Which theory of Habermas is useful way to explore knowledge and its impact of student engagement?

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the critical theory and pragmatism tradition.

The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas

• Habermas, a proponent of critical social theory, raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests by identifying critical knowledge based on principles that differentiated it from the natural sciences or the humanities through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation.
• Habermas explored concepts of knowledge, identifying three areas analytical, hermeneutic, and critical.
• Habermas differentiates three primary generic cognitive areas in which human interest generates knowledge.
• These areas determine categories relevant to what we interpret as knowledge.
• That is, they are termed knowledge constitutive.
• They determine how to discover knowledge and whether knowledge claims can be warranted.
• These areas define cognitive interests or learning domains and are grounded in different aspects of social existence -- work, interaction, and power.

Knowledge-constitutive Interest Theory

• Knowledge constitutive interests are essentially Habermas’s first attempt to achieve some understanding of the nature of truth.
• The concept of knowledge constitutive interests is complex and was initiated by Habermas’s concern for the limitations imposed upon thought by positivist practice.
• Habermas was concerned with ‘knowledge that can truly orient action’.
• In other words, Habermas wanted a profound and radical integration of theory and practice.
• Suc h knowledge, Habermas argued, is necessarily self-reflective.

Social Theory

•  Habermas develops a two-level social theory that analyses communicative rationality, the rational potential built into everyday speech.
• Habermas contends that communicative competence has developed through the course of evolution. Still, in contemporary society, it is often suppressed or weakened by how major domains of social life, such as the market, the state, and organizations, have been given over to or taken over by strategic instrumental rationality and rationalization on the other.

Theory of Communicative Action

• The theory of communicative action is a critical project which reconstructs a concept of reason which is not grounded in instrumental or objectivistic terms but rather in an emancipatory communicative act.
• These linguistic communication structures can be used to establish a normative understanding of society.
• Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action was devoted in part to developing an account of truth in terms that did not imply that there exists an absolute truth of the kind traditionally posited by metaphysics.