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prehension. 12 An interpretation consists of a guess based on experiences resulting inexplanations that must be validated by others, terminating in comprehension, which isanother name for understanding that is informed and enriched by an objective process ofvalidation. Determining which interpretations are more plausible than others requires thatwe argue for our descriptions and explanations by offering relevant reasons in order toconvince an other of the superiority of one interpretation over another. Given the rangeof interpretations, often conflicting and contradictory, Ricoeur echoes Habermas, claimingthat “the question of criteria belongs to a certain kind of interpretation itself, that is to say,to a coming to an agreement between arguments. So it presupposes a certain model ofrationality where universality, verification, and so on are compelling.” 13Again, in Time and Narrative, Ricoeur argues that a regulative ideal of communicationis operative within communication. He agrees with Habermas that any critique of traditionis mediated by a regulative ideal of unconstrained communication, which, in turn, remainshistorically situated in order to be applied in a particular context. The regulative ideal ofunconstrained communication mediates our consciousness of effective-history.The transcendence of the idea of truth, inasmuch as it is immediately a dialogical idea,has to been seen as already at work in the practice of communication. When so reinstalledin the horizon of expectation, this dialogical idea cannot fail to rejoin thoseanticipations buried in tradition per se. Taken as such, the pure transcendental quitelegitimately assumes the negative status of a limit-idea as regards many of ourdetermined expectations as well as our hypostatized traditions. However, at the risk ofremaining alien to effective-history, this limit-idea has to become a regulative one,orienting the concrete dialectic between our horizon of expectation and our space ofexperience. 14Ricoeur appropriates communicative rationality even more explicitly in Oneself AsAnother where he incorporates the ethics of communication as found in Habermas’sreinterpretation of the deontological tradition. Ricoeur agrees that communicative ethicsprovides a framework for resolving conflicts and reaching consensus regarding moralimperatives. Communicative ethics preserves both the universal validity and impartialityof moral judgments. Above all, it retains the central Kantian notion of autonomy butreinterpreted as “communicative autonomy,” which is the ability of speakers to expressthemselves freely to others. Ricoeur is in full agreement with Habermas over the basicprinciples of communicative ethics -- that the very process of justifying normative claimspresupposes that speakers have a shared understanding of what norms and reasons are andwhat they expect of us. Valid norms are discursively redeemable, impartial, universal, andrationally justifiable.His acceptance is, of course, qualified. Rather than contrast, as Habermas does, thedifference between argumentation on one hand, and particular interpretations, personalconvictions, and traditional conventions on the other, Ricoeur argues that argumentationitself is an interpretive practice that leads to a potentially universal practical judgment ina particular situation. As Ricoeur puts it in Oneself As Another, “what has to bequestioned is the antagonism between argumentation and convention, substituting for it12Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, Tex.:Texas Christian University Press, 1976).13Paul Ricoeur, “Interview with Charles Reagan,” in Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1996), 104-105.14Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 226.89