Dear students!

Thank you very much for your “Module 1st works”. We’ll analyze those on
Friday. In general, WELL DONE!
I am sending the working material and tasks for our next meeting!

2.2. Formation of the main methodological guidelines of transcendental

pragmatics.

The adjective “transcendental” was widely used by Kant as a philosophical term.

By transcendental Kant means that his philosophical approach to knowledge
transcends mere consideration of sensory evidence and requires an understanding of
the mind's innate modes of processing that sensory evidence.
Karl-Otto Apple (1922 – 2017) was a famous German philosopher who
developed a distinctive philosophical approach that he called "transcendental
pragmatics."
He specialized on the philosophy of language and was thus considered
a communication theorist.
Pragmatics, in linguistics and philosophy, the study of the use of
natural language in communication; more generally, the study of the relations
between languages and their users. It is sometimes defined in contrast with
linguistic semantics, which can be described as the study of the rule systems that
determine the literal meanings of linguistic expressions. Pragmatics is then the
study of how both literal and nonliteral aspects of communicated
linguistic meaning are determined by principles that refer to the physical or
social context (broadly construed) in which language is used. Among these
aspects are conversational and conventional “implicatures” (e.g., “John has three
sons” conversationally implicates that John has no more than three sons; “He was
poor but honest” conventionally implicates an unspecified contrast between
poverty and honesty). Other aspects include metaphor and other tropes
and speech acts.
A pragmatist can consider something to be true without needing to confirm that
it is universally true. For example, if humans commonly perceive the ocean as
beautiful then the ocean is beautiful.
So, as it was mentioned above, "transcendental pragmatics" is a term and
concept developed by Karl-Otto Apple in the context of his conception of morality
based on intersubjectivity; it denotes philosophical reflection on the validity conditions
of argumentation. In transcendental pragmatics, a “transformation” of transcendental
arguments takes place through a theory of linguistic and symbolic action.

TASKS:

1. The terms “transcendental” and “transcendent” in philosophy.

In philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence
convey three different but related meanings, all of them derived from the
word's literal meaning (from Latin) of climbing or going beyond.
Transcendence often refers to an experience with the divine or God,
which is conceived as absolute, eternal, and infinite.
In modern philosophy, Kant introduced a new use of the term
transcendental. In his theory of knowledge, this concept is concerned with the
conditions of possibility of knowledge itself. He also set the term
transcendental in opposition to the term transcendent, the latter meaning "that,
which goes beyond" (transcends) any possible knowledge of a human being.
For him transcendental meant knowledge about our cognitive faculty with
regard to how objects are possible a priori.
"I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied, not with objects, but
with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience
them. "He also equated transcendental with that which is "...in respect of the
subject's faculty of cognition." Something is transcendental if it plays a role in
the way in which the mind "constitutes" objects and makes it possible for us to
experience them as objects in the first place. Ordinary knowledge is
knowledge of objects; transcendental knowledge is knowledge of how it is
possible for us to experience those objects as objects. This is based on Kant's
acceptance of David Hume's argument that certain general features of objects
(e.g. persistence, causal relationships) cannot be derived from the sense
 impressions we have of them. Kant argues that the mind must contribute those
features and make it possible for us to experience objects as objects. In the
central part of his Critique of Pure Reason, the "Transcendental Deduction of
the Categories," Kant argues for a deep interconnection between the ability to
have self-consciousness and the ability to experience a world of objects.
For Kant, the "transcendent," as opposed to the "transcendental," is that
which lies beyond what our faculty of knowledge can legitimately know.
Hegel's counter-argument to Kant was that to know a boundary is also to be
aware of what it bounds and as such what lies beyond it—in other words, to
have already transcended it.

2. Pragmatics in linguistics and philosophy

Pragmatics, In linguistics and philosophy, the study of the use of natural
language in communication; more generally, the study of the relations
between languages and their users. It is sometimes defined in contrast with
linguistic semantics, which can be described as the study of the rule systems
that determine the literal meanings of linguistic expressions.
Pragmatics is then the study of how both literal and nonliteral aspects of
communicated linguistic meaning are determined by principles that refer to the
physical or social context (broadly construed) in which language is used.
Among these aspects are conversational and conventional “implicatures” (e.g.,
“John has three sons” conversationally implicates that John has no more than
three sons; “He was poor but honest” conventionally implicates an unspecified
contrast between poverty and honesty). Other aspects include metaphor and
other tropes and speech acts.

