The Foundations of

Social Research
Michael Crotty
Chapter 7
Critical Inquiry Continued
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Research
 Habermas claims that Adorno, in
rejecting identity logic, ‘surrendered
to an uninhibited scepticism
concerning reason.’
 Adorno, according to Habermas
replaced reason with impulse, its
opposite.
 Adorno disagrees claiming that his
project is one that actually seeks to
increase rationality by increasing
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 Tensions between The Institute and
Habermas
 Horkheimer’s hostility and Adorno’s
weakness
 The issue of ‘reason,’ so central to
negative dialectics lies also at the
heart of Habermas’ relationship to
the tradition of the Frankfurt school
he joined in 1956
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 Adorno and Horkheimer (Marcuse as well)
depict Western society as a social and
political economy, at once capitalist and
bureaucratic, which reduces all social
relations to the level of objectified and
commodified administered systems.
 As they see it, the development of this
form of society springs from the
Enlightenment’s understanding of reason
as instrumental rationality
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 This is an understanding that
decisively splits subject from object
and looks, above all else, to gain
control over nature and render it
predictable. On the basis of this
understanding, Horkheimer and
particularly Adorno make refutation
and rejection of identity thinking
pivotal to their critique of capitalist
society.
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 Habermas had never shared the
radically anti-capitalist stance of
Horkheimer and Adorno. Nor does
he want to reject reason as
wholeheartedly as he believes
Adorno has done.
 Seeking a praxis-oriented philosophy
of history, beyond Marxist historical
framework
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 He wants a normative basis for
critical theory
 Positive concept of reason (as
opposed to negative concept)
 Don’t throw out the baby with the
bathwater (see inset p. 142)
 Critiques Marx
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 Habermas posits a distinction between
labor as instrumental action and social
interaction as communicative action.
These two forms of action constitute the
basis for a three-fold typology of human
knowledge.
 Central epistemological tenet: Human
beings constitute their reality and organize
their experience in terms of cognitive (or
‘knowledge-guiding’) interests.
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 Habermas’ Three-Fold Typology of Human
Action
 Empirical Sciences led by a technical interest
in predicting and controlling objectified
processes-This is the realm of instrumental
action
 The historico-hermeneutic sciences (social
sciences) are guided by a practical interest in
achieving intersubjective understanding
 In the critical sciences (psychoanalysis,
philosophy?), which are governed by the intent
to bring about emancipation from the relations
of dependence that ideology in particular has
set in place and that come to appear to us as
natural.
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 Three-Fold Typology in a nutshell:
 The specific viewpoints from which we
can apprehend reality as such in any
way whatsoever are an orientation
toward:
 Technical control
 Mutual understanding

 emancipation
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 Habermas and the linguistic turn
 Language and epistemology very
intertwined
 the web to whose threads subjects cling
and through which they develop into
subjects in the first place
 Today the problem of language has
taken the place of the traditional
problem of consciousness
 What raises us out of nature is the only
thing whose nature we can know:
language.
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 Habermas
 Language-epistemology-
pragmatics/praxis-rationality
 McCarthy quote p. 143 inset
 Systematically distorted
communication
 Theory of communicative
competence
 Ideal speech situation
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 Ideal Speech Situation: one that is free
from systematic distortion, allows
unimpaired self-presentation by
participants, and is characterised by
mutuality of expectations rather than one-
sided norms.
 Discourse is unrestrained and universal
and enables an unconstrained consensus
to emerge whereby the idea of truth can
be analyzed.
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 Habermas: Theory of Discourse/Consensus
theory of truth
 Discourse is distinguished from
communicative action:
 Communicative action is the interaction that
takes place in everyday life and in it claims to
validity are more or less naively accepted.
 Discourse, on the other hand, constitutes an
unusual form of communication in which the
participants subject themselves to the force of
the better argument, with a view of coming to
an agreement about the validity or invalidity of
problematic claims
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 Habermas: In critical inquiry, it is discourse
with which we should be concerned
 In discourse, the beliefs, norms and values
that are taken for granted in everyday
interaction are expressly thematized and
subject to critique
 Discourses become institutionalized for
certain domains: that of practical
questions and political decisions (practico-
politico discourse)
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 Universal Pragmatics and communicative
ethics in Habermas’ thought.
 Where there is consensus about norms that is
free from constraint and representative of the
common good, Habermas is ready to accord it
universality i.e., a normative principle of
universalization.
 The general and unavoidable—in this sense
transcendental—conditions of possible
understanding have a normative content
 The project of discovering and articulating
these conditions is universal pragmatics
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 So Habermas is concerned with
communication competence, social
evolution, systems theory, problem
solving (pragmatics), social learning
and development
 Reenvisioning historical materialism
(ala Marx)
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 Systems problems occur in any given
society
 These create crises and demand a
response
 The systems problems coemerge
with learning processes in response
to them, providing the dynamism of
social development and processes of
history
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 Two dimensions to the processes of
learning in Habermas social evolution
theory
 Moral-practical knowledge (developments in
the relations of production)
 Empirical-analytic knowledge (development in
the forces of knowledge)
 Reenvisioning historical materialism:
 Theory materialist in that it makes reference to
crisis-producing systems problems in the
domain of production and reproduction; and
the analysis remains historically oriented in so
far as it has to seek the causes of evolutionary
changes in the whole range of…contingent
circumstances
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 Focus of Habermas on the collision
between economic and political
imperatives and the communicative
structures of the lifeworld
 Modernity is about justifying subject-
centered reason
 But, philosophy of language
repudiates the subject
 How to reconcile this dilemma?
