The Politics of Truth. Towards a Discourse Ethical Framework for the Legitimate Use of Truth Claims in Deliberation

The discourse theory of democracy, prominently advanced by authors like Jürgen Habermas or Ingeborg Maus, argues against technocratic tendencies in democratic theory that in pluralistic societies the only normative requirement for deliberation consists in inclusive procedures in that citizens provide advice which reasons they themselves accept. Habermas for example emphasises that good democratic decisions should not be measured as to whether they are true but justified. Yet, in his work about the difference between truth and justice there are indications that de facto in discourse there will necessarily be connections between truth and justice in concrete speech acts. While highlighting the categorical difference between truth and justice, these have never been systematically followed by further works in the area of discourse theory. This, however, is not just a theoretical but also a practical blind spot: Nowadays discourse is shifting successively from deliberating what should be done (justice) to questions of how to interpret the world (truth). For example, the discourse about coping with climate change does not only affect the question if environment protection is a right thing to do but whether the assumption that there is an anthropogenic cause is true. Considering the role truth claims take for justifying political action, it seems necessary for the discourse theory of democracy to evaluate their normatively proper role. Therefore, I would like to present a three-dimensional model of the dialectical role of truth in deliberation. Truth must be considered in discourses about tolerance, pragmatic solutions and defying the group of the relevantly affected. Yet, in contrast to technocracy truth must be understood dialectically as truth by the people. In this sense, truth takes an important role to prohibit democratically illegitimate domination.