Response to Critics

Abstract

Like most books in philosophy, Communicative Action and Rational Choice contains a large number of arguments (six big ones, by my count, plus dozens of smaller ones). Each of these arguments I adhere to with a greater or lesser degree of conviction. Some of them I think are pretty decisive. In other cases, I was doing the philosophical equivalent of throwing things against the wall just to see what sticks. Of course, I did not present things that way in the book, choosing instead to dress up my scruffier arguments in the hope that they might appear to share the same pedigree as my more refined ones. It is thus a testament to the astuteness of my critics here that they have focused their criticism almost entirely on my more tentative arguments—especially my so-called “pragmatic theory of convergence,” which is less a theory than a set of suggestions about how a theory might be constructed. Thus my desire to defend these arguments against criticism, which predominates in what follows, should be understood also as tempered by the recognition that much of what I say may ultimately prove to be unsustainable.