On the Pragmatics of Communication

Jürgen Habermas

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745630472, 9780745622194
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

This volume brings together Habermas's key writings on language and communication. Including some classic texts as well as new material which is published here for the first time, this book is a detailed and up-to-date introduction to Habermas's formal pragmatics, which is a vital aspect of his social theory.

Written from 1976 to 1996, the essays show the extent to which formal pragmatics underpins Habermas's theory of communicative action. They are presented in chronological order, so that the reader can trace developments and revisions in Habermas's thought. The volume includes a critical discussion of Searle's theory of meaning, and Richard Rorty's neopragmatism. It concludes with Habermas's recent defence of his theory of communicative action, in which he reaffirms his view that interpretative understanding inescapably involves evaluation.

This book will be an indispensable text for students and academics who want a clear and accessible introduction to the development of Habermas's theory of communication and its relation to his broader social and political theory.

1

What Is Universal Pragmatics? (1976)

I

The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding (Verständigung)¹ In other contexts, one also speaks of “general presuppositions of communication,” but I prefer to speak of general presuppositions of communicative action because I take the type of action aimed at reaching understanding to be fundamental. Thus I start from the assumption (without undertaking to demonstrate it here) that other forms of social action—for example, conflict, competition, strategic action in general—are derivatives of action oriented toward reaching understanding (Verständigung). Furthermore, since language is the specific medium of reaching understanding at the sociocultural stage of evolution, I want to go a step further and single out explicit speech actions from other forms of communicative action. I shall ignore nonverbal actions and bodily expressions.²

The Validity Basis of Speech

Karl-Otto Apel proposes the following formulation in regard to the general presuppositions of consensual speech acts: to identify such presuppositions we must, he thinks, leave the perspective of the observer of behavioral facts and call to mind “what we must necessarily always already presuppose in regard to ourselves and others as normative conditions of the possibility of reaching understanding; and in this sense, what we must necessarily always already have accepted.”³ Apel here uses the aprioristic perfect (immer schon: always already) and adds the mode of necessity in order to express the transcendental constraint to which we, as speakers, are subject as soon as we perform or understand or respond to a speech act. In or after the performance of this act, we can become aware that we have involuntarily made certain asssumptions, which Apel calls “normative conditions of the possibility of reaching understanding.” The adjective “normative” may give rise to misunderstanding. One can say, however, that the general and unavoidable—in this sense transcendental—conditions of possible mutual understanding have a normative content when one thinks not only of the validity dimension of norms of action or evaluation, or even of the validity dimension of rules in general, but also of the validity basis of speech across its entire spectrum. As a preliminary, I want to indicate briefly what I mean by the “validity basis of speech.”

I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated (einlösen). Insofar as she wants to participate in a process of reaching understanding, she cannot avoid raising the following—and indeed precisely the following—validity claims. She claims to be

a. uttering something intelligibly,

b. giving (the hearer) something to understand,

c. making herself thereby understandable, and

d. coming to an understanding with another person.

The speaker must choose an intelligible (verständlich) expression so that speaker and hearer can comprehend one another. The speaker must have the intention of communicating a true (wahr) proposition (or a propositional content, the existential presuppositions of which are satisfied) so that the hearer can share the knowledge of the speaker. The speaker must want to express her intentions truthfully (wahrhaftig) so that the hearer can find the utterance of the speaker credible (can trust her). Finally, the speaker must choose an utterance that is right (richtig) with respect to prevailing norms and values so that the hearer can accept the utterance, and both speaker and hearer can, in the utterance, thereby agree with one another with respect to a recognized normative background. Moreover, communicative action can continue undisturbed only as long as all participants suppose that the validity claims they reciprocally raise are raised justifiably.

The aim of reaching understanding (Verständigung) is to bring about an agreement (Einverständnis) that terminates in the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal comprehension, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another. Agreement is based on recognition of the four corresponding validity claims: comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness, and rightness. We can see that the word “Verständigung” is ambiguous. In its narrowest meaning it indicates that two subjects understand a linguistic expression in the same way; in its broadest meaning it indicates that an accord exists between two subjects concerning the rightness of an utterance in relation to a mutually recognized normative background. In addition, the participants in communication can reach understanding about something in the world, and they can make their intentions understandable to one another.

