Steering Humanity\'s Future with the Dialogic Web by Ray Luechtefeld

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the question. In Habermas' 1983 article on moral consciousness, he reinterprets Kohlberg's stages of development as increasing levels of discourse ethics. He describes Stage 6, the postconventional stage, as follows:

Stage 6, the stage of universal ethical principles.

Content: This stage assumes guidance by universal ethical principles, that all humanity should follow.

1 Regarding what is right, Stage 6 is guided by universal ethical principles. Particular or social agreements are usually valid because they rest on such principles. When laws violate these principles, one acts in accordance with the principle. Principles are universal principles of justice: the equality of human rights and respect for the dignity of human beings as individuals. These are not merely values that are recognized, but are also principles used to generate particular, decisions,

2. The reason for doing right is that, as a rational person, one has seen the validity of principles and has become committed to them.

Habermas writes that discourse ethics... "in fact, reflects the very operations Kohlberg postulates for moral judgments at the postconventional level:: complete reversibility of the perspectives from which participants produce their arguments; universality, understood as inclusion of all concerned; and the reciprocity of equal recognition of the claims of each participant by all others.

He sees stage 6 as the final stage of "decentering" of a person's understanding of the world, developed in the progression through succeeding stages of interaction.

It also embodies a move towards "centering" responsibility for action, and hence "control" toward the individual and away from outside.

In "Between Facts and Norms", Habermas asserts that "law" can be a coercive instrument designed to extract obedience through the power of enforcement. This is in comparison to "legitimate law". Legitimate law and radical democracy mutually presuppose one another, as they are arrived at through open, rational interactions. Freedom is achieved through self-governance via political participation, which is the means to develop "legitimate laws".

When I say that, in a society that is essentially at "stage 6", there is "no need for law", I mean that individuals will behave freely based on universal principles, and that legal rules enacted by political systems will reflect those universal principles. So there will be no need for the coercive aspects of law. "Law" would merely exist as a record of mutually agreed-upon standards and norms of behavior. Thus my use of the term "beyond lawfulness", which you might also conceive of as "the end of law" (with the double entendre of "end" as both the expiration and the complete accomplishment of its aims).

For an excellent overview of Habermas' work I recommend http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/ , which goes into more detail than I can here.

This is the ultimate ideal state that might be accomplished through the use of a dialogic web as a tool to develop interaction abilities.

Ray

Hi Mike,

Yes, I agree that Habermas greatly values law and its enforcement (while also seeing its dangers, since the National Socialists operated under their "laws" though not "legitimate" laws).

Just to clarify, this is what I wrote:

"As individuals grow through the stages their ethical foundation becomes less dependent on outside definition and more internally grounded. Habermas describes this as a "de-centering" of a maturing person's understanding of the world. At the final stage there is no need for laws, in the sense that a person at that stage of moral development would act in the best interests of a civil society with or without a set of civil and criminal statutes in place.

With sufficient members of a society at the final stage, one might achieve a state that has no need for laws, which has grown beyond lawfulness. In this state there will exist harmony, equality, ethical interaction, and plenty."

While Habermas did not say "no need for laws", the reading suggests that for the special case, where sufficient members of a society are advanced in their practice of discourse ethics, there is no need for laws.

Visiting the section of Between Facts and Norms you refer to (pages 26 and 27 duplicated below), it is clear that Habermas was not, as I am, referring to the best state humanity can achieve. He is referring to humanity "as it is", with strategic (self-interested) actors where the controlling aspects of religious authority are dissolving in a "modern economic society". His argument is that because there are strategic actors and because communicative action fails (which the dialogic web is intended to support) there is a need for laws. I completely agree with you that, in the present society and with humanity's current stages of discourse ethics, there is a need for laws, and Habermas agrees. But there is a situation that one may find by reading Habermas that points out where there is no such need.

To simplify with an example, I would ask, "Did Mother Teresa need a law to prevent her from committing murder?" The answer is "Of course not". No matter where she lived she would not have murdered. Laws are needed only because there are those who act without the "legitimate validity" that arises from the use of discourse ethics. And the dialogic web is a tool that would provide a "virtual conscience" to steer humanity's future along the path of dialogic/discourse ethics/action science broadly and deeply, both reaching billions of people and aiding them in their smallest interaction.

You seem quite stuck on the distinction between Habermas describing the world as it is and my describing the best state of society possible. They are very different, and by looking at the arguments Habermas makes about why laws are needed to see futures and circumstances where they may not be needed. In a world full of Mother Teresa's (or Dalai Lama's, or even the very kind person that probably lives down your street), there would be no need for laws against murder. What I'm working on is how to develop those attributes in humanity. And the dialogic web is the tool to do that.

Ray

Following from "Between Facts and Norms" by Habermas, Transl by William Rehg, 1996, MIT Press, pages 26 and 27.

In what follows, I start from the modern situation of a predominantly secular society in which normative orders must be maintained without metasocial guarantees. Even lifeworld certainties, which in any case are pluralized and ever more differentiated, do not provide sufficient compensation for this deficit. As a result, the burden of social integration shifts more and more onto the communicate achievements of actors for whom validity and facticity - that is, the binding force of rationally motivated beliefs and the imposed force of external sanctions - have parted company as incompatible. This is true, at least, outside the areas of habitualized actions and customary practices. If, as I assume along with Parsons and Durkheim, complexes of interaction cannot be stabilized simply on the basis of the reciprocal influence that success-oriented actors exert on one another, then in the final analysis society must be integrated through communicate action.

