Download e-book Aging & Becoming: A Reflective Enquiry

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online Aging & Becoming: A Reflective Enquiry file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with Aging & Becoming: A Reflective Enquiry book. Happy reading Aging & Becoming: A Reflective Enquiry Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF Aging & Becoming: A Reflective Enquiry at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF Aging & Becoming: A Reflective Enquiry Pocket Guide.
Dec 7, - Additional information. Notes on contributor. Theresa Wray is an independent scholar. Most recently her work on Irish women's fiction has been.
Table of contents

• Exploring Technology as a Tool for Eliciting and Encouraging Beginning Teacher Reflection
• SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online
• Hello & Welcome

This theory of ideology as distorted communication opens up the possibility of a different relation of theoretical and practical knowledge than Habermas has suggested so far. His approach uses formal pragmatics philosophically to reflect upon norms and practices that are already explicit in justifications in various sorts of argumentation or second-order communication. Such reflection has genuine practical significance in yielding explicit rules governing discursive communication such as rules of argumentation , which in turn can be used for the purpose of designing and reforming deliberative and discursive institutions Habermas , It is easily overlooked that such rules are only part of the story; they make explicit and institutionalize norms that are already operative in correct language use.

Such implicit norms of well-formed and communicatively successful utterances are not identical with the explicit rules of argumentation.

These claims about norms raise two difficulties. First, there is a potential regress of rules, that is, that explicit rules requires further rules to apply them, and so on. Second, this approach cannot capture how norms are often only implicit in practices rather than explicitly expressed Brandom , 18— Here Habermas sides with Pettit in seeing the central function of explicit norms as creating a commons that can serve as the basis for institutionalizing norms, a space in which the content of norms and concepts can be put up for rational reflection and revision Pettit , Habermas Making such implicit norms explicit is thus also the main task of the interpretive social scientist and is a potential source of social criticism; it is then the task of the participant-critic in the democratic public sphere to change them.

There is one more possible role for the philosophically informed social critic. In this section, I have discussed claims that are distinctive of the metaphilosophy of Critical Theorists of both generations of the Frankfurt School and illustrated the ways in which critical normativity can be exercised in their differing models of the critique of ideology. Critical Theorists attempt to fulfill potentially two desiderata at the same time: first, they want to maintain the normativity of philosophical conceptions such as truth or justice, while at the same time they want to examine the contexts in which they have developed and may best be promoted practically.

I argued that the first generation theorists avoided the relativism of sociologies of knowledge such as Mannheim's only to fall into a practical skepticism about the feasibility of agents acting upon such norms in current contexts. This project shifts the goal of critical social inquiry from human emancipation as such, to the primary concern with democratic institutions as the location for the realization of ideals of freedom and equality. The limits on any such realization may prove to be not merely ideological: Critical Theory is also interested in those social facts and circumstances that constrain the realization of the ideal democracy and force us to reconsider its normative content.

While such an account of the relation between facts and norms answers the sociological skepticism of Weber and others about the future of democracy, it may be based on an overly limited account of social facts. Such a positive, expressivist ideal of a social whole is not, however, antiliberal, since it shares with liberalism the commitment to rationalism and universalism.

The next phase in the development of Critical Theory took up the question of antidemocratic trends. This development of the Frankfurt School interpretation of the limits on democracy as an ideal of human freedom was greatly influenced by the emergence of fascism in the s, one of the primary objects of their social research. Much of this research was concerned with antidemocratic trends, including increasingly tighter connections between states and the market in advanced capitalist societies, the emergence of the fascist state and the authoritarian personality.

As first generation Critical Theorists saw it in the s, this process of reification occurs at two different levels. First, it concerned a sophisticated analysis of the contrary psychological conditions underlying democracy and authoritarianism; second, this analysis was linked to a social theory that produced an account of objective, large-scale, and long-term historical processes of reification.

However, this concept is ill suited for democratic theory due to a lack of clarity with regard to the underlying positive political ideal of Critical Theory. As his later and more fully developed normative theory of democracy based on macrosociological social facts about modern societies shows, Habermas offers a modest and liberal democratic ideal based on the public use of reason within the empirical constraints of modern complexity and differentiation.

This social theory may make it difficult for him to maintain some aspects of radical democracy as an expressive and rational ideal that first generation critical theorists saw as a genuine alternative to liberalism. While the emergence of fascism is possible evidence for this fact, it is also an obvious instance in which reliance on the internal criticism of liberalism is no longer adequate.

The shift in the Frankfurt School to such external forms of criticism from onwards is not confined to the fascist state. With the development of capitalism in its monopoly form, the liberal heritage loses its rational potential as the political sphere increasingly functionalized to the market and its reified social relationships.

In this way the critique of liberalism shifts away from the normative underpinnings of current democratic practices to the ways in which the objective conditions of reification undermine the psychological and cultural presuppositions of democratic change and opposition. Rather than being liberating and progressive, reason has become dominating and controlling with the spread of instrumental reason.

