Three knowledge-constitutive interests determine what counts as objective knowledge

Evidence

For the critically oriented sciences, the methodological framework, consisting of objectifying procedures or nomological knowledge and of a method of comprehension, suggests that reality is grasped on the basis of a guiding interest in the dissolution of apparently objective, but in principle alterable, relationships of dependency. The transcendental framework and the conditions of possible objectivity were determined in the first case by an epistemic interest in technology, in the second by an epistemic interest in practical affairs, and in the third by an epistemic interest in emancipation. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 606

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names Habermas’s technical, practical, and emancipatory interests as the transcendental conditions of possible objectivity.
• XREF: Core Habermas claim which the Adorno-Habermas positivist dispute in this book sets up.