Critical Theory and Social Evolution (II)

Development logic, development dynamics and learning processes in Habermas

Abstract

The present study continues with the analyzes presented in the article “Critical theory and social evolution (I): on the origin and relevance of the concept of social learning in Habermas's work from the 1970s”, discussing in this opportunity how the concept of learning, presented in 1970s, articulates the premises of social evolution inscribed in the Habermasian model of critical theory before the revisions undertaken in the Theory of Communicative Action (1981), clarifying the concepts of development logic and development dynamics, insufficiently described in Problems of legitimation in the late capitalism (1973), based on Habermas's “reckoning” with Marx in the work For the Reconstruction of Historical Materialism (1976). The concepts of development logic and development dynamics articulate (implicitly) assumptions of formal pragmatics and the critique of political economics – even if not centered on the category “work” – to explain why the resolution of steering problems can be understood as “gradient vector” of social learning processes, which justify the heuristic strategy underlying the idea of social evolution. In the 1976 work, Habermas faces the theoretical challenges linked to the proposition of the idea of historical progress, based on the material and symbolic assumptions that structure the “history of the species” presupposed in his theoretical model of social evolution. However, the rationalization of world images and the emergence of new normative structures (and institutions) understood as assumptions of learning processes, which articulate the “driving problems” and the possibility of social evolution, do not satisfactorily resolve the problem of homology between the dimensions of ontogenesis and phylogenesis (ontogenetic fallacy) in the 1976 work. Klaus Eder's criticisms of Habermas will be answered by reviewing the idea (of processes) of (social) learning presented in the 1981 work, based on the contributions of interactionism symbolic of Mead.