Still reading Habermas from the online source, because my second attempt at ordering a copy has disappeared. Is there a Habermas thief in the postal system? Because those are the only things that ever not arrived after I ordered them. This has nothing to do with the readings, just had to vent somewhere.

Habermas is spending a lot of time talking about lifeworld, so honestly I had to Google it to get a better handle on it. So the Habermas view of the lifeworld consists of social and cultural meanings that people experience together. So, in a way it is a relativistic constructivism of some kind? Two people come together to create a lifeworld based on their own experiences to help come to understand each other. That is, at least, what I think I understand so far. There are some deeper layers to it that Habermas gets into that obviously I still need to come to understand.

The great thing about this chapter of Habermas is that he gives a great summary of everything he has been talking about in past chapters in the last paragraph of page 253. He also seems to connect his other ideas to the lifeworld concept as he summarizes, but I will really need to dig into these more before I grasp them better.

The Alexander article was a fascinating read, although I’m interested to see how it is discussed and dissected in class. I understand that he is creating a compromise theory between the warring factions of two paradigms. I get the basic idea of using the best of both, but I am not sure if I fully get how all of the pieces fit together. I loved the next to the last paragraph on page 214 (the one that starts with “Viewed in this light”). I quoted that one on Facebook and got into some interesting discussions about truth and even human evolution in the future. So overall I think that article touches on some topics even larger than research and paradigm. An interesting read.