-- This talk by Keith Pisani, which was scheduled for this evening, has been POSTPONED as he is indisposed. Details on when it will take place will follow in the coming days. Apologies for any inconvenience caused. --
This is the seventh in a series of sessions that the Philosophy Postgraduate Reading Group (PPRG) in conjunction with the Department of Philosophy will organise throughout this academic year 2015/16. The session will be led by Keith Pisani, an M.A. in Philosophy Graduate and Philosophy Teacher.
This talk is a work-in-progress dealing with Habermas’s conception of complexity as developed and used in "The Theory of Communicative Action". This work is part of a larger project which seeks to reconstruct and critically engage with Habermas’s notion(s) of complexity as developed both in "The Theory of Communicative Action" and "Between Facts and Norms".
In "The Theory of Communicative Action" Habermas does not systematically deal with the concept of complexity; what he means by complexity has to be inferred and reconstructed from what he says about systematic rationalisation, that is, the rise of areas in which instrumental reasoning dominates. In this talk, it will be argued that there are at least two possible meanings of systematic complexity.
The first relies on the notion of complexity as developed in Systems Theory: the division of society into specialised sub-systems. Complexity in this sense would be specialisation or differentiation. The rise of the economic sub-systems and its detachment from the state would be an instance of ‘complexification’. The second possible sense of complexity is tied to the notion of ‘technicization’. A social space is technicized when it is governed by technical rules detached from normative contexts; in such spaces social actors are expected to follow such technical rules and consequently not expected to ground or justify their claims or actions. Social spaces thus become complex when they no longer depend directly on the intentions of social actors interacting within such spaces.
Undergraduate students are encouraged to attend these sessions. For PPRG news and updates, join the PPRG Facebook group.