Such a situation intensifies the problem: how can disenchanted internally differentiated and pluralized lifeworlds be socially integrated if, at the same time, the risk of dissension is growing, particularly in the spheres of communicate action that have been cut loose from the ties of sacred authorities and released from the bonds of archaic institutions? According to this scenario, the increasing need for integration must hopelessly overtax the integrating capacity of communicative action, especially if the functionally necessary spheres of strategic interaction are growing, as is the case in modern economic societies. In the case of conflict, persons engaged in communicative action face the alternatives of either breaking off communication or shifting to strategic action - of either postponing or carrying out the unresolved conflict. One way out of this predicament, now, is for the actors themselves to come to some understanding about the normative regulation of strategic interactions. The paradoxical nature of such regulation is revealed in light of the premise that facticity and validity have split apart, for the acting subjects themselves, into two mutually exclusive dimensions. For self-interested actors, all situational features are transformed into facts as they evaluate in the light of their own preferences, whereas actors oriented toward reaching understanding rely on a jointly negotiated understanding of the situation and interpret the relevant facts in the light of intersubjectively recognized validity claims. However, if the orientations to personal success and to reaching understanding exhauste the alternatives for acting subjects, then norms suitable as socially integrating constraints on strategic interactions must meet two contradictory conditions that, form the viewpoint of the actors, cannot be simultaneously satisfied. On the one hand, such rules must present de factor restrictions that alter the relevant information in such a way that the strategic actor feels compelled to adapt her behavior in the objectively desired manner. On the other hand, they must at the same time develop a socially integrating force by imposing obligations on the addressees - which, according to my theory, is possible only on the basis of intersubjectively recognized normative validity claims.

According to the above analysis, the type of norm required would have to bring about willingness to comply simultaneously by means of de facto constraint and legitimate validity.

Hi Vladimir,

I thought I had responded earlier, but didn't see it here. My apologies.

Yes, I agree on the need for self-organizing systems that reflect the real state of the society. I would add that there is a need to incorporate reflective feedback, as a system that can help society learn and change.

I also agree on the dangers that face humanity. To me, dialogic means taking into account the many perspectives that are relevant, which includes those related to global warming, the disenfranchised, and the powerless.

Thanks,

Ray

Thanks Don,

I'm an electrical engineer by training, but I'm not that good. :)

Besides, I thought that Michelson-Morley disproved the existence of the aether. :)

I appreciate the mention in a blog. I'm also looking for potential collaborators to take the prototype system I've developed (as part of a NSF CAREER award investigating approaches to team skill development) and move it to a more structured "dialogic web" platform - like has been done with the semantic web. So if you know of any potential collaborators who might add value, please send them my way.

With much appreciation,

Ray Luechtefeld, PhD

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your comments. To respond to your implicit question, the personal dialogic agents actually "talk" using text to speech, and "listen" using speech to text, to their users. The prototype I developed used only very basic computational intelligence to interact with users, but was still able to produce some significant changes in behavior, including, for example, in one study nudging teams using the system to ask more questions of their team members than teams in a control group. The expertise lies in developing the intervention approach, which is why psychologists, organization development experts, facilitators, etc., are needed to contribute.

Ray

Hi again Eugene,

Sorry, my last post appeared as "anonymous". I'm re-posting here...

Hi Eugene,

Thanks for your comment. "Little acts of disrespect" refers to the micro-inequities that are a result of hidden bias. However if they are recorded and viewed together, the bias is apparent. A personal dialogic agent can be set up to capture a record of these micro-inequities, and then guide users through a conversation about how they occur, and even develop indicators of how they occur that can be used to prevent them in the "moment of action".

"Meaning" is indeed a slippery concept, since as Bakhtin pointed out, it depends on context and history as much as connotation and denotation. For example, in a dysfunctional organization to treat someone "with respect" may mean putting on a facade of friendliness while plotting to sabotage their efforts. This may be moderated by the setting in which the phrase is used as well as the personal experiences of the participants with others. The personal agents in a dialogic web would guide the user to capturing his or her meanings associated with critical events or phrases, recognizing the polysemous ("many meaning'ed") nature of interaction. (I remember discussions with many people in the early '90's for whom "business process re-engineering" meant "management wants to fire us".)

For my prototype I used simple pattern-matching and boolean logic. This was sufficient to produce some significant improvements in group function, though it would have surely been better with some more sophisticated techniques. But, I was pleased with the results I got while just using CSci undergrads to do most of the programming. (Unfortunately, the last "real" coding I did was assembly language in the late 1980's. I just didn't have the time to keep up while I was doing other work.)

As far as I can tell in the future, computational "understanding" of polysemic / polysemiotic language is not possible. There are, however, many resources, such as AffectNet and WordNet that can help with the detection of patterns through data mining. Taxonomic approaches, as I believe Google and Siri use, are also very helpful for the broad strokes of capturing semantics. However the dialogic web relies on pattern matching and data mining along with user-supplied meanings which supplement the data mining. Sharing this information between personal agents can be very powerful.

I hope this clarifies things. Let me know if you have more questions.

Thanks,

Ray