Ultimate reason

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The ultimate justification in philosophy , theology and philosophy of science is the return of validity claims with regard to truth and certainty to the ultimate secure basis. A strategy of justification with the claim to self- justification and ultimate justification usually considers an unconditional beginning to be indispensable.

The concept of a “final” justification was already reflected in Plato and Aristotle and repeatedly examined in the course of the history of philosophy. Important older approaches to putting thinking on a secure basis can be found in Anselm von Canterbury , Descartes , Karl Leonhard Reinhold , in German Idealism ( Fichte , Schelling , Hegel ) and Jakob Friedrich Fries .

In his late philosophy, the philosopher Edmund Husserl also subscribes to “science based on absolute justification” . In addition to Hugo Dingler , Karl-Otto Apel , Vittorio Hösle , Wolfgang Kuhlmann and Harald Holz are considered to be the ultimate justification theorists .

The representatives of critical rationalism in particular criticize the ultimate justification.

Directions of ultimate justification

A final justification begins with a valid basis. This starting point is definitely justified and therefore no longer capable of a later refutation or falsification . Rather, one thinks further from this foundation without a circle and always falls back on it when giving reasons . As the first truths or fundamental truths are at least since the Scholastics the evidence seen. They themselves are neither provable nor refutable, since every proof already presupposes them.

According to Descartes , the secure theoretical basis consists exclusively of the knowledge that I think and am, since I cannot assume not to be without thinking.

With the transcendentally pragmatic argument, Karl-Otto Apel tries to justify that people who talk about their purposes must also make them available in the discourse, because otherwise they will enter into a performative self-contradiction . From this, Apel develops a discourse ethic that can ultimately be justified by the aforementioned disposition of purposes. According to Apel, a theory is ultimately justified when it cannot be negated without self-contradiction.

Similar to Apel holds Jurgen Habermas it as part of his universal pragmatics possible that discourse ethics to substantiate by an ideal speech situation (the basic standard of reasonable speech) and legitimize. This goes hand in hand with a consensus theory of truth . In contrast to Apel, Habermas strives for a minimalist interpretation of the transcendental.

The above approaches all use the argumentation figure of retorsion . In protophysics ( Hugo Dingler ) an attempt is made to reach the beginning of the sciences by safeguarding the measuring device standards. From this, the physics - which is dependent on measurements - is ultimately justified. In fundamental theology , Hansjürgen Verweyen uses the philosophical proof of a final reason to show that a Christian understanding of revelation is "perceptible" for human reason (cf. natural theology ).

Lifeworld as a founding authority

Rene Descartes' philosophy begins with the doubting 'I think', on which he ultimately bases his philosophy. In Edmund Husserl's late work , in the critical reception of the Cartesian beginning, a predicative evidence is taken as the beginning. The living world is in Husserl this letztbegründende initial instance. Husserl developed the term in his work The Crisis of the European Sciences and the Transcendental Phenomenology as part of his reflections on the general “Crisis of the European Sciences”. According to Husserl, the positive and empirical sciences blinded people in the age of industrialization in the 19th century:

Husserl sees the cause of this crisis in the fact that it has been forgotten that all science is based on the lifeworld. The lifeworld is the natural, unquestioned ground for all everyday actions and thinking as well as all scientific theorizing and philosophizing. It is the "primordial sphere" - not only because it existed without the modern conception of science with its objective concept of truth, but also because many of the lifeworld senses and validities must necessarily be assumed for any scientific argument.

Transcendental Pragmatics

In contemporary philosophy, the representatives of transcendental pragmatics , especially Karl-Otto Apel and Wolfgang Kuhlmann , have spoken out most clearly in favor of the possibility of ultimate justification . Jürgen Habermas provided a similar justification approach, but without mentioning the ultimate justification.

The basis of the transcendental pragmatic ultimate justification approach is the speech act theory founded by John Austin and John Searle . According to this, the basic units of human speech represent speech acts. Provided they are propositionally differentiated, they have a “peculiar double structure” which is of decisive importance for the final justification argumentation: a propositional component, the actual content of the statement ( locutive act ), and a performative component , the intention with which the content of the statement is expressed ( illocutive act ). As a rule, the illocutive act is only implicit in a speech act. According to the Searleschen “principle of expressibility”, there is the possibility of explicating every illocutive act and making it accessible through argumentation.

