Interpretation und Kommunikation. Lebensformen im Dialog

This essay analyzes the role played by the “principles of interpretative benevolence”, mainly Davidson’s principle of charity, in the communication and understanding practices within and between different ways of life. The unifying feature of the life-world (Lebenswelt) and the incompleteness of the interpretation processes constitute the framework in which convergences and intersections of beliefs and values between different cultural and linguistic communities emerge. First of all, it is highlighted both by Gadamer’s notion of horizon and Charles Taylor’s conception of cultures as “webs of interlocutions”, that the basic social structure is constituted by the I-you relationship. From this relationship, a “we” can originate at both intra- and inter-cultural level. In the course of a real communicative exchange, subjects articulate their points of view not as a simple reiteration of a transmitted knowledge, but as a first-person performance that constitutes and organizes elements of their respective background knowledge. Communication and understanding do not take place between cultural or social systems conceived as macro-subjects. Secondly, according to Davidson’s truth-functional semantics, this essay aims to show that mutual understanding takes place, when it occurs, in the inter-subjectively accessible area between the interlocutors on the basis of a great deal of common agreement about various truths in everyday life contexts (Lebenswelt). Contrarily to the thesis of widespread incommensurability among points of view or conceptual schemes I argue that the disagreement is surrounded by spaces of agreement, which are left unnoticed because there are taken for granted. I highlight that differences in the meaning of expressions in different languages might be bridged by an adequate interpretative effort. To support the idea that there is no qualitative difference between intra- and inter-cultural communication and understanding, this essay resorts to Wittgenstein’s ideas of family resemblance and forms of life (Lebensformen), interpreting them in a way that is not committed to the kind of cultural relativism that some of his critics attribute to him. I attempt to show that his notion of “forms of life” – Wittgenstein also calls them “facts of living” - refers to basic activities, practices and attitudes toward life and people that are rooted in man’s biological and social nature. They provide the shared system of reference by means of which people can interact with each other both intra- and inter-culturally. Thirdly, the essay aims to show that the forms of life, so conceived, constitute the core contents of the human rights system, starting with the Universal Declaration as the first genuinely intercultural document in history. The ways of being and acting expressed by human rights, on which different views of the world have found, and continue to find, an overlapping consensus at the practical level, represent a selection of valuable features of the “common behavior of mankind”. As the principle of charity indicates, we can suppose that dissent on one or more human rights is based on the sharing, no matter how partial, of other contents understood as forms of life. It is precisely for this reason that what is shared remains, for the most part, unnoticed. That dissent concerns not so much about the ways of being and acting to which value is attributed, but about the weight that is attributed to them both by individuals and different cultural communities. If the contents of human rights lead to the expression of basic facts of living, then what characterized the different ways of life are the different and often alternative combinations and priorities attributed to them by the people living in different cultural communities. Finding commonalities is a practice that always comes about in the particular. It starts from the particular meeting of two people, referring to a particular topic, in a particular place and at a particular time. When within differences one succeeds in grasping commonalities, “universal” places occur.