There appears to be a lack of symmetry in Habermas’ analysis of
those disciplines guided by a technical and a practical interest
and those guided by an emancipatory interest. In the first two,
Habermas is primarily interested in the formal conditions of the
types of knowledge involved. To claim, for example, that the
empirical-analytic sciences are guided by a technical interest…
does not prejudice the issue of which theoretical schemes will be
corroborated or falsified in the course of scientific enquiry. Again,
to note the ways in which the historical-hermeneutic disciplines
differ from the empirical analytic sciences…does not prejudice
the issue of how we are to judge among competing
interpretations…. But an emancipatory interest and the disciplines
supposedly guided by it, is not merely formal; it is substantive
and normative. It dictates what ought to be the aim both of our
study of society and of society itself—human emancipation.
Habermas seems to be…smuggling in his own normative bias
under the guise of an objective analysis of reason as selfreflection…
critique…is a substantive normative theory which
cannot be justified by an appeal to the formal conditions of reason
and knowledge