According to the transcendental pragmatists, a statement is finally justified precisely when its doubt leads to a “performative contradiction”, ie. H. the content of the illocutive act i contradicts the content of the proposition p. As examples, Apel and Kuhlmann cite, among other things, the non-contradiction principle, the indubitable existence of my self and a communication community.

For example, someone who denies the principle of non-contradiction asserts “at the same time the opposite of his assertion” and can thus “no longer take his assertion as an assertion”. Similarly, the doubt that I exist can be explicated in the performative utterance “I hereby - now - doubt that I exist”, which represents a performative contradiction between illocution and proposition. Furthermore, according to the transcendental pragmatists, every doubt is based on the assumption of a real communication community to which I present my doubts and the assumption of an ideal communication community that is in principle able to "adequately understand the meaning of my arguments and to definitely judge their truth".

The foundations of ethics can also be justified in this way. Insofar as we seriously engage in arguing at all, which includes denying it, we can no longer step back behind our will to rational argument. The goal of every argument is that we really want to know something in order to have "certainty" that the attempt at solving the problem in question is "really the right (optimally achievable) solution". According to transcendental pragmatics, however, we can only achieve such certainty if we strive for a "solution that everyone could agree to, for a reasonable consensus" to solve a problem.

From the perspective of transcendental pragmatics, every illocutive act of a speech act contains a knowledge of action. Its contents can be shown by the method of “strict reflection”, that is, the reflection on “thematizing [a proposition] itself”; the implicit knowledge of action (the “know-how” of arguing) thus becomes explicit knowledge of action (“know-that”).

For Apel and Kuhlmann, the implicit knowledge of action is infallible, since it is constitutive for every speech act. With regard to the explication of this practical knowledge, however, their positions diverge. While for Apel there is no "infallibility of any person" - not even with regard to the reconstruction of our action knowledge, for Kuhlmann this is infallible for at least one core area: For the reconstruction of our action knowledge we do not need to set up any empirical and therefore fallible theories about it from outside but would rather have the paradoxical case that it is "the object of research itself [...] that produces explicit knowledge of itself".

Methodical measurement theory

The German philosopher Hugo Dingler developed a non-empirical theory of measurement ( protophysics ). According to Dingler, an operation may only make use of aids that are also already operationally constructed and justified (full justification). The initial steps of this methodical chain are defined in Dingler's operativism through recourse to standardized actions. For example, the 'flatness' of bodies is pre-empirically determined by the standardized production of flat surfaces. If three surfaces are alternately abraded against each other, they cannot become concave or convex (so-called Dingler's three-plate process).

Such beginnings of the sciences are to be made with Dingler before the measurements and cannot be falsified by them. They establish the structure of the sciences.

discussion

criticism

In contemporary philosophy, especially the advocates of critical rationalism question the possibility of an ultimate justification. They point to a fundamental problem with any attempt at a final justification. Every repeated why-question chain would sooner or later after the Munchausen Trilemma come to a logical dead end, which, in the opinion of the last opponent, leaves only three alternatives to choose from:

  • Infinite Regress - infinite series of answers
  • Logical circle - in the series of answers at some point the answer is used as a prerequisite (the sky is blue because it is blue)
  • Dogmatism - an unsubstantiated assertion takes the place of a reason (the sky is blue because God wanted us to have a blue sky).

In any case, however, a final justification would not be possible completely independently of the question asked.

Opponents of the final justification are u. a. confronted with the following logical problem: Your thesis “There is no ultimate justification” does not seem to apply to itself. For what justifies it? Proponents of the ultimate justification would say either there are compelling ultimate reasons, in direct contradiction to the thesis - or they are weaker reasons, in friction with the apodictic character of the thesis. However, critical rationalists would answer that there are no reasons at all ( epistemological skepticism ), and that epistemological arguments always only have negative effects, are never positive, that is, they are knowledge-destroying, and do not establish knowledge ( negativism ). The fact that there is no final justification is only true (absolutism), even if this assumption could one day turn out to be an error. The same applies to logic itself. The fact that the assertion that there is no ultimate justification can be derived from logic in the form of the Münchhausen trilemma does not constitute a justification, because the logic is also unfounded (see also core logic ).

Critical rationalists also claim that absolute truth exists and that one can also make a truth claim for statements, but not that one can justify that one is considering truth in concrete cases or that the truth claim is fulfilled - because every criterion for this would have to Statement already contained deductively and would therefore expand the problem of justification, not reduce it. According to this position, there are no justifications, only criticism, and this does not result in evidence, but in unproblematic theses - or, to paraphrase David Miller, the approach of critical rationalism also draws conclusions from unfounded assumptions, but at least not, as the proponents of justification do , from the assumptions that were initially up for debate (or that contain them deductively and are therefore even less well-founded than they are). Miller argues that there is no justification; that it would be useless if it existed; and that reason can do much better without it anyway.