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 Can the dilemmas of modernity be
reframed in terms of a philosophy of
language and a theory of
communication?
 For Habermas, communicative
reason is not the same as subject-
centered reason
 The structure of communicative
discourse is emancipatory
 We can save modernity.
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 Paulo Freire
 Who was he?
 Reflection without action=‘verbalism’
 Literacy and politics
 Freire does not begin by teaching his
peasant groups the alphabet or by
showing them how to spell words
chosen for them to learn. He
reverses the process. He learns their
language first
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 Conscientisation
 Learn the words that are meaningful to
the people, words that evoke responses
in them i.e., generative words
 Portray words in visual form
 Invite community to discuss
 Dissect these words and put together in
different forms
 People realize they have power over
their words and can exercise power over
them
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 To conscientise is to render conscious
through awakening
 Critical consciousness, critical perception,
critical thinking
 Freire defines critical thinking as “thinking
which discerns an indivisible solidarity
between the world and men.”
 Critical thinking “perceives reality as
process and transformation, rather than as
a static entity”
 It is “thinking which does not separate
itself from action.”
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 There is indivisible solidarity between
humans and their world. No
dichotomy can be made between the
two.
 Authentic reflection considers neither
abstract man nor the world without
men, but men in their relations with
the world.
 We are not only in the world but with
the world, that is, essentially related
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 Through us, the world has come to
consciousness, and so the world is now
subject not merely to natural evolution,
but to an historical revolution in which
human beings have a guiding hand.
 Freedom is not to realise absolute,
abstract ideals as such, but the freedom to
address themselves to their situation.
 To embody freedom in action, a
person/persons must begin with the
relationship they have with their world, the
here and now, the situation with which
they are submerged.
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 They must emerge from that situation,
reflect upon it, and intervene in it.
 Their current state is not unalterable, not
fated, but merely limiting and therefore
challenging.
 As a thinking and free being, the human
being is in the world in a unique way:
because they are thinking, they are
historical, creative, free, and have a
unique human presence on the planet.
 It is never merely a material universe…
what humans do in the world never has
just physical consequences.
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 In constantly transforming the
environment, women and men
are shaping the very conditions
of their existence and their life.
 Human beings have no nature, what
they have is history
 There is no history for men, there is
only history of men, made by men
and in turn making them.
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 Freire’s epistemology rejects:
 Mechanistic objectivism, wherein
consciousness is considered to be
merely a copy of objective reality
 And solipsism, which reduces the world
to a capricious creation of consciousness
 We must recognize the unity between
subjectivity and objectivity in the act of
knowing. Reality is never simply the
objective datum, but is also peoples
perception of it.
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 Implications of Freire’s Epistemology
 Intentionality: The intentionality of
consciousness means that consciousness is
never a mere reflection of material reality, but
is a reflection upon material reality
 Consciousness is already an active
intervention into reality.
 Critical reflection is already action.
 Both activism and serious reflection are thus
necessary in true praxis. They must also be
simultaneous. Then they become creative.
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 If humans are to take charge as
subjects and not as mere objects of
their own history, what direction are
they to give to that history?
 If they must intervene in the reality
of their own situation, to what end
are they to intervene?
 What kind of transformation are they
to effect?
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 Humanization
 The historic task of human beings,
and their central problem as well, is
to become more fully human.
 Dehumanization is both a possibility
and a historical reality
 Unlike animals, who cannot be de-
animalized, humans can be
dehumanized.
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 Humans can fail to become fully human
and can become less human in fact via
exploitation, oppression, and through all
forms of injustice, marking (and I would
say dehumanizing) both those whose
humanity is stolen and those who have
stolen it.
 The great humanistic task of the
oppressed is not only to liberate and
humanize themselves, but to liberate and
humanize their oppressors as well.
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 Conscienticization
 This is not an individual enterprise (even
epistemologically speaking)
 Concienticization does not take place in
abstract beings but in real people and in
real social structures.
 The pursuit of full humanity cannot be
carried out in isolation or in
individualism, but can only take place in
fellowship and in solidarity.
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 Conscienticization requires dialogue
 Action/reflection need dialogue in
order to occur
 Liberation cannot occur without
dialogue
 Dialogue cannot exist without critical
thinking (and vice versa)
 The banking concept of learning…vs.
pedagogy of the oppressed
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 Who are the oppressed? To Freire?
 The masses upon whom, within
culturally alienated societies, a regime
of oppression is imposed by the power
elites.
 What did Freire discover about the
concept of the “third world” when he
went to the United States?
 The oppressed belong to the culture of
silence
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 In the culture of silence, the
oppressed are muted. They have no
voice. The are excluded from any
active role in the transformation of
their society and are therefore
prohibited from being.
 What is worse is that not only do
they not have a voice, they are most
likely not aware that they do not
have a voice
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 In the culture of silence, the
oppressed internalize their
oppression…what does this mean?
 In emerging from the culture of
silence, donor-recipient solutions will
fail, why?
 There must be dialogue, requiring
trust (but not naïve trust) in the
oppressed and their ability to reason
 Dialogue engages in
problematization
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 Problematicization requires
demythicization
 Summary of critical inquiry on page
157, 158: How does it compare with
my summary at the beginning of this
section?