Even if unconditional truth is unattainable in principle, the ideal of unconditional truth has an important role to play in practice, according to Habermas. Habermas' position can be construed as descriptive or prescriptive. Either way, it faces considerable challenges. As a description, it raises classic philosophical problems. As a prescription, it raises many of the practical problems of religious fundamentalism, as Rorty argues. Trying to avoid the theoretical problems inherent to the concept of unconditional truth by non-epistemic means is not (...) promising. (shrink)

Up to the introduction of the term and concept of incommensurability by T. S. Kuhn and P. K. Feyerabend in the early 1960s, scientific texts were supposed to pose no problem as regards their translation, unlike literature, which was thought very difficult to translate. After the introduction of the term, translation of scientific language became equally problematic because, due to conceptual and perceptual incommensurability, there was no common observation basis to ground linguistic equivalences between languages of incommensurable paradigms. This article (...) highlights the presuppositions that link incommensurability to dramatic consequences (impossibility of communication, translation, and comparative evaluation of paradigms) and tries to sketch an alternative way of understanding incommensurability and translation drawing on Kuhn’s work. From this perspective, translation is not an all-or-nothing affair for either science or literature and becomes a problem to be solved for each particular set of circumstances. (shrink)

Argues that out of the confrontation between Rorty and Habermas may be found a new way to answer the question of what kind of politics do we need today.