Rationality and relativism

Habermas's "overcoming" of hermeneutics

Thomas A. Mccarthy

pp. 57-78

in: John B. Thompson, David Held (eds), Habermas, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1982

Abstract

The debate between Habermas and Gadamer which took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s came to a provisional close on Habermas's side with a series of promissory notes.¹ While he agreed with Gadamer on the necessity for a sinnverstehenden access to social reality, he insisted nevertheless that the interpretation of meaningful phenomena need not, indeed could not, be restricted to the type of dialogic understanding characteristic of the hermeneutic approach. He held out instead the possibility of a theoretically grounded analysis of symbolically structured objects and events which, by drawing on systematically generalised empirical knowledge, would reduce the context-dependency of understanding and leave room for both quasi-causal explanation and critique. The types of theoretical-empirical knowledge in question, he suggested, included (i) a general theory of communication which would reconstruct the "universal-pragmatic infrastructure" of speech and action; (ii) a general theory of socialisation in the form of a theory of the acquisition of communicative competence; (iii) a theory of social systems which would make it possible to grasp objective meaning connections going beyond what is subjectively intended or expressly articulated in cultural traditions; and (iv) a theory of social evolution which would make possible a theoretical reconstruction of the historical situations of the interpreter (or critic) and his or her object.

Cited authors

Gadamer Hans-Georg

Habermas Jürgen