Shorn of its objective content, democracy is reduced to mere majority rule and public opinion to some measurable quantity. The argument here is primarily genealogical thus based on a story of historical origin and development and not grounded in social science; it is a reconstruction of the history of Western reason or of liberalism in which calculative, instrumental reason drives out the utopian content of universal solidarity.

Some nondominating, alternative conception is exhibited in Horkheimer's religiously influenced ideal of identification with all suffering creatures or Adorno's idea of mimetic reconciliation with the other found primarily in art Horkheimer ; Adorno These analyses were also complemented by an analysis of the emergence of state capitalism and of the culture industry that replaces the need for consent and even the pseudo-consent of ideology. Some of the more interesting social scientific analyses of fascism that the Frankfurt School produced in this period were relatively independent of such a genealogy of reason.

The first is the analysis of political economy of advanced, administered capitalist societies, with Franz Neumann providing a dissenting view that no state can completely control social and economic processes in the ways that might be more consistent with Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of instrumental reason. Thus, long-term historical cultural development and macro- and micro-sociological trends work against the democratic ideal.

What was needed was an alternative conception of rationality that is not exhausted by the decline of objective reason into subjective self-interest. These shifts permit a more positive reassessment of the liberal tradition and its existing political institutions and open up the possibility of a critical sociology of the legitimation problems of the modern state. On the whole, Habermas marked the return to normative theory united with a broader use of empirical, reconstructive and interpretive social science.

Above all, this version of Critical Theory required fully developing the alternative to instrumental reason, only sketched by Adorno or Horkheimer in religious and aesthetic form; for Habermas criticism is instead grounded in everyday communicative action. Indeed, he cam to argue that the social theory of the first generation, with its commitments to holism, could no long be reconciled with the historical story at the core of Critical Theory: the possible emergence of a more robust and genuine form of democracy.

Habermas's rejection of the explanatory holism of the first generation of the Frankfurt School has both explanatory and normative implications. First, he brings categories of meaning and agency back into critical social theory, both of which were absent in the macro-sociological and depth psychological approaches that were favored in the post war period. This brings democratic potentials back into view, since democracy makes sense only within specific forms of interaction and association, from the public forum to various political institutions.

Second, Habermas also developed an alternative sociology of modernity, in which social differentiation and pluralization are not pathological but positive features of modern societies Habermas , Indeed, the positive conception of complexity permits an analysis of the ways in which modern societies and their functional differentiation opens up democratic forms of self-organization independently of some possible expressively integrated totality.

Such an ideal of an expressive totality and conscious self control over the production of the conditions of social life is replaced with publicity and mutual recognition within feasible discursive institutions. This emphasis on the normative potential of modernity does not mean that modern political forms such as the state are not to be criticized.

• Time Travel Journals;
• Reflective Theory and Practice in Teacher Education | SpringerLink.
• Beauty Shout Box: AGING AND BECOMING - A REFLECTIVE ENQUIRY.
• Beauty Shout Box: AGING AND BECOMING - A REFLECTIVE ENQUIRY | Beauty, Psychology.
• Enders Art of War: An Unofficial Guide to Enders Game;

These crisis tendencies open up a space for contestation and deliberation by citizens and their involvement in new social movements. This criticism of the contemporary state is put in the context of a larger account of the relation between democracy and rationality.

The relevant notion of rationality that can be applied to such a process is procedural and discursive; it is developed in terms of the procedural properties of communication necessary to make public will formation rational and thus for it to issue in a genuine rather than merely de facto consensus.

Democratic institutions have the proper reflexive structure and are thus discursive in this sense. Its purpose in social theory is to provide the basis for an account of cultural rationalization and learning in modernity.

Hello & Welcome

In normative theory proper, Habermas has from the start been suspicious of attempts to apply this fundamentally epistemological criterion of rationality directly to the structure of political institutions. As early as Theory and Practice , Habermas distanced himself from Rousseau's claim that the general will can only be achieved in a direct, republican form of democracy. Indeed democratic principles need not be applied everywhere in the same way Habermas , 32— Instead, the realization of such norms has to take into account various social facts, including facts of pluralism and complexity Habermas , For Habermas, no normative conception of democracy or law could be developed independently of a descriptively adequate model of contemporary society, lest it become a mere ought.

Without this empirical and descriptive component, democratic norms become merely empty ideals and not the reconstruction of the rationality inherent in actual practices. I shall return to the problematic relation of social facts to democratic ideals in the next section in discussing Habermas's account of the philosophy of critical social science. Another way in which this point about democratic legitimacy can be made is to distinguish the various uses to which practical reason may be put in various forms of discourse. Contrary to the account of legitimacy offered in Legitimation Crisis , Habermas later explicitly abandons the analogy between the justification of moral norms and democratic decision-making.

Moral discourses are clearly restricted to questions of justice that can be settled impartially through a procedure of universalization Habermas , 43ff. The moral point of view abstracts from the particular identities of persons, including their political identities, and encompasses an ideally universal audience of all humanity.