If full agreement, embracing all four of these components, were a normal state of linguistic communication, it would not be necessary to analyze the process of reaching understanding from the dynamic perspective of bringing about an agreement. The typical states are in the gray areas between, on the one hand, lack of understanding and misunderstanding, intentional and involuntary untruthfulness, concealed and open discord, and, on the other hand, preexisting or achieved consensus. Reaching understanding is the process of bringing about an agreement on the presupposed basis of validity claims that are mutually recognized. In everyday life, we start from a background consensus pertaining to those interpretations taken for granted among participants. As soon as this consensus is shaken, and as soon as the presupposition that the validity claims are satisfied (or could be vindicated) is suspended in the case of at least one of the four claims, communicative action cannot be continued.

The task of mutual interpretation, then, is to achieve a new definition of the situation that all participants can share. If this attempt fails, one is basically confronted with the alternatives of switching to strategic action, breaking off communication altogether, or recommencing action oriented toward reaching understanding at a different level, the level of argumentative speech (for purposes of discursively examining the problematic validity claims, which are now regarded as hypothetical). In what follows, I shall take into consideration only consensual speech acts, leaving aside both discourse and strategic action.

In communicative action, participants presuppose that they know what mutual recognition of reciprocally raised validity claims means. If in addition they can rely on a shared definition of the situation and thereupon act consensually, the background consensus includes the following:

a. Speaker and hearer know implicitly that each of them has to raise the aforementioned validity claims if there is to be communication at all (in the sense of action oriented toward reaching understanding).

b. Both reciprocally suppose that they actually do satisfy these presuppositions of communication, that is, that they justifiably raise their validity claims.

c. This means that there is a common conviction that any validity claims raised either are already vindicated, as in the case of the comprehensibility of the sentences uttered, or, as in the case of truth, truthfulness, and rightness, could be vindicated because the sentences, propositions, expressed intentions, and utterances satisfy the corresponding adequacy conditions.

Thus I distinguish (i) the conditions for the validity of a grammatical sentence, true proposition, truthful intentional expression, or normatively correct utterance appropriate to its context from (ii) the claims with which speakers demand intersubjective recognition for the well-formedness of a sentence, truth of a proposition, truthfulness of an intentional expression, and rightness of a speech act, as well as from (iii) the vindication of justifiably raised validity claims. Vindication means that the proponent, whether through appeal to intuitions and experiences or through arguments and action consequences, justifies the claim’s worthiness to be recognized and brings about a suprasubjective recognition of its validity. In accepting a validity claim raised by the speaker, the hearer recognizes the validity of the symbolic structures; that is, he recognizes that a sentence is grammatical, a statement true, an intentional expression truthful, or an utterance correct. The validity of these symbolic structures is justified by virtue of the fact that they satisfy certain adequacy conditions; but the meaning of the validity consists in their worthiness to be recognized that is, in the guarantee that intersubjective recognition can be brought about under suitable conditions.⁴

I have proposed the name “universal pragmatics”⁵ for the research program aimed at reconstructing the universal validity basis of speech.⁶ I would now like to delimit the theme of this research program in a preliminary way. Thus before passing on (in part II) to the theory of speech acts, I shall prefix a few guiding remarks dealing with (i) an initial delimitation of the object domain of the proposed program of universal pragmatics; (ii) an elucidation of the procedure of rational reconstruction, as opposed to an empirical-analytic procedure in the narrower sense; (iii) a few methodological difficulties resulting from the fact that linguistics claims the status of a reconstructive science; and finally (iv) the question of whether the proposed universal pragmatics assumes the status of a transcendental theory of reflection or that of an empirically substantive reconstructive science. I shall restrict myself to guiding remarks because, while these questions are fundamental and deserve to be examined independently, they form only the context of the topic I shall treat and must thus remain in the background.

