facing desire for Truth

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Let me start off frivolously, fun; then get into worthwhile things.

Since I hadn’t posted to the Facebook/Habermas Page for a couple of weeks, I’ve been getting a daily e-mail from the software indicating in the subject line that “Habermas fans want to hear from you.”

We know what this is: educing the reader to put a face on algorithmic interaction. Face the text. We so want to personify things. [Insert monograph: from toys to Literature…Phenomenology lives. Pygmalion finds True Love. A movie moves one. The trees know.]

There’s no programmed assessment of what “fans” want (but you, too, can be a fan of philosophical venturing!). There’s a Facebook algorithm that either [1] automatically generates an e-mail if a Page with relatively high content has no activity (I have a Facebook Page with little activity, no posting for months, and I get no reminder); or [2] folks are checking the Habermas Page at X rate, causing a software widget to be triggered. I hope for the latter (2), but I presume it’s the former. Anyway, Facebook is less about connectivity than about “eyeballs” for ads. “It’s a business, honey, just like everything.”

communicative community: the basis of good systems

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If you find plausible that a “lattice” approach to political change tends to prevail over a “wheel” approach (“Sustainable Global Growth” posting), then a focus on dynamics of reflective equilibration may tend to prevail over dynamics of normative structure (and collaborative innovation precedes norm formation). In this case, Habermas’s theory of communicative action becomes all the more useful, not less so.