Abstract
Abstract/Hauptbeschreibung
(01)
|
A pragmatist thinker like Nicholas Rescher deems the idea that social harmony must be predicated in consensus to be both dangerous
and misleading. An essential problem of our time is the creation of political and social institutions that enable people to
live together in peaceful and productive ways, despite the presence of not eliminable disagreements about theoretical and
practical issues. Such remarks, in turn, strictly recall the “practical” impossibility of settling philosophical disputes
by having recourse to abstract and aprioristic principles. In the circumstances, the social model of team members cooperating
for a common purpose is unrealistic. A more adequate model is, instead, that of a classical capitalism where - in a sufficiently
well developed system - both competition and rivalry manage somehow to foster the benefit of the entire community (theory
of the “hidden hand”). Certainly the scientific community is one of the best examples of this that we have, although even
in this case we must be careful not to give too idealized a picture of scientific research. Consensus, however, in the Western
tradition is an ideal worth being pursued. At this point we are faced with two basic positions. On the one side (a) “consensualists”
maintain that disagreement should be averted no matter what, while, on the other, (b) “pluralists” accept disagreement because
they take dissensus to be an inevitable feature of the imperfect world in which we live. A pluralistic vision, therefore,
tries to make dissensus tolerable, and not to eliminate it. All theories of idealized consensus present us with serious setbacks.
This is the case, for instance, with Charles S. Peirce. As is well known, Peirce takes truth to be “the limit of inquiry,”
i.e. either what science will discover in the (idealized) long run, or what it would discover if the human efforts were so
extended. By taking this path, thus, truth is nothing but the ultimate consensus reached within the scientific community.
We can be sure that, once a “final” answer to a question has been found which is thereafter maintained without change, that
one is the truth we were looking for. This fascinating theory, however, has various unfortunate consequences. In our day the
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has in a way revived these Peircean insights, putting forward an influential theory to
the effect that consensus indeed plays a key role in human praxis, so that the primary task of philosophy is to foster it
by eliminating the disagreement which we constantly have to face in the course of our daily life. In his “communicative theory
of consensus,” furthermore, he claims that human communication rests on an implicit commitment to a sort of “ideal speech
situation” which is the normative foundation of agreement in linguistic matters. Consequently, the quest for consensus is
a constitutive feature of our nature of (rational) human beings: rationality and consensus are tied together. A very strong
consequence derives from Habermas’ premises: were we to abandon the search for consensus we would lose rationality, too, and
this makes us understand that he views the pursuit of consensus as a regulative principle (rather than as a merely practical
objective). Rescher opposes both Peirce’s eschatological view and Habermas’ regulative and idealized one.
|
Benutzer-Konto
DOI URL Update