ABSTRACT
The growing acknowledgement in western academic and political circles of the fundamentally situated character of human agency has resulted in a valorization of the uniqueness of specific cultural, gender, sexual identity and racialized identity standpoints. Both are rooted in a specific vision of the relationship between human ontology and the nature of language which dates back to the ancient Greeks, and influentially revived under the rubric of Jurgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action. Habermas shares with Aristotle the conviction that human beings are intersubjectively constituted as individuals through mutual recognition. Habermas’ interpretation of the relationship between human ontology and language has been taken up by many contemporary theorists. Young argues that human beings’ standpoints are irreducibly asymmetrical because of the vagaries of personal history and social positioning.