Theorists, for example, who use deconstructive or discourse-analytical instruments as a basis and who follow traditions that correspond to their intuitions, have repeatedly criticized forms of ultimate justification in different ways. The arguments put forward are varied and complex in nature. They often have to do with the demonstration of contingent factors, for example power constellations, norms, conventions and habits that favor very specific patterns of order, interpretation categories, conceptual schemes and theoretical criteria, so that a separate form of "final" reasoning would fail on principle. Such criticisms are often directly related to a fundamental skepticism towards certain concepts of rationality, subjectivity, science and justification.

Response to the criticism

The transcendental pragmatists defended their ultimate justification approach in the ultimate justification dispute against the criticism of the critical rationalists. In particular, they dealt with the fallibilism principle (FP) established by Hans Albert, which claims that all beliefs are fundamentally doubtful. Apel and Kuhlmann essentially reject this principle for the following reasons:

  1. When applied to itself, the FP leads to a paradox: “If the 'fallibilism' principle itself is fallible, then it is precisely not fallible and vice versa”.
  2. The FP is meaningless, since the fallibilist "asserts nothing but true, not even that anything is uncertain".
  3. The FP is immune, since it asserts its own falsehood and cannot be falsified by showing a certain conviction.

Hans Albert has rejected this criticism as straw man arguments.

Miller's criticism was also replied to. In addition, although there is broad consensus in Critical Rationalism itself that there can be no justification for assertions, there are also opinions that are of the opinion that one can at least justify the assumption that an assertion can be held to be true, but these in turn have met with contradictions.

literature

Primary literature

Final justification attempts

  • Karl-Otto Apel : Discourse and Responsibility. The problem of the transition to post-conventional morality. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-57924-X .
  • Karl-Otto Apel: Debates in the testing of the transcendental-pragmatic approach , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, 1998, ISBN 3-518-58260-7 .
  • Hugo Dingler : Textbook of Exact Fundamental Science. Volume 1: General and Justification of Mathematics. Lüttke, Berlin 1944 (as: Structure of the exact fundamental science. Edited by Paul Lorenzen . Eidos-Verlag, Munich 1964).
  • Wolfgang Kuhlmann : Reflexive ultimate justification. Studies on transcendental pragmatics. Alber, Freiburg (Breisgau) / Munich 1985, ISBN 3-495-47568-0 (Also: Frankfurt am Main, University, habilitation paper, 1983).
  • Hansjürgen Verweyen : God's last word. Outline of Fundamental Theology. Patmos-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1991, ISBN 3-491-71037-5 , (PDF of the first edition) , (3rd, completely revised edition. Pustet, Regensburg 2000, ISBN 3-7917-1692-1 ).

criticism

Introductions and overview presentations

Introductions

  • Reinhold Aschenberg : final reason? Contribution to a typological orientation. In: Reinhard Hiltscher, André Georgi (ed.): Perspektiven der Transzendentalphilosophie. Following the philosophy of Kant. Freiburg (Breisgau) / Munich 2002, ISBN 3-495-48058-7 , pp. 11-42.
  • Carl Friedrich Gethmann : final reason. In: Jürgen Mittelstraß : Encyclopedia Philosophy and Philosophy of Science. Second edition. Volume 4, Metzler 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02103-8 , pp. 549-552.
  • Miriam Ossa: Prerequisites for unconditional knowledge? The problem of the ultimate philosophical justification of truth . Paderborn, Mentis 2007, ISBN 978-3-89785-567-0 .

Interpretations of classical attempts at ultimate justification

  • Dieter Wandschneider : Basics of a theory of dialectics. Reconstruction and revision of dialectical category development in Hegel's “Science of Logic”. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-608-91748-9 .