Preliminary Delimitation of the Object Domain

In several of his works, Apel has pointed to the abstractive fallacy that underlies the approach to the logic of science favored by contemporary analytic philosophy.⁷ The logical analysis of language that originated with Carnap focuses primarily on syntactic and semantic properties of linguistic formations. Like structuralist linguistics, it delimits its object domain by first abstracting from the pragmatic properties of language, and subsequently introducing the pragmatic dimension in such a way that the constitutive connection between the generative accomplishments of subjects capable of speaking and acting, on the one hand, and the general structures of speech, on the other, cannot come into view. It is certainly legitimate to draw an abstractive distinction between language as structure and speaking as process. A language will then be understood as a system of rules for generating expressions, such that all well-formed expressions (e.g., sentences) may count as elements of this language. On the other hand, subjects capable of speaking can employ such expressions as participants in a process of communication; for instance, they can utter sentences as well as understand them and respond to them. This abstraction of language from the use of language in speech (langue versus parole), which is made in both the logical and the structuralist analysis of language, is meaningful. Nonetheless, this methodological step is not sufficient reason for the view that the pragmatic dimension of language from which one abstracts is beyond formal (or linguistic) analysis. An abstractive fallacy arises in that the successful, or at least promising, reconstruction of linguistic rule systems is seen as justification for restricting formal analysis to this object domain. The separation of the two analytic levels, language and speech, should not be made in such a way that the pragmatic dimension of language is left to exclusively empirical analysis—that is, to empirical sciences such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.

I would like to defend the thesis that not only language but speech too—that is, the employment of sentences in utterances—is accessible to formal analysis. Like the elementary units of language (sentences), the elementary units of speech (utterances) can be analyzed from the methodological stance of a reconstructive science.

Approaches to a general theory of communication have been developed from the semiotics of Charles Morris.⁸ In their framework of fundamental concepts they integrate the model of linguistic behaviorism (the symbolically mediated behavioral reaction of the stimulated individual organism) with the model of information transmission (encoding and decoding signals between sender and receiver for a given channel and an at least partially common store of signs). If the speaking process is conceptualized in this way, the fundamental question of universal pragmatics concerning the general conditions of possible mutual understanding (Verständigung) cannot be posed in an appropriate way. For example, the intersubjectivity of meanings that are identical for at least two speakers does not even become a problem (i) if the identity of meanings is reduced to extensionally equivalent classes of behavioral properties, as is done in linguistic behaviorism,⁹ or (ii) if it is preestablished at the analytic level that there exists a common code and store of signs between sender and receiver, as is done in information theory.

In addition to empiricist approaches that issue, in one way or another, from the semiotics of Morris, there are interesting approaches to the logical analysis of general structures of speech and action. The following analyses can be understood as contributions along the way to a universal pragmatics. Bar-Hillel pointed out quite early the necessity for a pragmatic extension of logical semantics.¹⁰ Also of note are the proposals for a deontic logic (Hare, H. von Wright, N. Rescher)¹¹ and corresponding attempts at a formalization of speech acts such as assertions and questions (Apostel);¹² approaches to a logic of nondeductive argumentation (Toulmin, Botha) belong here as well.¹³ From the side of linguistics, the investigation of presuppositions (Kiefer, Petöfi),¹⁴ conversational postulates (Grice, Lakoff),¹⁵ speech acts (Ross, McCawley, Wunderlich),¹⁶ and dialogues and texts (Fillmore, Posner)¹⁷ lead to a consideration of the pragmatic dimensi...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Maeve Cooke
• 1 What Is Universal Pragmatics? (1976)
• 2 Social Action, Purposive Activity, and Communication (1981)
• 3 Communicative Rationality and the Theories of Meaning and Action (1986)
• 4 Actions, Speech Acts, Linguistically Mediated Interactions, and the Lifeworld (1988)
• 5 Comments on John Searle’s “Meaning, Communication, and Representation” (1988)
• 6 Toward a Critique of the Theory of Meaning (1988)
• 7 Some Further Clarifications of the Concept of Communicative Rationality (1996)
• 8 Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn (1996)
• 9 On the Distinction between Poetic and Communicative Uses of Language (1985)
• 10 Questions and Counterquestions (1985)
• Selected Bibliography and Further Reading
• Index