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he work of Karl-Otto Apel concerns about the conditions of possibility of both knowledge and ethics as given into the "argumentation". In other words, the transcendental conditions without which there is neither valid nor possible knowledge are the same conditions of possibility of the argumentation or the effective linguistic communication. The transcendental condition of possibility is no more the ultimate conditions of consciousness, which would lead to solipsism - according to the author-, but the language itself, which become by its turn the "ultimate foundation". Language is, for that reason, pragmatically understood as a "communicative action between speakers", indicating here a philosophical filiation with some former theses from the John Searle's book Speech Acts. With this innovative proposal, Apel intends to move the Kantian paradigm from the transcendental consciousness to the language a priori. The first advantage of this move, according to him, is that the former transcendental conditions become now "public" a priori, no more solipsistic nor "individualized", as he maintains. Language is always sociologically prevalent. For this very reason, Apel fixes the limits of the "a priori" inside the outlines of an ultimate consensus of an ideal community of communication. So, Apel's transcendental argument is characterized as "pragmatic" in the sense that the reference to a linguistic a priori is also a reference to a "communicative action". Any communicative action brings immediately a virtual agreement between speaker and hearer by which result the senses or meanings of linguistic signs. Communicative action means the achievement of a consensus between speaker and hearer. A consensus ruled by semantic determinations previously established by social convention through the ideal community of communication. Any argumentation has, says Apel, a double structure represented by the propositional content of what is being said and the performative content of what is being meant through the employment of determined words committed to certain validity pretensions. According to such parameters, a statement like "there is no truth" is wrong because it is involved in a performative-propositional self-contradiction. Such a statement has a pretension to "the truth that there is no truth". Surely its truth is also the negation of what is being asssumed by its performative action. In that case, the performative content is a pretension to an universal truth, and the propositional content is an assertion that precludes such possibility. Due to the fact that we are aprioristically conditioned to linguistic conventions without which our phrases and actions have no meaning, Apel makes reference to an ultimate foundation of the communicative action. The ultimate foundation is on the semantic-transcendental level. Precisely this is the very ultimate limit of both epistemology and ethics. For Apel, even epistemoligical schools like the Popperian Fallibilism must be subsumed under the parameters of an "ultimate foundation". Some disciples of Popper, particularly those integrated into the so-called Pancritical Rationalism movement - Hans Albert, Gerard Radnitzky, and William W. Bartley, III -, strongly disagreed with Apel's thesis about the ultimate foundation, claiming that criticism could not be limited by any other concept if it is to be effective. This is the only way one could avoid justificationism or dogmatism. In response to these claims, Apel denounced the Pancritical Rationalism's self-contradictions, trying to establish by indirect proof the soundness of his own philosophical arguments. Fallibilism, says Apel, is also ruled by an utmost limit related to its action and discourse, beyond which it is impossible to get: an Ultimate Foundation. It would be correct to think that transcendental conditions of knowledge could bring us to the supposition of an ultimate foundation quite in opposition to a radical fallibilism? Click on the button "Loparic" above to go next. |
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