Jürgen Habermas in 2014 at the age of 84
I have spent the start of the new year, trying to bring some order to the hundreds of documents on my laptop and was surprised to find a document in my 2014 folder with the title – ‘You are Jürgen Habermas’, which included the following text:
Author of The Logic of the Social Sciences, you recognize that the primary activity of human beings is to interpret the meaning of things in the world around them. As human beings themselves, researchers also interpret meanings and cannot therefore keep their own perspective separate from their research. Since there is no absolute truth, research must instead use reason and argument to arrive at the best interpretation. Go use your hermeneutics to conquer the world!
It turns out that this was the result of an online quiz – ‘What’s your epistemology?’
I don’t take these quizzes seriously. They are just a bit of light-hearted fun to occupy a spare moment, or when procrastinating, but I was interested that six years later I get the same result, and given that I haven’t written a blog post for a couple of months, sharing this seemed like a gentle restart.
I don’t know a huge amount about Habermas, but I do like his advocacy of communicative action and Ideal Speech Situation.
Keith Morrison (2008) makes these ideas accessible in his paper ‘Educational Philosophy and the Challenge of Complexity’ where he writes:
A complexity informed pedagogy requires communication that includes:
- Freedom to enter a discourse, check questionable claims, evaluate explanations and justifications;
- Freedom to modify a given conceptual framework and alter norms;
- Mutual understanding between participants;
- Equal opportunity for dialogue that abides by the validity claims of truth, legitimacy, sincerity and comprehensibility, and recognises the legitimacy of each subject to participate in the dialogue as an autonomous and equal partner;
- Equal opportunity for discussion, and the achieved—negotiated—consensus resulting from discussion deriving from the force of the better argument alone, and not from the positional power of the participants;
- Exclusion of all motives except for the cooperative search for truth.
All this feels very relevant at the beginning of 2020.
And, as an aside, the quiz included this lovely image:
A painting by a Swedish artist new to me – Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939)
Happy New Year to anyone reading this post.
Reference
Morrison, K. (2008). Educational Philosophy and the Challenge of Complexity Theory. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2007.00394.x
Jenny Connected 