Why Bea is Wrong, but Fly might be, too.

Bea's expert summary of Fly's book cuts right to the quick: the Dane is, quite certainly advocating a phronetic turn in the social sciences, one where the production of knowledge relies, as Bea writes, "heavily on learning or discovering through experience, as indicated in the Dreyfus model." But in her critique of this fundamental shift, elaborating on reasonable fears that the introduction of the normative is "potentially troubling," I think she shows an unwillingness to accept the analysis she so capably summarized. This isn't a horrible thing: the worlds of episteme and techne almost certainly have more jobs in them. But they also have phronesis, and should probably just admit it already.

This really seems the core of Fly's beef with Habermas, too, though, so I think Bea is certainly is excellent company. Marx, too. But the anecdote related on p.22, wherein Dreyfus admits that his project is to "undermine Western society," seems to become Fly's as well. If in the perfectly rational, endlessly deliberative world of which Habermas writes we can never surpass the achievment of competent or even proficient performers, then either 1) the world is condemned to be perpetually poorer, or 2) there must be something else, beyond the episteme and techne, worthy of being valued.

But Fly's reading of Foucault seems shockingly different from the usual, too -- so much so that I wonder if maybe he's not stretching beyond what the Frenchman really would agree too. In his concluding paragraphs on p.127 and 128, Fly makes the twin points that 1) because institutions based solely on episteme and techne can go horribly awry, phronesis must be privileged; and 2) that theories must be constantly be confronted with praxis to defend freedom. In both these concluding thoughts, I think Fly is probably seeing individuals as more self-determining than would Foucault, and to whatever extent his making a convincing argument relies on this reading of Foucault, I'd consider it suspect. That said, it doesn't really rely much, if at all; it'd be an odd sort of proposition if, in making this argument for phronesis, Fly expected us to accept it basedon the Foucault card, as some sort of episteme shorthand.