Pragmatism, school of philosophy, based on the principle that the

usefulness, workability, and practicality of ideas, policies, and proposals are
the criteria of their merit. It stresses the priority of action over doctrine, of
experience over fixed principles, and it holds that ideas borrow their meanings
from their consequences and their truths from their verification. Thus, ideas
are essentially instruments and plans of action.
Achieving results, i.e., “getting things done” in business and public
affairs, is often said to be “pragmatic.” There is a harsher and more brutal
connotation of the term in which any exercise of power in the successful
pursuit of practical and specific objectives is called “pragmatic.” The character
of American business and politics is often so described. In these cases,
“pragmatic” carries the stamp of justification: a policy is justified
pragmatically if it is successful. The familiar and the academic conceptions
have in common an opposition to invoking the authority of precedents or of
abstract and ultimate principles. Thus, in law judicial decisions that have
 turned on the weighing of consequences and probable general welfare rather
than on being deduced from precedents have been called pragmatic.

3. Karl-Otto Apel: a brief review of the biography.

Karl-Otto Apel was a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the
University of Frankfurt am Main. He specialized on the philosophy of
language and was thus considered a communication theorist. He developed a
distinctive philosophical approach which he called "transcendental
pragmatics."
Apel grew up during the political crises of the Weimar Republic. In 1940,
he was a war volunteer with his entire graduating class. After the Second
World War, Apel studied from 1945 to 1950 at the University of Bonn, first
history and intellectual history, before he committed himself as a student of
Erich Rothacker on philosophy. In 1950, he received his doctorate from Bonn
with a thesis on Martin Heidegger.
Apel was appointed lecturer at the University of Mainz in 1961. He was a
full professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel from 1962 to 1969, at the
University of Saarbrücken from 1969 to 1972, and at the University of
Frankfurt am Main from 1972 to 1990. In 1990, he transferred to emeritus
status. He has held a number of visiting and guest professorships at
universities around the world.
He was made a Member of the Academia Europaea in 1989 and a Full
Member of the Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea in 1993. In 2001,
he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

4. Karl-Otto Apel: a brief review of his works.

Apel worked in ethics, the philosophy of language and human sciences.
He wrote extensively in these fields, publishing mostly in German. Apel's
work brings together the analytical and Continental philosophical traditions,
especially pragmatism and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He
developed a distinctive philosophical approach which he called transcendental
pragmatics.
In Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic
Perspective, Apel reformulated the difference between understanding and
explanation, which originated in the hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey and
interpretive sociology of Max Weber, on the basis of a Peircean-inspired
transcendental-pragmatic account of language. This account of the "lifeworld"
would become an element of the theory of communicative action and
discourse ethics, which Apel co-developed with Habermas. Strategic
rationality both claim to stand in need of communicative rationality that is
seen as, in several regards, more fundamental. While sympathetic to
Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action, Apel has been critical of
 aspects of Habermas's approach. Apel has proposed that a theory of
communication should be grounded in the transcendental-pragmatic
conditions of communication. After taking his point of departure from Apel,
Habermas has moved towards a "weak transcendentalism" that is more closely
tied to empirical social inquiry.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, Apel influenced other philosophers writing
in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

