Chapter 3. Assessment results
3.2 Threatened and Endemic species
We argued that Habermas does not directly engage in the question as to how a global political culture can be the basis of a dialogic world society. While the efforts of other scholars have paved the way for using Habermas' communicative rationality to address the role of inter-civilisational dialogue in such a global cultural preparation,237 we need to examine the epistemological capacity of communicative rationality for initiating such an inter-civilisational dialogue.
Habermas’ communicative epistemology views the mechanism of the ‘the force of better arguments’ as its epistemic logic for emerging an inter-subjective (societal)
235 Marc Lynch, "The Dialogue of Civilisations and International Public Sphere," 29 (2) (2000), p.317.
236 Ibid., p.330.
237 For other scholarly efforts in this line of thought, see Alexander Anievas, "Critical Dialogues:
Habermasian Social Theory and International Relations", Politics, 25 (3), (2005), pp.135-143.; M.
Weber, "Engaging Globalisation: Critical Theory and Global Political Change", Alternatives 27 (2002) pp.301-325. ; D.L. Jones, "The Global and the Local: 'System' and 'Lifeword' in the Study of World Order," Co-operation and Conflict, 36 (3) (2001) pp .296-305., and James Bohman "The Globalisation of the Public Sphere", Philosophy & Social Criticism, 24 (2/3) (1998), pp.199-216.
consensus.238 The communicative epistemology implies that humans’ equal access to linguistic ability of speaking with each other provides an epistemic competence239 for solving their conflicts of opinions, either at a national or at a global level. However, it seems that we need to go beyond this linguistic ability to address the possibility of a rational dialogue amongst civilisations.240 As argued in chapters 1 and 2, this thesis employs ‘critical rationalism’ as its epistemological theory of a rational dialogue amongst civilisations. According to this theory--as a conjectural theory of rationality--our ability for a rational dialogue with each other, either at the national or at an inter-civilisational scale, originates from our equal access to critical rationality.
Critical rationality refers to (a) our ability to respect the regulative idea of truth;
(b) our ability to formulate valid deductive arguments, and (c) our ability to test our deductive conjectures through falsifying evidence. These epistemic competences enable us to shape a rational dialogue among ourselves. Chapter 2 argued about this conjectural theory of rationality (P1TTEEP2). This thesis finds this conjectural theory of rationality a powerful explanatory theory for addressing the functions of a rational dialogue amongst civilisations. It aims to address the mechanism of dialogue of civilisations through opening their systems of rationale to mutual criticism. Donald Nielsen criticises Habermas’ communicative epistemology due to its insufficiencies to provide a historical sociology of civilisations. He writes:
Habermas’s theory appears to rest on the redemption of validity claims to truth, rightness, and authentic subjectivity through discourse oriented to understanding and agreement via the force of better reason. … the force of the better reason, in general or in abstract, cannot be a basis for a notion of consensual agreement and emancipation from distorted communication, because it depends itself on prior concrete historical-civilisational definitions of what can possibility count as a better reason. However, these collective definitions of what can count as the better reason are open in different civilisations to varying degrees of public discursive examinations. …Indeed, is it likely that a ‘paradigm of language’ can provide at all the general foundations for sociology… 241
238 See Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, (trans.) Thomas McCarthy, (UK, Blackwell: 1981), pp.1-77.
239 For an analysis of Habermas’s communicative epistemology as an especial reading of 'philosophy of language', see David Rasmussen, Reading Habermas, (1990), pp .18-55.
240 For a critic of applying Habermas’s dialogic politics in international relations see C. Rustin,
"Habermas, Discourse Ethics and International Justice," Alternatives, 24 (1999), pp.167-192., and for a reply to the critics see: Andrew. Linklater, "Dialogic Politics and the Civilising Process," Review of International Studies, (2005), 31, pp.141-154.
241 Donald A. Nielsen, “A Theory of Communicative Action or a Sociology of Civilisations? A Critique of Jurgen Habermas”, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 1 (1) (1987), pp .162 and 165.
The thesis aims to employ Critical Rationalism as its epistemological foundation for the development of a critical macrosociology of dialogic globalisation. Replacing communicative rationality with critical rationality provides us with a new logic and a new explanatory framework for addressing the function of dialogue of civilisations as a mechanism of the transformation of the existing contradictory globalisation towards a humane globalisation. Perhaps a key contribution of a critical rationalist theory of dialogue of civilisations is that: It recognises different civilisational-based systems of rationale, and it argues that opening these systems of rationale to mutual criticism can lead them to a global social learning from mutual errors (P1TTEEP2). It argues that it can lead them to a higher level of global critical rationality that provides a normative foundation for an open global society of free and equal peoples.
However, the development of critical macrosociology of globalisation based on such a theory of dialogue of civilisations calls for a new normative ideal type of global society. The next chapter uses critical rationalism to introduce this new ideal type: the idea of an open global society. This new normative vision of global society provides us with a new analysis of globalisation’s societal deficits.
The main function of this chapter was to show how different normative ideal types of global community lead us to diverse normative critiques of globalisation. However, it also provided a good base for addressing the question of how the ideal type of an open global society must introduce a new normative logic for arriving at a global consensus about an alternative global order.