November 8th to 11th, 2004

Josué Cândido da Silva
josuecandido@uol.com.br
PUC - SP - Brazil

FROM THE INDEFINITE COMMUNITY OF INVESTIGATORS TO THE COMMUNICATION COMMUNITY

ABSTRACT
Both Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas have tried to found ethics in terms of philosophy of language, which they called "discourse ethics." Such an attempt aims at resuming the Kantian concept on the transcendental conditions of possibility and validity of science by means of discerning the transcendental status of language and by means of the linguistic community as well. According to Apel, this program would have been initiated by the semiotic transformation of Kant's transcendental logic operated by Charles Sanders Peirce. According to Apel, Peirce would have done such transformation while creating the concept of an "indefinite Community of investigators", in which converges, on the one hand, the semiotic postulate of a supra-individual unit of interpretation, and on the other hand, the postulate inherent to the logic of research of an experimental assurance "in the long run." Therefore, Peirce transcends the Kantian distinction between theoretical and practical reason, or between regulatory principles and moral postulates, since the unlimited cognitive process itself, as a real social process, is at the same time an object of the logic of ethics. However, Apel, after having built the discourse ethics upon the concept of communication community, draws way from Peirce by placing the regulatory principle of communication community no longer on the research logic of the scientific community, but rather on the idea of an unlimited interpretative community, which implicitly presupposes that any and all argumentative individuals are ideal instances of control. This article focuses on Apel's change.

KEYWORDDS: Discourse Dthics, Apel, Pragmatism, and Communication Community.

Center for Pragmatism Studies
Philosophy Graduate Program
Departament of Philosophy
Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo - Brazil