Reason, language and education: philosophical assumptions for new curricular orientations

Abstract

A theory of reason, language and their interconnection constitutes a research topic of epistemological, ontological and metaphysical significance. It also represents a crucial point of contention between defenders and detractors of postmodernism. Therefore, in this article we set out to discuss its stakes and search for its most accomplished philosophical treatment, such as to clarify and justify new curricular premises and overcome disabling and obsolete dichotomies. To accomplish this task, we explore modernist and postmodernist conceptions of reason and single out Apel and Habermas’s coupling of rationality and language and its convergence with Derrida’s insights on thought and meaning. We argue that such a framework provides education with prospects for new and important curricular directions and emphases.

Notes

1. Habermas goes on as follows: ‘Husserl, too, compares the signs we use in calculating with figures we move in accord with the rules of a chess game. But in contrast to Wittgenstein, Husserl has to postulate the primacy of pure meanings; only by virtue of our acquaintance with these originary meanings can we know how to proceed with the chess figures’ (Habermas, 1987b, p. 167).

2. For a detailed presentation of Husserl’s foundation of iterability and sameness of meaning as well as Searle’s and Derrida’s critique of Husserl, see Frank (1989, pp. 412–425). For a full account of Habermas’s criticisms of Husserl’s theory as being ensnared in the subject–object paradigm, see Habermas (1987b, pp. 163–175).

3. To anticipate a point of contention that we discuss later, postulating, then, that universal pragmatics favours literal meaning over some, supposedly, parasitical uses of language would be a serious misinterpretation. It is the conception of language which the universal pragmatics theorists employ that prevents a distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘parasitical’.

4. As Derrida writes:

I do not believe that translation is a secondary and derived event in relation to an original language or text. And as ‘deconstruction’ is a word, as I have just said, that is essentially replaceable in a chain of substitution, then that can also be done from one language to the other. (1988, p. 275)