Paradigm shift & Educational Research
I have found the best book yet to introduce Habermas’ ideas: The Force of Reason by Arie Brand. As digging into the Theory of Communicative Action, while engaging at first, soon became a cure for my insomnia (no offense to Habermas actually…my brain just got tired).
I like this book because it really contextualizes Habermas in contrast with others in the Frankfurt School, especially Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno. As I have only a limited background in philosophy, this in invaluable “setting” of the scene to better understand the importance of communicative action in the context of where it arose from (which would, in essence, be especially critical when in a philosophy that fueled the “historicizing” of knowledge).
Brand credits Habermas with the paradigm shift from the focus on the philosophy of consciousness on the part of Weber and friends. Philosophy of consciousness as I understand it is rooted in the premise of rationalization, ie, the pursuit of scientific, objective knowledge. However, as the rise of this rationalization or scientific knowledge occurred, resulting in a decline in religious influence in the world, humans were left with a void—as science cannot systematically explain our existence.
Skipping ahead slightly, essentially Habermas rejects philosophy of consciousness as a foundation of critical theory because ultimately, the end result of the Frankfurt School’s argument is a breakdown of an individual’s subjectivity and uniqueness. In this paradigm, a person can have only two sorts of relationships with other objects (I assume this to include people– and I suspect that Heidegger’s idea of bestandt is important here when he talks about the danger of viewing other human beings as resources instead of people.) Thus, Habermas shifts to communicative action as a new foundation for critical theory. From this viewpoint, he is shifting from a subject-object focus in philosophy of consciousness to a subject-subject interaction, where shared understanding is the focus.
What else is informative in this first chapter setting the stage for communication theory is the tremendous impact that this paradigm shift has had for research. Essentially this shift in thinking brought out by the Frankfurt School’s thinkers radically suggests that there is no absolute “scientific” knowledge. Essentially, the author equates philosophy of consciousness (poc) with logical empiricism and in rejecting poc, Habermas radically changed how many view knowledge, a major result being: “the widespread conviction of the relativity of all knowledge and the…belief in the untenability of the concept of truth.
This is particularly pertinent as a researcher in education. Recently (in the last 50 years or so), education research has tried to “scienc-ify” itself (my own neologism). This has led to a great rift between those doing quantitative and qualitative research because essentially, the whole construct of these two branches of research are like night and day philosophically. While there is value in viewing statistics and interpreting them, I truly believe that 1) the interpretation of these numbers can as easily be as biased as any interpretation of qualitative data, as can the formulations of questions in a survey. 2) The formulation of knowledge is complex and subjective—what one would call constructivist or probably more often socially constructivist (and I wonder if this term is also related with Habermas’ social action theory) and for that reason it is important to try to understand how another person is experiencing something—and this can even be more informative in case study form. Personally, I find a mixed design ideal in that one can present a view of a statistical trend, but then also have that rich data to provide a more thorough interpretation.
So there goes Habermas, bringing communicative action in to radically reconceptualize our perceptions of ourselves in the world, to redefine rationality and to remind grad students like myself that we’re not as smart as we think we are.