Was Habermas Ced Nature To The Positivists

In Did Habermas Cede Nature to the Positivists?, Gordon Mitchell creates a philosophical discussion concerning the validity of Jürgen Habermas’s “colonization of the lifeworld” thesis. Habermas’s thesis sought to elucidate the implications of society’s propensity for “converting social issues into technical problems” that require resolutions based off a “scientific mode of decision-making” (Mitchell, 1). This mechanical mode of thinking stems from the idea that science is objective in nature, in which there is always a right way and a wrong way. However, Habermas argues that “joint communicative action by deliberating citizens would yield more appropriate and legitimate judgments” in the field of social sciences (Mitchell, 1). Although many

First, he examines the objective nature of science by drawing upon Nagel’s view that “the tradition of science as a practice produces knowledge out of a ‘view from nowhere’” (Mitchell, 3). This view would suggest that science comes from within the individual, in which their subjective ideas alone would formulate an objective truth that is accepted. Yet, from the time we are children, we are being fed information that is continuously processed and interpreted, which comes together in order to create a coherent, subjective formation of reality and influence how and what we think. Thus, the validity of Nagel’s claim is undermined because our interpretations are based on the ideas that are passed down to us, which work together to create knowledge. It follows that the objectivity of knowledge should be reinterpreted as “a collective property of discursive interchange” (Mitchell, 4). As a result, this enables a broader discussion on the effects that discursive interchange can bring about within the field of science. Longino provides evidence to this claim

For example, Mitchell dedicates an entire paragraph to Habermas’s suggestion that “the university is a key launching point for political dialogue in the public sphere” (Mitchell, 15). He continues to lay out the ways in which it has the possibility of benefiting the society as a whole. Yet, Mitchell criticizes universities for “eroding the conditions necessary for communities to claim validly that their data deserve the marker of scientific objectivity” by focusing on maximizing corporate profits and the potential for grants (Mitchell, 16). Thus, can universities be entrusted with politically effective discourse if they can not even be trusted in their means of natural