ABSTRACT

Habermas, J. Jürgen Habermas is one of the world’s most influential philosophers. Over the past decades he has produced an extensive corpus of work that has impacted not only on philosophy but also on sociology, psychology, communication studies, political theory and legal theory. A core element of Habermas’s philosophical approach is his program of formal pragmatics. The aim of this program is to identify and reconstruct the universal presuppositions that underlie the communicative competence of speakers and make mutual understanding possible. For this reason, Habermas used the term ‘universal pragmatics’ when he first delineated its main features in his programmatic article ‘What is Universal Pragmatics?’ (Habermas 1976). However, later on he preferred to use the term ‘formal pragmatics’ to distinguish it from Apel’s program of transcendental pragmatics (Apel 1992, 1994) and to underscore its affinity with formal semantics. The core idea behind Habermas’s project is that not only language but also speech, that is, the use of sentences in utterances, is susceptible to formal philosophical analysis and not merely to empirical analysis of particular situations of use as is done in sociolinguistics, for example. A comprehensive philosophical account of human communication thus requires complementing formal semantics with formal pragmatics. Whereas the former examines the propositional content of utterances in order to provide an account of what is said in a speech act, the latter examines the force of speech acts in order to explain the interpersonal relations that are established in communication. According to

Habermas, the latter type of analysis, unlike the former, has a philosophical significance that goes beyond its intrinsic value for understanding human communication. It has important implications for theories of action, rationality, society and morality. The key hypothesis behind Habermas’s program of formal pragmatics is that human communication is governed by a genuine kind of rationality (he calls it ‘communicative rationality’) that is not reducible to instrumental rationality. Whereas the linguistic competence of speakers may be conceived as being limited to the capacity of understanding grammatically well-formed expressions of a language, the communicative competence of speakers involves at the very least the ability to use linguistic expressions in order to reach understanding with someone about something (or, in Habermas’s own terminology, to engage in ‘communicative action’). This communicative ability, however, is genuinely different from and irreducible to the capacity to act instrumentally or strategically in order to achieve extracommunicative goals. In order to prove this hypothesis, Habermas draws from speech act theory as it was originally developed by J. Austin (Austin 1975) and J. Searle (Searle 1969, 1979b, 1983). In contradistinction to these authors, however, Habermas’s aim is not to provide a comprehensive descriptive account of each of the rules that govern the use of specific types of speech acts, important as that task may be. Instead, his analysis of speech acts aims to identify the unavoidable rational presuppositions that make communication possible. These rational presuppositions can be identi-

fied by focusing on the difference between the

mere production of a grammatically correct sentence by a speaker and its use in a situation of possible understanding. Habermas explains this difference by reference to the relations to reality in which every sentence is first embedded through the act of utterance. In being uttered, a sentence is placed in relation to (1) a certain state of affairs, (2) a certain speaker’s intention, and (3) a certain interpersonal relationship. It is thereby placed under validity claims that it need not and cannot fulfill as a nonsituated sentence, as a purely grammatical formation. These three dimensions of validity (what Habermas calls ‘the validity basis of speech’) are the key heuristic cues that interlocutors have at their disposal in trying to understand each other’s speech acts. The guiding idea is a generalization of the conception of meaning as truth conditions characteristic of formal semantics. According to the latter, we understand the propositional content of an assertion when we know its truth conditions, that is, when we know what would be the case if it were true. Generalizing this view to cover both the propositional content of an utterance and the force of the different speech acts that can be performed by it, Habermas claims that we understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable. Now, as we just saw, knowledge of the acceptability-conditions of speech acts involves at least three dimensions: a speaker, a hearer, and the world. Thus, in order to understand each other’s speech acts, interlocutors must be able to share the knowledge implicit in the propositional content of the speech act and hence they must assess the truth claim of the utterance. They must share the normative presuppositions inherent in the interpersonal relation established through the illocutionary act (i.e. they must assess the rightness claim inherent in it) and they must also assess the sincerity with which the speech act is uttered. Truth, rightness, and sincerity are three universal validity claims that speakers (implicitly or explicitly) raise with their speech acts and which they must be prepared to justify by offering reasons if challenged by the hearer. Following Dummett’s account of meaning in terms of assertibility conditions (Dummett 1975, 1976), Habermas claims that knowing the kinds of reasons with which a speaker could vindicate the validity claims raised with her speech act is an

indispensable part of understanding its meaning. Here lies the key connection between formal pragmatics and theories of action, rationality, and social order. To the extent that interlocutors can check the acceptability of their reasons by participating in reflexive practices of argumentation (what Habermas calls ‘rational discourses’), communication can generate binding and bonding effects that have a rational foundation and make consensual action coordination possible. In order to fill in the details of this general

program of formal pragmatics, Habermas has engaged in discussion and criticism of central aspects of speech act theory such as the classification of basic types of speech acts and the account of the relationship between the illocutionary and perlocutionary component of speech acts. He has also criticized the shortcomings of the major competitors to formal pragmatics: truth-conditional semantics (Dummett 1976) and intentionalist semantics (Bennett 1976; Grice 1989; Schiffer 1972). His analyses are spread over multiple writings, from the original statement of the program in ‘What is Universal Pragmatics?’ (Habermas 1976) to his major philosophical work The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1981). They also extend to some more recent discussions in his book Truth and Justification (Habermas 1999). Over this long period of time he has proposed important modifications of classical speech act theory and has also refined and revised his own pragmatic theory of meaning in light of numerous suggestions and criticisms (Apel 1994; Lafont 1999; Schnädelbach 1992; Skjei 1985; Thompson 1982; Tugendhat 1985; Wellmer 1992; Wood 1985). Most of these writings are compiled in an English anthology entitled On the Pragmatics of Communication (Habermas 1998). For further analysis and discussion of Habermas’s program, see Apel (1992, 1994), Cooke (1994), Heath (1995, 2001), Honneth and Joas (1991), Johnson (1993), Lafont (1999, 2002) and Wellmer (1992).