Roberto Frega

In this article I examine the main conceptions of public reason in contemporary political philosophy in order to set the frame for appreciating the novelty of the pragmatist understanding of public reason as based upon the notion of consequences and upon a theory of rationality as inquiry. The approach is inspired by Dewey but is free from any concern with history of philosophy. The aim is to propose a different understanding of the nature of public reason aimed at overcoming the limitations of the existing approaches. Public reason is presented as the proper basis for discussing contested issues in the broad frame of deep democracy.

Since Rawl’s A theory of justice, political philosophy has been haunted by the moral and epistemic problem of justification. The growing awareness of the irreducibility of human disagreement has increased a sense of uneasiness towards the ambivalence of pluralism that, in turn, has fostered the hope that rationality, in its public use, could help us in grounding the social order on more stable basis. Although Stanley Cavell is not usually considered a significant participant in this debate, through his work he has developed an original and strong interpretation of the nature of justification and rationality. Cavell’s search for a new conception of rationality starts from an analysis of the rationality immanent to the use of ordinary language. This model of explanation, whose origins are to be found in the teaching of Wittgenstein and Austin, is then extended and articulated through an analysis of aesthetic judgment. This vantage point is successively used by Cavell in order to redefine the epistemological categories of political and moral philosophy. Cavell’s moral and political philosophy is based on an original account of practical rationality and justification built over the concepts of claim, articulation and expression. As Cavell himself has never offered a complete account of his theory of rationality, in this paper I provide a wide reconstruction of the linguistic, aesthetic and moral steps through which this theory has been developed