Dialogic Foundations 281feeds on many of the traditional understandings of theory, reason, and knowledge,
implicit in older classical philosophy. However, it then proceeds to destroy them. As
Habermas notes, empirical positivist theory borrows ‘two elements from the philo-
sophical heritage: the methodological meaning of the theoretical attitude and the
basic ontological assumption of a structure of the world independent of the knower.’
However, he continues, it then abandons ‘the connection oftheoriaandKosmos,of
mimesisandbios theoretikosthat was assumed from Plato through Husserl. What
was once supposed to comprise the practical efficacy of theory has now fallen prey
to methodological prohibitions. The conception of theory as a process of cultiva-
tion of the person has become apocryphal’ (Habermas 1971: 304). In other words,
this positivistic conception of reason undermines the crucial dimensions of reason,
which underpin human understanding and communication. Technical progress, in
the human and social sciences, is not the same as providing the conditions for rational
human conduct. This point extends earlier arguments that Habermas had made over
the question of technocratic ideology. As Thomas McCarthy comments:
The growth of productive forces and administrative efficiency does not itself lead to the
replacement of institutions based on force by an organization of social relations bound to
communication free from domination. The ideals of the technical master of history and of
liberation from the quasi-natural forces of social and political domination, as well as the means
for their realization, are fundamentally different. (McCarthy 1978: 36)
In the final analysis, positivism facilitates, unwittingly, the development of negative
dialectics and neglects the crucial relation between knowledge and human interests.
Yet Habermas neither wants to abandon this positivist conception, nor to despair
over its impact. As long as it is correctly grasped, as a sphere of knowledgeable
understanding connected to particular human interests, it can have a role in the
human and social sciences. In this context, a more balanced, nuanced, and expansive
‘interest-based’ conception of reason is required.^8
In hisKnowledge and Human InterestHabermas therefore separates out various
dimensions of knowledge, associating them with differing uses of reason. His basic
claim is grounded in a philosophical anthropology, namely that what we call know-
ledge claims are in fact, rooted in certain human interests, or, more precisely
‘knowledge-constitutive interests’. Thus, one cannot single out spheres of knowledge
for abstract study—as in epistemology—distinct from material human concerns.
Interest means, ‘cognitive interest’, and cognitive interests are rooted in human
(specifically social) activities. Certain kinds of human activity are therefore the
grounds for knowledge-constitutive interests. Habermas isolates three non-reducible
human interests: technical, practical, and emancipatory. The first is concerned
with work, the second with interaction, and the third with power relations. These
interests are then seen to correspond to three major-knowledge-based sciences (and in
effect understandings of reason), that is, theempirical–analyticsciences, focused on
technical cognitive interests or technical control of the world; second, thehistorical–
hermeneuticsciences embodying practical interests, communication, and symbolic
interaction; third, critical orientated social sciences, incorporating emancipatory