Truth and Justification

How can the norms that underpin the linguistically structured world in which we live be brought into step with the contingency of the development of socio-cultural forms of life? How can the idea that our world exists independently of our attempts to describe it be reconciled with the insight that we can never reach reality without the mediation of language and that 'bare' reality is therefore unattainable?

In Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas answered these questions with reference to a weak naturalism and a transcendental-pragmatic realism. Since then, however, he has developed a formal pragmatic theory which is based on an analysis of speech acts and language use. In this new volume Habermas takes up the philosophical questions of truth, objectivity and reality from the perspective of his linguistically-based pragmatic theory. The final section addresses the limits of philosophy and reassesses the relation between theory and practice from a perspective that could be described as 'post-Marxist'.

This volume, now available in paperback as well, by one of the world's leading philosophers will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy, social theory and the humanities and social sciences generally.

Translator's Introduction

Introduction: Realism after the Linguistic Turn

1. Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy: Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn

2. From Kant's "Ideas" of Pure Reason to the "Idealizing" Presuppositions of Communicative Action: Reflections on the Detranscendentalized "Use of Reason"

3. From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom's Pragmatic Philosophy of Language

4. From Kant to Hegel and Back Again: The Move toward Detranscendentalization

5. Norms and Values: On Hilary Putnam's Kantian Pragmatism

6. Rightness versus Truth: On the Sense of Normative Validity in MoraiJudgments and Norms

7. The Relationship between Theory and Practice Revisited

Notes

Index