Discussion of the ultimate justification concept

Web links

Wikibooks: final justification dispute (study guide Hans Albert)  - learning and teaching materials

swell

  1. ↑ The final justification after Harald Holz , cf. also Harald Holz: work edition. Volumes 1, 3, 4, 6-8. European University Press Berlin, Bochum et al. 2009-2011.
  2. ↑ Edmund Husserl: The Crisis of the European Sciences and the Transcendental Phenomenology 1954, p. 4.
  3. ↑ For the explication of illocutive acts cf. Jürgen Habermans: What does universal pragmatics mean? , in: Karl-Otto Apel (ed.): Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie, Frankfurt a. M. 1976, pp. 174-272, here pp. 222-225.
  4. ↑ Karl-Otto Apel: Is a philosophical ultimate justification of moral norms possible , in: Karl-Otto-Apel, Dietrich Böhler, Gerd Kadelbach (ed.): Funk-Kolleg practical philosophy / ethics, dialogues, vol. 2, Frankfurt a. M. 1984, pp. 82-123, here p. 93.
  5. ^ Karl-Otto Apel: The problem of the philosophical ultimate justification in the light of a transcendental language pragmatics. Attempt to criticize “Critical Rationalism” , in: B. Kanitscheider (Ed.): Language and knowledge . Festschrift for Gerhard Frey on his 60th birthday, Innsbruck 1976, pp. 10–173, here p. 71.
  6. ^ Karl-Otto Apel: The a priori of the communication community . In: Transformation der Philosophie, Vol. 2, p. 429.
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Kuhlmann: Reflexive final justification. Investigations on transcendental pragmatics , p. 189.
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Kuhlmann: Reflexive final justification. Studies on Transcendental Pragmatics , p. 180.
  9. ↑ Karl-Otto Apel: Is a philosophical ultimate justification of moral norms possible , in: Karl-Otto-Apel, Dietrich Böhler, Gerd Kadelbach (ed.): Funk-Kolleg practical philosophy / ethics, dialogues, vol. 2, Frankfurt a. M. 1984, pp. 82-123, here p. 112.
  10. ↑ Wolfgang Kuhlmann: Reflexive final justification. Studies on Transcendental Pragmatics , p. 139.
  11. ↑ Jürgen Mittelstraß: Dingler, Hugo in: ders .: Encyclopedia Philosophy and Philosophy of Science. Second edition. Volume 2, Metzler 2005, ISBN 978-3-476-02101-4 , pp. 218-220
  12. ↑ "But now arises when our principle is taken seriously, immediately following problem: If you for everything requires a justification [...] leads [that] in a situation with three alternatives, all three appear unacceptable." Hans Albert: Treatise on critical Reason , p. 15
  13. ↑ "The fact that a 'justification' must be achieved through 'ultimate justification' in the sense of a 'self-justification' is ... a requirement that takes itself ad absurdum." Hans Albert: Critique of transcendental thinking , p. 120 .
  14. ^ D. Miller: Overcoming the Justificationist Addiction (PDF; 124 kB). In: Iranian Journal of Philosophical Investigations 4:11 (2007), pp. 167-182.
  15. ↑ See under Unproblematic. In: Hans-Joachim Niemann: Lexicon of Critical Rationalism. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2004, ISBN 3-16-148395-2 .
  16. ↑ David Miller: A critique of good reasons. Critical rationalism (1994)
  17. ↑ Hans Albert: Transzendentale Träumereien , p. 122.
  18. ↑ Wolfgang Kuhlmann: Reflexive final justification. On the thesis that the argumentation situation cannot be evaded, in: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 35 (1981), pp. 3–26, here p. 8.
  19. ^ Karl-Otto Apel: The problem of the philosophical ultimate justification in the light of a transcendental language pragmatics. Attempt to criticize “Critical Rationalism” , p. 71
  20. ↑ Wolfgang Kuhlmann: Is a philosophical ultimate justification of moral norms possible? In: Study accompanying letter 8 of the Funkkolleg Practical Philosophy / Ethics, Weinheim / Basel 1981, pp. 38–71, here p. 50.
  21. ↑ Wolfgang Kuhlmann: Is a philosophical ultimate justification of moral norms possible? , P. 49.
  22. ↑ Hans Albert: The alleged paradox of consequent fallibilism and the claims of transcendental pragmatics. Critique of transcendental thinking , p. 166f
  23. ↑ Berkson, William: In defense of good reasons. In: Melbourne journal of politics 20: 1 (Parkville: 1990), p. 84.
  24. ↑ D. Miller: Rejoinder to Berkson. In: Philosophy of the Social Sciences 20 (March 1990), pp. 92-94.
  25. ↑ Alan Musgrave: Deductivism vs. psychologism. In Mark A. Notturno: Perspectives on Psychologism (1989), p. 315
  26. ^ D. Miller: Three Stages of Critical Rationalism. In: Out of Error (2006), p. 45.