Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

311Deliberative Politicsneutral ground, with the hope either of resolving the dispute or ofbypassing it.4Once an ethical disagreement is uncovered, "neutral dialogue"requires a transition to that higher level of abstraction characteristicofjustice discourses, where participants examine what lies in theequal interest of all concerned. In Larmore's approach, this transitionappears as a special case of a more general postulate ofrational discourse. :15In response to this proposal, the communitarian objection canbe radicalized still further. Even if the neutrality principle could betraced back to a universal rule of argumentation, it is objected, thereconstruction of such rules must rely on the intuitive knowledgeof individual participants in rational discourse, normally our own ·knowledge. The reason is that the conditions for the discursivevindication of a validity claim, which are always already implicitlyknown, can be reflexively grasped only from the participant perspective.But this method for the rational reconstruction of intuitiveknowledge can have the consequence "that when individuals'conceptions of the good life conflict, they often will also havesomewhat different notions of the ideal conditions under whichthey believe they could justifY their conception to others. "36 Larmoresuspects that even universal grammatical knowledge is to a certainextent interwoven with a particular linguistic ontology or with theindividual's self-understanding and worldview. Even if one grantsthis, however, the worst one should expect is that the explication ofour antecedently acquired practical knowledge will exhibit perspectivaldistortions. One need not expect that this knowledgeitself, which is always already intuitively employed, will take as manydiverse forms as there are perspectives. The ever fallible andpossibly even false reconstruction does not touch the always alreadyfunctioning knowledgeY For this reason, we may assume that theknow-how informing argumentative practices represents a point ofconvergence where participants, however diverse their backgrounds,can at least intuitively meet in their efforts to reach an understanding.In all languages and in every language community, suchconcepts as truth, rationality,justification, and consensus, even ifinterpreted differently and applied according to different criteria,play the same grammatical role.38 At any rate, this is true for modern----;-