Truth and Justification

Jurgen Habermas has developed the theory of communicative action
primarily in the context of critical social and political theory and discourse
ethics. The essays collected in this volume, however, focus on the theory's
implications for epistemology and metaphysics. They address two fundamental issues
that have not figured prominently in his work since the early 1970s. One is the
question of naturalism: How can the ineluctable normativity of the perspective of
agents interacting in a linguistically structured lifeworld be reconciled with the
contingency of the emergence and evolution of forms of life? The other is a key
problem facing epistemological realism after the linguistic turn: How can the
assumption that there is an independently existing world be reconciled with the
linguistic insight that we cannot have unmediated access to "brute" reality?Truth
and Justification collects Habermas's major essays on these topics published since
the mid-1990s. They offer detailed discussions of truth and objectivity as well as
an account of the representational function of language in terms of the
formal-pragmatic framework he has developed. In defending his post-Kantian
pragmatism, Habermas draws on both the continental and analytic traditions and
endorses a weak naturalism and a form of epistemological realism.