Academic literature on the topic 'Habermas’s Ideal Speech Situation'

Virtually all of our knowledge is second-hand, learned from others. In ideal deliberative settings, such as Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’, learning from others works well because participants are challenged to provide evidence and be consistent in their arguments. Not all real-world deliberation lives up to such high standards, but even non-ideal deliberation can be epistemically advantageous. We investigate five ways how: by improving voter competence; by reducing positive correlation; by incentivizing more sincere voting; by making the decision problem more truth-conducive; and by chan

Web 2.0 technologies, which allow interactions between the producers and consumers of information, have important implications for how urban spaces are designed and governed. Spatial information on the web has become increasingly wikified, so that non-planners may contribute data, photos, and opinions in a variety of ways, a process that labeled neogeography (and which is closely related to participatory GIS). For example, websites such as GoogleMaps have greatly democratized the process of constructing and using spatial data. This process implies that planners are no longer the privileged producers of information about urban space. A case study of Brión, Galicia, is offered to illustrate this process in practice. Web 2.0 and neogeography have greatly elevated the philosophical significance of planning information: rather than received wisdom, users may construct their own communities of truth. The chapter argues this process resembles Habermas’s notion of an ideal speech situation. The conclusion argues that Web 2.0 and the growth of neogeography imply that planning must be more inclusive and democratic in nature.

As a form of moral debate, discourse ethic, according to Habermas, is based on regulated discussion. Participating moral agents share a common understanding in the ideal speech situation. Following procedures they try to reach consensus on questions of justice and rights. Critics of discourse ethic point to the bias of Western assumptions regarding agents and methods, the danger of elitism, and the optimism and the pacifism that run through the theory. After modification, Habermas distinguishes two types of discourse: the discourse of justification and the discourse of application. The second is inferior to the first. In the second, there is room for negotiating. There is another way of looking at negotiation, one that takes negotiating seriously as an important category of human behavior. This category shows an interesting overlap with moral behavior. Distinguishing four concepts of negotiating and using reciprocity and trust as the moral minimum, Negotiating Ethics is presented as a two level moral debate, close to Habermas but morally different in essential aspects.

Contemporary technology in the form of electronically managed interactive telecommunications is compatible with the goals and values of the humanities. For Marx, machine-work tended toward being mechanically routine, repetitive, deskilled, and trivialized. In the case of discourse, the same criticism has been made of computerized communication. Immediacy is not authorial presence, but the experience of textuality that is maximized by participation in interactive communication. Bulletin board technology inverts the relationship between the degree of communicative interaction and the number of communicants. It is both mass communication and individualized participation. From the point of view of a theory of discourse, the bulletin board system is unique in that the ratio between the number of participants and the individualized nature of the interaction is directly proportional. One person's voice does not inhibit or repress the voice of another. It is the technological embodiment of the ideal speech situation of Habermas which allows for the maximum of democratic participation and which, by allowing everyone to have a voice, allows for the greatest amount of dissensus and dialectic.

Just how much confidence should we place in published research findings, even if peer reviewed? What should we ignore, reject, modify, incorporate, pursue? To answer these questions, the sciences and the humanities must be continually in the business of keeping the record of knowledge straight at the edge, an enterprise the Internet can fruitfully enhance. Accordingly, this chapter looks at some Internet-based possibilities concerning this postpublication process: watch­dog blogs in the sciences, blogs and discussion forums in the sciences and humanities, and book and article reviews in the humanities. For these activities, as for peer review, Habermas’s ideal speech situation provides a useful theoretical framework. The goal is the same: the achievement of rational consensus concerning the originality, significance, argumentative competence, and clarity of expression of the work in question. After reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—after the sweeping “Prologue,” the dramatic “Pardoner’s Tale,” the raucous “Miller’s Tale,” the sermon that is the “Parson’s Tale”—readers come upon what may well be the world’s first “Retraction Notice”: . . . Now I pray to all who hear or read this little treatise, that if there is anything in it that they like, they thank our Lord Jesus Christ for it, from whom proceeds all wisdom and goodness. And if there is anything that displeases them, I pray also that they attribute it to inadvertence rather than intent. I would have done better if I could. For the Bible says, “All that is written is written to support the teaching our faith” and that is what I wish to do. Therefore I beseech you meekly, for the mercy of God, that you pray for me that Christ have mercy on me and forgive my sins, especially my translations and works of worldly vanity, which I revoke in my retractions. . . . In acknowledging error, some editors of science journals lack the poet’s candor. One minced no words, responding to a request from the editors of the blog “Retraction Watch”—Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky—for reasons that a paper was retracted with the following terse comment: “It’s none of your damn business.”

Chapter 1 provides an ethnography and analysis of women’s peacebuilding initiatives in Palestine, tracking the ways in which the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and the liberal Women, Peace and Security agenda was interpreted and implemented there. After the Oslo Accords, foreign donors but also some scholarly analysts have displayed a peculiar fascination with peacebuilding initiatives between Palestinian and Israelis. Such joint peace initiatives often are legitimized in the international community with reference to the UNSCR 1325, but they have become few and lack social support and impact in Palestine. Countering liberal approaches to peace, politics, and the public sphere, including Habermas’s notion of ideal speech, this chapter argues that joint Palestinian and Israeli women’s peacebuilding in fact constitutes an attempt to discipline rather than to strengthen women’s political activism in Palestine.