Although politics and law include moral concerns within their scope, such as issues of basic human rights, the scope of justification in such practices can be restricted to the specific community of associated citizens and thus may appeal to culturally specific values shared by the participants. There are at least three aspects of practical reason relevant to democratic deliberation: pragmatic, ethical, and moral uses of reason are employed with different objects pragmatic ends, the interpretation of common values, and the just resolution of conflicts and thus also different forms of validity Habermas , 1— Because of this variety, democratic discourses are often mixed and complex, often including various asymmetries of knowledge and information.

Democratic deliberation is thus not a special case of moral judgment with all of its idealizing assumptions, but a complex discursive network with various sorts of argumentation, bargaining, and compromise Habermas , What regulates their use is a principle at a different level: the public use of practical reason is self-referential and recursive in examining the conditions of its own employment. He argues that such a principle is at a different level than the moral principle, to the extent that its aim is primarily to establish a discursive procedure of legitimate law making and is a much weaker standard of agreement.

Nonetheless, even this democratic principle may still be too demanding, to the extent that it requires the agreement of all citizens counterfactually as a criterion of legitimacy. Habermas admits that in the case of cultural values we need not expect such agreement, and he even introduces compromise as a possible discursive outcome of democratic procedures. In this way, what is crucial is not the agreement as such, but how citizens reason together within a common public sphere. The democratic principle in this form expresses an ideal of citizenship rather than a standard of liberal legitimacy.

The internal complexity of democratic discourse does not overcome the problem of the application of the democratic principle to contemporary social circumstances. Such complexity restricts the application of fully democratic justification for a number of reasons: first, it is not possible for the sovereign will of the people by their democratic decision-making powers to constitute the whole of society; and, second, a society formed by merely associative and communicative means of coordination and cooperation is no longer possible.

This objection to radical democracy is thus directed to those theories that do not figure out how such principles can be institutionally mediated given current social facts. This approach to law has important consequences for a critical theory, since it changes how we appeal to democratic norms in criticizing current institutions: it is not clear exactly what the difference is between a radical and a liberal democracy, since some of the limitations on participation are due to the constraints of social facts and not to power asymmetries.

That is, members of the public do not control social processes; qua members of a public, they may exercise influence through particular institutionalized mechanisms and channels of communication. Even given the limits of social complexity, there is still room for judgments of greater or lesser democracy, particularly with regard to the democratic value of freedom from domination. For example, a critical theory of globalization could show that the democratic potential of modern societies is being undermined by neoliberal globalization and denationalization of economic policy.

Such a theory sees the solution here to be the achievement of more democracy at the international level. It is also possible that the critical use of democratic concepts may require reconceptualizing the democratic theory that has informed much of Enlightenment criticism in European societies. Here critical theorists are then simply one sort of participant in the ongoing internal work of redefining the democratic ideal, not simply in showing the lack of its full realization.

Either way, radical democracy may no longer be the only means to social transformation, and indeed we may, with Marcuse, think that preserving the truths of the past, such as democratic constitutional achievements, to be as important as imagining a new future. Given the new situation, Critical Theory could now return to empirical social inquiry to discover new potentials for improving democracy, especially in understanding how it may increase the scope and effectiveness of public deliberation.

In these various roles, critical theorists are participants in the democratic public sphere. To do so would entail a different, perhaps more reflexive notion of critical social inquiry, in which democracy is not only the object of study but is itself understood as a form of social inquiry. Critical Theory would then have to change its conception of what makes it practical and democratic.

In the next two sections, I will discuss two aspects of this transformed conception of Critical Theory. First, I turn to the role of social theory in this more pragmatic account of critical social inquiry. Contrary to its origins in Marxian theoretical realism, I argue for methodological and theoretical pluralism as the best form of practical social science aimed at human emancipation.

Second, I illustrate this conception in developing the outlines of a critical theory of globalization, in which greater democracy and nondomination are its goals. This theory also has a normative side, which is inquiry into democracy itself outside of its familiar social container of the nation state. In this sense, it attempts not just to show constraints but also open possibilities. Critical Theorists have failed not only to take up the challenge of such new social circumstances but also thereby to reformulate democratic ideals in novel ways. I shift first to the understanding of the philosophy of social science that would help in this rearticulation of Critical Theory as critical social inquiry as a practical and normative enterprise.

Such a practical account of social inquiry has much in common with pragmatism, old and new Bohman a, b. As with pragmatism, Critical Theory came gradually to reject the demand for a scientific or objective basis of criticism grounded in a grand theory. This demand proved hard to square with the demands of social criticism directed to particular audiences at particular times with their own distinct demands and needs for liberation or emancipation. The first step was to move the critical social scientist away from seeking a single unifying theory to employing many theories in diverse historical situations.

Rather, it is better to start with agents' own pretheoretical knowledge and self-understandings. The issue for critical social inquiry is not only how to relate pretheoretical and theoretical knowledge of the social world, but also how to move among different irreducible perspectives. The second step is to show that such a practical alternative not only provides the basis for robust social criticism, but also that it better accounts for and makes use of the pluralism inherent in various methods and theories of social inquiry.