Identity, Intersubjectivity and Communicative Action :: Philosophy Hume Papers

Identity, Intersubjectivity and Communicative ActionTraditionally, attempts to verify communications between individuals and cultures appeal to familiar objects, essential structures of experience, or world-wide reason. Contemporary continental philosophy demonstrates that not only such appeals, but fortuitously also the very conception of isolated individuals and cultures whose communication such appeals were intentional to insure, be problematic. Indeed we encounter and understand ourselves, and are also originally constituted, in relation to others. In view of this the traditional problem of communication is modify and becomes that of how we are sufficiently differentiated from one another such that communication might appear problematic. Following Humes recognition that we tricknot in principle have some(prenominal) experience of an experience transcending objectivity as such, Husserls Phenomenological Epoche (1) suspends judgement on whether or not such a realm of things- in-themselves exists. Thus our experiences of material objects and descriptions thereof can no more be shown to correspond to such an objective standard than can our experiences and descriptions of immaterial objects and conscious states. Consequently interpersonal and intercultural communications concerning the supposedly public objects etc. of the material world seem no less problematic than Wittgenstein (2) and others have shown communication concerning the private objects of the immaterial world (of fantasies, dreams etc.) to be.Accepting that we cannot establish the objectivity of our experiences content, Kant nevertheless attempts to resist a slide into relativism by insisting that they are mediated by rationally delineated categories which supposedly insure the transcendental or universal nature of their form, thereby providing an absolute standard against which we might check the veridicality of our descriptions of, and communications concerning, them. However as a priori pr econditions of the possibility of experience such categories are obviously inexperienceable in themselves, and consequently must also fall to the phenomenological reduction. (3) Nevertheless, a moments reflection will confirm that our experiences do indeed exhibit structure or form, and that we are able, even from within, or wholly upon the basis of, the (phenomenologically reduced) realm of, our experiences per se, to distinguish between the flux of constantly changing and interrupted subjective appearances, and the relatively unchangeable and continuously existing objects constituted therein. Husserl confirms... cognitive acts, more generally, any mental acts, are not isolated particulars, coming or going in the electric current of consciousness without any interconnections. As they are ESSENTIALLY related to one another, they display a teleological coherence and corresponding connections ... And on these connections, which present an lucid unity a great deal depends.