The virtuous circle of discourse : why Habermasian critical theory is blind to social traps
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper raises a critique concerning the limitations that Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (TCA) faces to engage with topics such as social traps. The main argument is that the developmentalist explanation of ego ontogenesis that supports the possibility of the “discourse principle” reduces the TCA’s effectiveness to explain social transformation in less-than-ideal situations. The paper introduces the concept of social traps through Rothstein’s account of the recursive dynamics between individual agents and social structures in non-cooperative scenarios, and follows his criticisms of rationalist and culturalist approaches. The same problems that these strands of the literature suffer are present, although for different reasons, in the TCA: wrong assumptions about human action, deterministic views of social reality, and a narrow understanding of social transformation. Along these lines, the paper explores the implications that the Habermasian notion of praxis as discursive competences and autonomy has for a wider conception of agency in cases where discourse is inhibited or disrupted. Moreover, this becomes a real problem due to the circular relationship between, on the one hand, the development of the cognitive and moral competences necessary to participate in discursive practices and, on the other, how these practices foster the very same competences that they require to prevail (“the virtuous circle of discourse”). The combination of these elements raises a number of challenges for the TCA to provide convincing explanations about the way in which social traps operate and, especially, how social transformation can be generated in those situations from the micro-level. Finally, the author concludes with some suggestions to be considered in the development of a critical methodology to observe social traps.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.032 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.115 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.032 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".