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Na teoria cultural de Habermas, o conhecimento é determinado pelas condições socio-históricas que o enformam. O indivíduo é parte de uma vivência universal e pertence a uma tradição cultural e linguística, na qual está obrigado a participar. Esta vivência universal possui três dimensões: 1) o mundo objectivo dos factos que existem independentemente do homem e que constituem a referência fundamental para a determinação da verdade;  2) o mundo social das relações intersubjectivas; 3) o mundo subjectivo das experiências privadas. Para Habermas, a descentralização do sujeito conquista-se quando o indivíduo consegue diferenciar-se destes três modos de existência. A descentralização permite então compreender a diferença entre certos valores como a justiça, a verdade e o gosto, em vista das suas concretizações sociais e culturais.

Comentando esta tese, Benjamin Endres, em “Habermas and Critical Thinking,” (1997) (http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/PES/96_docs/endres.html), resume assim as limitações da teoria de Habermas: “Yet there seems to be a tension in Habermas’s theory surrounding the concept of decentering. On the one hand, Habermas recognizes people as embedded in their personal and social history. On the other, his theory seems to ask that rational and moral people give up these prior commitments and consider them hypothetically when arguing with others about the acceptance of a norm. Yet how far does Habermas think people can go in giving up personal and cultural identities in favor of “the force of reason?” In some places, he is adamant about the historically and culturally defined nature of human action. Habermas sees himself clarifying everyday intuitions that are themselves socialized and historically grounded. (…) Though he does not sacrifice the primacy of social-historical contexts in determining our knowledge, he places especially rigorous expectations on individuals within particular contexts to achieve a disinterested perspective. Furthermore, he proposes informal logic as a model for human reasoning, which combines the consideration of substantive content with the requirements of logical validity. By adopting this formal methodology, he believes that participants in argumentation are able to assume the perspectives of everyone else affected by the practice. This universal exchange of roles requires that individuals step outside of their own perspectives to consider the needs of others while attuning themselves to the requirements of logical reasoning.”
Para a continuação deste debate, ver o artigo de Mark Weinstein “Decentering and Reasoning”, em resposta a Endres (http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/PES/96_docs/weinstein.html).

bibliografia

Jürgen Habermas: The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (1987)