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3. PAUL RICOEUR’S THEORY OF TRUTH: FROM PHENOMENOLOGY TOCOMMUNICATIVE ACTIONDavid M. KaplanAt various stages throughout his career, Ricoeur has examined the nature and limits ofphenomenology, hermeneutics, narrative theory, and communicative rationality. Each timehe addresses himself to a subject, it takes the form of a mediation that highlights andpreserves differences between two positions without synthesizing a new unity. Instead,Ricoeur claims only to draw a “hermeneutic arc” between opposites, a metaphor that suggestsa mitigated version of mediation. A hermeneutic arc, drawn between antitheticalpositions, contrasts each theory as seen from the perspective of the other, linking themtogether in a way that produces no theoretical resolution but only a practical one. Inprinciple, opposites remain unreconciled; in practice there is a way to proceed as if theywere not. Among the arcs Ricoeur has drawn, include those between phenomenology andhermeneutics, hermeneutics and structuralism, narrative theory and communicative rationality.On Ricoeur’s own self-interpretation, there is no relation between these mediations:each one addresses a different problem, developed in conjunction with different dialoguepartners, and is limited in scope. He claims only to deal with particular problems, not tocreate systems in a more traditionally dialectical fashion. Yet, Ricoeur manages to doprecisely that: he exhibits the internal connections among phenomenology, hermeneutics,narrative, and communicative rationality, and, in so doing, he suggests a single, promisingmodel of social inquiry. Such a model contains a much stronger theory of truth andvalidity than found in the hermeneutic philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer, but, at thesame time, is less absolute than Husserlian phenomenology and more interpretive andcreative than Habermasian communicative rationality. Building on the works of Ricoeur,I want to argue that phenomenological description, interpretive narration, and discursiveargumentation are dialectically related; each is a part of a “practical whole” and needs theother to be complete.There are three distinct yet related conceptions of truth operative in Ricoeur’s work.They are truth as approximation, truth as manifestation, and truth as argumentation. Truthas approximation draws on Husserlian phenomenology, in which truth is the fulfilling ofan empty intentionality. Truth as manifestation draws on Heideggerian hermeneutics, inwhich truth is the presencing of being. Ricoeur’s theories of metaphor and narrative extendthis tradition. Finally, truth as argumentation draws on Habermasian pragmatics, inwhich truth is a rationally achieved consensus over a validity claim. Yet, for some reason,Ricoeur repeatedly emphasizes the weakest, least adequate, Heideggerian conception oftruth, when he speaks of the world-disclosing character of literary reference in The Ruleof Metaphor (1978) and Time and Narrative (1984). The Heideggerian conception of truthas manifestation only complements the two stronger conceptions of truth and validityrelated to the Husserlian and Habermasian character of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. These arethe undeveloped elements in Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology that should bebrought out to show that a much stronger conception of truth and validity can be gleanedfrom his scattered remarks on the subject.PhenomenologyRicoeur retains from Husserl the central insight into the intentionality of consciousness,and the methodological technique of bracketing. The well-known doctrine of intentionalityasserts that all experience is directed toward some object of reference, while every object83