Presuppositions: Reply to Benhabib and Jay
I am grateful to the Editors of Amor Mundi for sending me a copy of Prof. Benhabib’s response to my comments on her defence of Habermas, and I wonder if I might reply to her and also to some comments by Prof. Martin Jay which appeared recently in ‘The Point’.
In her remarks Prof. Benhabib speaks of the ‘assumptions’ and ‘presuppositions’ we make in our social life.Of course, in everyday life we all — but who exactly is ‘we’? — make innumerable presuppositions and assumptions about the world, have commitments to and expectations about others, and would dearly love to be able to live up to various ideals we have in various ways acquired and invented. What is perhaps more important, we would dearly love to hold others to (unrealised) ideals we have, and would like (in some cases) to impose commitment to these ideals on them. If I speak French to a waiter in Lille, it is because I assume he will understand that language, and I presuppose all sorts of other things in our encounter. I also project onto him various ideas about how I think he ought to behave toward me. Some of the assumptions I make will have the form of specific bits of propositional belief ( of ‘knowing-that’) such as my thought before speaking to the waiter: ‘That looks like the waiter’. This may be thought to presuppose that I am in a café or restaurant (or that I think I am in a café or restaurant). Other…
