Truth, Objectivity, and Experience after the Pragmatic Turn: Bernstein on Habermas’s “Kantian Pragmatism”

Abstract

In his recent book The Pragmatic Turn, Richard Bernstein provides a richly textured account of what he calls the “pragmatic sea change” that has been taking place over the past 50 years as philosophers have taken up many of the themes explored by the classic American pragmatists.1 He also points to the influence of pragmatism for many German thinkers since the end of the Second World War as evidence of its growing international significance, citing Karl-Otto Apel and Hans Joas, for instance, as having written some of the best work on Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead, respectively.2 But the German figure whose work gets the most attention in the book is Jurgen Habermas, whom Bernstein includes, along with Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty, among the three “most important thinkers shaped by the pragmatic tradition” (p. xi). Certainly Habermas has long been sympathetic with American pragmatism. Peirce was an early influ- ence on his views in epistemology, and Mead was a significant influ- ence on his theory of communicative action and discourse ethics.3 It was only in the late 1990s, however, that Habermas labeled his own position “Kantian pragmatism.” This relabeling coincided with a shift from his long-standing focus on how to realize the linguistic and prag- matic turns in practical philosophy (in a social theory of action and rationality, and in moral, legal, and political theory) towards doing the same for issues in theoretical philosophy related to realism and naturalism. From his essay on “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn” (1996) to the essays collected in Truth and Justification (2003), Habermas has