Jürgen Habermas was recently celebrated by Harvard University
as "one of the most important philosophers and social theorists
in the world today – and a formidable exponent of the Enlightenment
ideals of rationality and universality." Indeed, Jürgen
Habermas is the latest (and perhaps last) member of a long line
of adventuresome and wide-ranging thinkers coming out of the Frankfurt
School. Best known as a critical theorist, Habermas’ work encompasses
topics including moral philosophy, philosophy of the social sciences,
legal theory, and aesthetics. In addition, he has not been shy
of crossing the disciplinary lines of history, sociology, and
developmental psychology. As a philosopher, Habermas stands in
marked contrast with the specialization witnessed amongst philosophers
in the United States since the rise of analytical philosophy.

Yet for all of its ranging, Habermas’ work has been, at least
since the mid-seventies, grounded on his philosophy of language
and nourished by critical dialogue with American philosophers
such as John Searle and Richard Rorty. This interest in philosophy
of language emerges from his enduring interest in social criticism,
and, in particular, his pursuit of a universal, normative basis
for social criticism. While language has a variety of morally
unsavory uses, Habermas argues that its primary function is the
achievement of understanding between language users. The use of
language to achieve an understanding with others puts us under
certain restraints, such as requiring us to back our claims up
with reasons. By unpacking the presuppositions involved in using
language to achieve an understanding with others, Habermas hopes
to find ways to understand concepts like truth, meaning, and rightness
that avoid relativism. Yet he also recognizes the force of some
‘post-modern’ criticisms of the philosophical tradition and so
aims to remain ‘postmetaphysical,’ that is, to avoid appealing
to any overarching ontological framework to ground normative claims.

On the Pragmatics of Communication compiles Jürgen
Habermas’s central essays on the philosophy of language starting
with his 1976 essay "What is Universal Pragmatics?"
up to a 1996 critical commentary on the notorious post-modern
pragmatist Richard Rorty. Given the centrality of communication
to Habermas’s thought as a whole, this book could justly be said
to get to the core of Habermas’s thought.

Several chapters of this book directly expound Habermas’ philosophy
of language. In these essays, he is concerned to formulate and
to defend his answer the central question in the philosophy of
language: what is it to understand a well-formed symbolic expression?
Following philosophers like the later Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin,
and John Searle, Habermas looks at language in its use, that is,
his unit of analysis is a speech act or utterance rather than
a sentence or proposition. This approach contains a danger to
which the later Wittgenstein and Austin may have succumbed; in
looking at language use, one risks getting lost in its unending
complexity, making any sort of general, theoretical answer to
the above question impossible. Habermas therefore tries to hold
onto the insights of truth-conditional semantics, which puts cognitive
validity at its center, though possibly at the expense of the
diversity of linguistic functions, along with the potential ability
of the pragmatic approach to address those functions.

Truth-conditional semantics rests on the view that "to understand
a proposition is to know what is the case if it is true,"
as Wittgenstein put it in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Truth-conditional semantics therefore emphasizes the representation
of states of affairs in sentences treated abstractly, as logical
propositions. While philosophers have argued that truth-conditional
semantics grounds meaning in any of the various uses of language,
Habermas holds that, in the end, truth-conditional semantics does
not even sufficiently ground the meaning of sentences used to
represent states of affairs. For beyond simple predications, truth
conditional semantics fails to cash out adequately what it is
for a language user to know the truth conditions for a sentence.
Habermas therefore draws on Dummett’s extension of truth-conditional
semantics. Dummett suggests that in order to understand a sentence
we must know the rules for its verification. Dummett therefore
speaks of assertibility conditions, that is, conditions under
which one is entitled to make a given claim. A hearer understands
a sentence, for Dummett, just in case she knows the kinds of reasons
a speaker could use to vindicate her claim that particular truth
conditions are satisfied. Habermas preserves Dummett’s insight
while attempting to extend it to include other linguistic functions
and to account more adequately for the pragmatic, intersubjective
component of the vindication of claims to validity, drawing on
the use theory of meaning.

Use theory or pragmatic approaches argue that the meaning of a
word is its use within language games, in which utterances and
non-linguistic activities are entwined. On this view, the meaning
of an utterance depends on its relation to a background pre-understanding
of established institutions and customs that pattern the relations
between utterances and actions. Although Habermas does want to
look at language in its use himself, he worries about this view
as articulated by the later Wittgenstein. In particular, he is
concerned that the validity of claims is assimilated by Wittgenstein
to the prevailing social conditions, so that there can be no context-transcendent
claims to truth or rightness.

Habermas wants to find a way of looking at language in its use
that stays at a level of generality sufficient to be comprehensive,
orderly, and to yield a conception of validity for utterances
in their various uses, yet without losing a grip on those various
uses. To categorize speech acts, Habermas revives a schema developed
by psychologist Karl Bühler in the nineteen thirties. This
schema divides expressions according to their employment to express
the intentions of a speaker, to represent states of affairs, and
to establish relations with an addressee.

