Beyond Justification: Habermas, Rorty and the Politics of Cultural Change

Theory, Culture and Society 31 (6):103-123 (2014)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Although Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty both reject the traditional picture of cultural change in which intellectuals are supposed to have the ‘last word’ on cultural issues and envisage cultural changes as the result of ‘dialogue’ or ‘conversation’ between them and the lay public, they nevertheless end up espousing different pictures of cultural change because of their totally different conception of the role and function of language, truth and rationality in such dialogue. In the first two sections of this article, I will recount Habermas’s critique of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism and the latter’s responses to it so that they can reveal the core issues of the debate. In the third section, I will argue that, as a ‘sociologized version’ of Rorty’s philosophy, Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of social performance provides us with a sociological framework that makes possible a wide range of empirical studies of cultural change.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 100,676

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-09-03

Downloads
13 (#1,316,561)

6 months
3 (#1,470,969)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

Notes from the Playground.Maura Striano - 2020 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 12 (1).

Add more citations

References found in this work

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.David Bohm - 1964 - Philosophical Quarterly 14 (57):377-379.
Philosophy and Social Hope.Richard Rorty - 1999 - Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 58 (3):714-716.
Respuesta a Jürgen Habermas.Richard Rorty - 2000 - In Robert Brandom (ed.), Rorty and His Critics. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.

View all 15 references / Add more references