Dissertation
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Dissertation Abstract Communicative Rationality and the Future of Science In these three case studies, I investigate the communicative mechanisms by which new knowledge in science is validated, using Jürgen Habermas's model of communicative rationality as a standard. In the first case, I analyze the criteria by which scientists differentiate between utterances that are oriented toward the pursuit of truth and those that are oriented toward some other goal, such as, in this case, a profit motive. I argue that these standards regulate and are regulated in science by a system of communicative rationality that represents a functional synthesis of the rhetorical process with dialectic procedures and logical arguments. In the second case, I explore the ways in which rhetorical conventionalizing devices, such as genre labels, function to typify specific texts and thereby bring those texts into alignment with epistemic value standards. I argue that this typification procedure mediates the essential tension in science between the epistemic authority of the sensing individual and that of the validating collective. In the third case, I analyze an instance of meta-analysis of the pharmacokinetics literature to inquire into the processes by which consensus in science is achieved and maintained. I argue that consensus in a truth-oriented system, such as science, is the necessary result of communicative rationality, which mediates crises in the conditionality of knowledge intrinsic to the situated instrumental contacts with the material world that are necessitated by the realist commitments of scientists. In my concluding chapter, I argue that Habermas's model of communicative rationality posits a feasible functional synthesis among subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity that regulates rational action in enterprises that, like science, are oriented toward truth. I conclude that understanding the communicative rationality of truth-oriented action systems requires a radical revision of ontological standards, so that truth is reconceived not as a condition that obtains in the subject/object relation but rather as a socially normative ideal that regulates an internal connection between teleologic, propositional, and communicative rationality. |