5. Apel’s transcendental pragmatics.

His so-called transformation of philosophy represents an ambitious attempt to

bring together in a systematic form analytic philosophy of language, American
pragmatism, and philosophical hermeneutics. According to Apel, in light of
these innovative traditions, the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant
must be fundamentally reconceived. In particular, the conditions for
intersubjectively valid knowledge cannot be explicated in terms of the
structure of consciousness or the cognitive capacities of the individual
knowing subject but only through a systematic investigation of language as the
medium of symbolically mediated knowledge. The pragmatic turn, initiated by
Peirce and Charles W. Morris and continued in the early twenty-first century
in speech act theory, further implies that an adequate explanation of how
meaningful communication is possible cannot be achieved by a semantic
theory alone. Rather, it must be supplemented by a pragmatic study of the
relation between linguistic signs and the conditions of their use by speakers.
Apel's strong thesis is that his transcendental semiotics yields a set of
normative conditions and validity claims presupposed in any critical
discussion or rational argumentation. Central among these is the
presupposition that a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a
member of a counterfactual, ideal communication community that is in
principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the
force of the better argument. Any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge
(scientific or moral-practical) implicitly acknowledges this ideal
communication community as a metainstitution of rational argumentation, to
be its ultimate source of justification (1980).

Drawing on the Continental tradition, Apel argues that the most important
contribution of philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer's in particular, has been
to show that interpretation is not another method of investigation in addition to
the methods used within the hard sciences, but an unavoidable dimension of
all understanding. Every empirical investigation of a domain of objects
implies at the same time a relation to other subjects, to a community of
interpreters. Thus, the attempt to study language from an exclusively
objectivistic or naturalistic perspective involves an abstraction from the
inquirer's own membership in a linguistic community. The inquirer's verbal
behavior must also be interpreted by the community of investigators and this
interpretive moment can never itself be displaced by objectivistic
investigation. In fact, such investigation itself presupposes a communication
community. But Apel's transcendental hermeneutics departs from Gadamer's
historicism in that successive interpretations not only purport to understand
differently but also raise an implicit claim to truth or correctness that can be
clarified, once again, with reference to the ideal communication community.
Furthermore, like Habermas, Apel does not exclude the possibility of
introducing causal or functional explanations to clarify systematic distortions
to communication, so long as they are "considered to be capable of conversion
into a reflexively heightened self-understanding of the communicating parties"
(1980, p. 125). In a response to externalist approaches (such as the strong
program in the sociology of knowledge) Apel proposes a principle of self-
appropriation that further develops this internalist (or rationalist) theme (see
Kettner 1996).

In an important critique of the critical rationalism of Karl Raimund Popper and

his followers, Apel further clarifies the status of transcendental pragmatics. He
suggests that their skepticism with regard to the possibility of ultimate
philosophical grounding is based on an abstractive fallacy in which sentences
are viewed in isolation from the pragmatic contexts of argumentation. The so-
called Münchhausen trilemma—that is, that all attempts to discover ultimate
foundations result in either logical circularity, infinite regress, or an arbitrary
end to the process of justification—can be overcome by moving from the level
of semantic analysis to the level of pragmatics and recognizing that some
presuppositions are necessary for the very possibility of intersubjectively valid
criticism and argumentation. Similarly, he argues, even the "principle of
fallibilism" (which holds that any claim can, in principle, be doubted) is only
meaningful within an "institution of argumentation," where some pragmatic
rules and norms are not open to question. Thus, contrary to the claim of
critical rationalism, the principle of fallibilism does not exclude the notion of
philosophical foundations and, Apel argues, certainly could not replace it as
the basic principle of rational discourse (1998, chapter 4).

In a series of essays and in Diskurs und Verantwortung (1988) Apel argues

that transcendental pragmatics can be used to develop an ethics of
communication or Diskursethik that closely parallels the moral theory of
Habermas. Like other cognitivist approaches, this ethics rejects the claim that
moral judgments are ultimately the expressions of subjective preferences or an
arbitrary will and hence beyond the reach of rational justification. By
elucidating its basic principle in relation to the pragmatic presuppositions of
argumentation in general, Apel seeks a more secure foundation than Kant's
appeal to a fact of reason or John Rawls's reflective equilibrium. According to
the basic principle of his ethics of communication, only those norms are
justified that could meet with the agreement of all concerned as participants in
a practical discourse. However, in contrast to Habermas, to avoid an abstract
utopianism, Apel (1988) maintains that this basic principle must be
supplemented by a further principle of responsibility. Taken together,
however, these two basic principles offer a secular foundation for a new global
ethics.