ABSTRACT
Habermas’s thinking is so extensively multifaceted that almost every main issue that we have examined thus far is reflected within it to a greater or lesser degree. In this way, Habermas is concerned to challenge the same positivistic conception of rationality that was examined in Chapter 4 within the context of a critical analysis of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory. The discussion of argumentation in the last chapter, particularly Perelman’s views on argumentation, reverberates in Habermas’s consensus theory of truth. Also, Habermas’s universal pragmatics contains strong echoes of Chomsky’s methodological approach to the study of language, which was examined in Chapter 2. As if these related areas were not reason enough to study the views of this influential thinker, a yet more conclusive reason for an examination of this nature lies in the multidisciplinary orientation of Habermas’s central thesis. Habermas looks to pragmatics – and, particularly, to a speech act analysis of language – to achieve a social-theoretic goal, ‘a form of life free from unnecessary domination in all its forms’ (McCarthy 1978: 273). Through so employing pragmatics, Habermas adopts a methodology that exemplifies perfectly the multidisciplinary theme of this book. It is all the more interesting, therefore, when a further feature of this book’s multidisciplinary theme – its discussion of aspects of Hilary Putnam’s philosophy – reveals Habermas’s views to be untenable in the final analysis. Before pursuing a Putnamian criticism of these views, we describe Habermas’s theoretical framework, its anti-positivistic motivations and its dependence on a pragmatic analysis of language.
