As I sit at my desk reading my assignment for Rhetorical Ethics tonight, I’m completely distracted. You see, we are moving this weekend and are supposed to have carpet installed in our home prior to Saturday. Unfortunately, Shaw did not load our carpet on their truck in time to get it here for the masterfully planned install that I painstakingly orchestrated. So, I’m trying to re-arrange the move, track where the hell the carept is and read Habermas. It seems, on the list of priorities that philosophical concepts like “analytical philosophy,” “constructivist position,” and “critical-rationalist position” don’t seem that high.

Can anyone help with this idea in Habermas:

On the face of it, the critical-rationalist position breaks completely with transcendentalism. It holds that the three horns of “Munchhausen trilemma”—logical circularity, infinite regress, and recourse to absolute certitude—can only be avoided if one gives up any hope of grounding or justifying whatsoever. Here the notion of justification is being disloged in favor of the concept of critical testing, which becomes the critical rationalist’s equivalent for justification. In this connection I would argue that criticism is itself a procedure whose employment is never presuppositionless. That is why I think that critical rationalism, by clinging to the idea of irrefutable rules of criticism, allows a weak version of the Kantian justificatory mode to sneak into its inner precincts through the back door.

Your guess is as good as mine….