a critic of pragmatism, Popper regarded Peirce
as one of the greatest philosophers of all time (Popper, 1983: 251) and shared with
Peirce (and Habermas) an intersubjective and conventionalist view of scientific
practice. Further, Popper gave rather more attention than Habermas to the basis
problem, that is, if language and conventional agreements mediate all observations,
then how do we know that any proposition has been falsified?
4 Some would go further and argue that, whatever its post-metaphysical claims, prag-
matism was always employed for the purpose of fashioning a meta-theory that privi-
leged experience consensus was not predicated on categorical preconditions of the
lifeworld but face-to-face interactions of citizens (Bronner, 1994: 291). Again, Shalin
(1992) argues that while a consensus theory of truth can be found in pragmatism, it is
based on a practically accomplished unity of knowledge and reality.
5 There is no definitive list of such conditions but the following is typical: openness to
the public, inclusiveness, equal rights to participation, immunization against external
or inherent compulsion, and participants orientation to reaching an understanding,
that is, sincere expression of utterances (Habermas, 1998: 367).
6 Habermas (1995: 84) claims that unmanifested perlocutory effects can only be
achieved parasitically, namely, under the condition that the speaker feigns the intention
of pursuing his illocutionary goals . . . and leave the hearer in the dark about his actual
intentions.
7 The differences between Habermas and Rorty are significant but it should be remem-
bered that they share a commitment to the development of rational and reasonable
forms of social organization, like earlier pragmatists. However, again like earlier prag-
matists, this commitment may arise more from liberal sentiments than following
necessarily from the precepts of their pragmatic philosophies.
8 For example, the ethos of martyrdom, as in Hizbollahs art of death (fann al-mawt) of
the suicide bomber is incomprehensible to most western liberals but derives meaning
from a particular system of values and beliefs.

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Larry Ray is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. His recent publi-
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Theorists (2003, edited with Anthony Elliott) and Social Theory, Communism and
Beyond (forthcoming 2004, with William Outhwaite). His current research includes
work on globalization, racism and migration. Address: School of Social Policy,
Sociology and Social Research, Cornwallis North East, University of Kent, Canter-
bury CT2 7NF, UK. [email: l.j.ray@kent.ac.uk]

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Pragmatism and Critical Theory

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through recognition, interpretation and action. Attempting to overcome both

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