Abstract
Abstract Under the influence of Hilary Putnam’s collapse of the fact/value
dichotomy, a resurging approach that challenges the movements of American
pragmatism and discourse ethics, I tease out in the first section of my paper the
demand for the warranted assertibility hypothesis in Putnam’s sense that may
be possible, relying on moral realism to get rid of ‘rampant Platonism’. Tracing
back to ‘communicative action’ or the Habermasian way that puts forward the
reciprocal understanding of discourse instigates the idea of life-world as composed
of ‘culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretative
patterns’, this section looks for whether Habermas’ psychoanalysis of
prolonged discussion can accord with Putnam’s thick ethical terms or not.
The last section of the paper pitfalls Putnam’s stance to accepting Habermas’
‘discourse ethics’ that centers around the context of entangling ‘rational
thoughts’ to ‘communication’, but he introduces the idea of fallibilism in a
rational query that also attacks the Habermasian metaphysical idea of the
validity of ethical statements that goes towards the truth. My next attempt is
to see whether Putnam’s objective dictum towards morality that resonates the
collapse of fact/value dichotomy from a universalistic stand can successfully
evade Rorty’s naive realism (structured by linguistic representation) and
Habermas’ ‘sociologism about values’ (a kind of minimalist ethics depending
on solidarity) respectively. This sort of claim insists on a universalizable pattern
of culture-relative value. I consider that the idea of a fact/value dichotomy
engages with the inextricable entanglement between the normative and descriptive
content, besides the epistemic values having exclusively intertwined with
the structure of factual discourse that intends towards collapsing the fact/value
dichotomy, a subjective universalizability predilection.