Habermas wishes to shift Bühler’s categories so as to bring
them into his formal pragmatic model. For Habermas, every speech
act "relates simultaneously to something in the objective
world, to something in the subjective world, and to something
in a shared social world." Bühler’s categories take
on new meaning for Habermas in being connected to the kinds of
reasons that can be used to redeem the various claims. Instead
of Dummett’s assertibility conditions, Habermas speaks of ‘acceptability
conditions.’ As with Dummett, a hearer understands a speech act
just in case she knows the kinds of reasons that could be used
to vindicate the claim, but Habermas broadens the grounds upon
which a claim can be criticized. Habermas divides acceptability
conditions with respect to the three different ‘world-relations,’
defined in terms of how we can go about criticizing and providing
reasons for our claims.

Each speech act can be criticized as false with respect to its
existential presuppositions, as untruthful or insincere with respect
to the speaker’s intent, and as inappropriate to the normative
context. Even a simple assertion like "it’s raining"
can be contested from each dimension: one can ask whether it is
in fact raining, whether the speaker really intends simply to
inform us of the weather, and whether it is an appropriate context
in which to make such an announcement. Of course, this speech
act is by virtue of its structure an assertion; it makes its most
direct claim about the objective world, because in normal contexts
the most direct challenge to it would be a particular state of
affairs not holding, i.e., it’s not raining.

A key insight here is that linguistic understanding is linked
to achieving an understanding with another person. As Habermas
puts it, "one would not know what it is to understand the
meaning of an utterance if one did not know that the utterance
can and should serve to bring about an agreement." In the
case of a successful speech act, the hearer realizes the conditions
that make it acceptable and that the speaker "makes a credible
warranty for the validity of what is said." In such a case,
the hearer is rationally motivated to say ‘yes’ to the offer.
The speech act can rationally motivate the hearer, Habermas holds,
only because the utterance obliges the hearer to respond to cognitively
testable validity claims connected with the type of speech act
that it is. Indeed, this ‘binding effect’ carries over into the
‘sequel of interaction,’ guiding the speaker and hearer in accordance
with the semantic content of the accepted offer. So, successful
communication depends on the speaker and hearer taking on specific
commitments (though not necessarily symmetrically) in accordance
with the content of an accepted offer. For example, in order for
a promise to be a successful speech act, the speaker must be ready
to show chiefly the normative appropriateness of the promise and
then to ‘make good’ on the offer contained in the promise. The
hearer must be ready chiefly to recognize the fulfillment of the
conditions that render the promise appropriate and then acknowledge
when the speaker has carried through with it.

The formal pragmatic account of language yields a concept of communicative
rationality grounded on the accountability necessary to take on
the obligations that arise from speech acts. This view
of rationality supplements the traditional conception oriented
toward maximizing one’s strategic outcome toward a view that is
centered on meeting the demands of reaching an understanding.
The rational individual on this view is oriented toward validity
claims as the condition of possibility for mutual understanding.
Communicative action, that is, action oriented toward achieving
an understanding is structured around validity claims, for they
are "the stewards of a rationality that presents itself as
the structural interconnection of validity conditions." By
Habermas’ account, then, natural language is holistic; it reaches
across particular ‘language games,’ for every speech act is, he
claims, connected "by logical-semantic threads" to others
that can take on the pragmatic role of reasons in further exchange.
The concept of communicative rationality thereby gives us a model
of human activity as potentially universally structured by a holistic
language used with a telos of understanding.

We can readily see that this account of the pragmatics of achieving
an understanding and the accompanying conception of rationality
has a certain normative content. Yet this theory provides only
the groundwork for Habermas’ well-known contributions to moral
and political theory. These essays provide the reader with an
important foundation for any serious study of those twin projects.
Yet they are also independently interesting as contributions to
contemporary philosophy. As becomes clear in the articles responding
to John Searle, Richard Rorty, and others, also collected in this
volume, Habermas’ treatment of language provides a point of departure
for addressing a range of issues in contemporary philosophy. Without
going into detail, the argument for universal presuppositions
to be found within the pragmatics of achieving an understanding
yields a pragmatism that does not simply affirm the validity of
the contingent arrangement of our practices. It allows us to make
sense of context-transcendent claims to truth and rightness, claims
that many contemporary pragmatists, particularly Rorty, seem to
undermine.

It should come as no surprise that these texts plunge the reader
directly into some of the most abstruse philosophical discourse
in the corpus of Habermas, who often writes in jargon-laden, programmatic
prose. Non-philosophers and analytical philosophers alike may
find these stylistic faults at times agonizing. In addition, these
works, when extracted from the overarching philosophical project
of which they are a central part, are sometimes so exacting that
one may lose sight of the larger project that motivates them.
Finally, Habermas’ criticism of his opponents can, at its worse,
come off as an appeal to ‘guilt by association’ with philosophies
he finds to be out of date. He associates both Charles Taylor
and Richard Rorty with Romantic philosophy, seeming to insinuate
a connection with the invocation of the philosophies in Nazi Germany.
Yet if the reader can patiently wade through these difficulties
and shortcomings, she will surely find a philosophical project
with far-reaching implications.

© 2001 John Wright

Categories: Philosophical