Communicative Action

When it appeared, Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action was called the most ambitious study in social theory in recent memory. Its scope is far larger than I will address. Here my aim is only to capture a few top-level highlights from his first chapter that are relevant in an ethical context.

Habermas aims to develop a notion of communicative action that treats meaning as inherently social, thus overcoming the modern “philosophy of consciousness” that threatens to reduce everything to individual subjectivity. At the same time, he emphasizes that every saying is a doing.

“To the goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality, we can tie neither ontological hopes for substantive theories of nature, history, society, and so forth, nor transcendental-philosophical hopes for an aprioristic reconstruction of the equipment of a nonempirical species subject, of consciousness in general. All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which the intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken down…. Theories of modern empirical science, whether along the lines of logical empiricism, critical rationalism, or constructivism, make a normative and at the same time universalistic claim that is no longer covered by fundamental assumptions of an ontological or transcendental-philosophical nature” (vol. 1, p. 2).

I’m a little more hopeful that first philosophy is still a meaningful endeavor. Correlated with this difference, Habermas seems to regard Aristotelian first philosophy as inevitably foundationalist, whereas I think that is by no means the case. But this all has to do with what we mean by first philosophy. For example, Avicenna complains that Aristotle should have put the first cause at the beginning of the Metaphysics, rather than only arriving at it at the end. That is to say, Avicenna takes a foundationalist view of the first cause as the Necessary Being (God), from which all else follows. Aristotle instead takes a hermeneutic approach, starting with the concrete while cultivating a variant of what Paul Ricoeur calls the long detour. Habermas too speaks of hermeneutics in this context.

“[R]ationality has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (p. 8).

“We can call men and women, children and adults, ministers and bus conductors ‘rational’, but not animals or lilac bushes, mountains, streets, or chairs. We can call apologies, delays, surgical interventions, declarations of war, repairs, construction plans or conference decisions ‘irrational’, but not a storm, an accident, a lottery win, or an illness” (p. 9).

One way to think of this is that rationality and irrationality (and normative properties in general) are properly said only of things that have intentional structure, which is something different from sensible form or gestalt.

Habermas examines in detail Max Weber’s early 20th century theory of modernity as an increasing, primarily economic but also scientific and technological, “rationalization” of society. He points out that Weber was actually highly critical of the effects of this rationalization. This kind of rationalization is exclusively concerned with what the Frankfurt school critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno called instrumental reason, which involves a calculating, utilitarian approach to the selection of means, while downplaying any evaluation of the goodness of ends. Horkheimer and Adorno were pessimists about modernity. In this regard, Habermas is much closer to Rorty and Brandom, in that all three are optimists about modernity.

Habermas sees a night-and-day contrast between instrumental reason and the communicative reason he is concerned to promote. In Aristotelian terms, instrumental reason treats everything in light of a degraded concept of efficient causality, as if that were the only thing that is relevant. Communicative reason on the other hand aims at shared understanding, and shared understanding implicitly tends toward universality.

“These reflections point in the direction of basing rationality of an expression on its being susceptible of criticism and grounding…. A judgment can be objective if it is undertaken on the basis of a transsubjective validity claim that has the same meaning for observers and nonparticipants as it has for the acting subject himself. Truth and efficiency are claims of this kind. Thus assertions and goal-directed actions are the more rational the better the claim (to propositional truth or to efficiency that is connected with them) can be defended against criticism” (ibid).

“This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld” (p. 10, emphasis in original).

“It is constitutive of the rationality of the utterance that the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim for the proposition p, a claim that the hearer can accept or reject for good reason…. It is constitutive of the action’s rationality that the actor bases it on a plan that implies the truth of p…. An assertion can be called rational only if the speaker satisfies the conditions necessary to achieve the illocutionary goal of reaching an understanding about something in the world with at least one other participant in communication” (p. 11).

“Behavioral reactions of an externally or internally stimulated organism, and environmentally induced changes of state in a self-regulated system can indeed be understood as quasi-actions, that is, as if they were the expressions of a subject’s capacity for action. But this is to speak of rationality only in a figurative sense, for the susceptiblity to criticism and grounding that we require of rational expressions means that the subject to whom they are attributed should, under suitable conditions, himself be able to provide reasons or grounds” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This recalls Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism argument.

To make assertions at all is to invite critical discussion. This is a very familiar point from Brandom. Brandom himself acknowledges significant influence from Habermas.

This kind of free inquiry is also exactly what Socrates was all about. Plato implicitly illustrates it time and again through abundant examples in his dialogues.

“The abstract concept of the world is a necessary condition if communicatively acting subjects are to reach understanding among themselves about what takes place in the world or is to be effected in it. Through this communicative practice they assure themselves at the same time of their common life-relations, of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld. This life world is bounded by the totality of interpretations presupposed by the members as background knowledge. To elucidate the concept of rationality the phenomenologist must then examine the conditions for communicatively achieved consensus” (p. 13, emphasis in original).

Husserl’s notions of intersubjectivity and lifeworld were extensively developed in the socially oriented phenomenology of Alfred Schütz, to which Habermas makes reference.

“In the context of communicative action, only those persons count as responsible who, as members of a communication-community, can orient their actions to intersubjectively recognized validity claims” (p. 14).

Intersubjectivity — genuine sharing and community — also counts as an ethical ideal. Habermas advocates “dialogical” approaches instead of “monological” ones.

“But there are obviously other types of expressions for which we can have good reasons, even though they are not tied to truth or success claims” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

“Normatively regulated actions and expressive self-presentations have, like assertions or constative speech acts, the character of meaningful expressions, understandable in their context, which are connected with criticizable validity claims. Their reference is to norms and subjective experiences rather than to facts. The agent makes the claim that his behavior is right in relation to a normative context recognized as legitimate, or that first-person utterance of an experience to which he has privileged access is truthful or sincere. Like constative speech acts, these expressions can also go wrong. The possibility of intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims is constitutive for their rationality too” (pp. 15-16, emphasis in original).

He takes very seriously the notion of argumentation, discussing at some length the work of Stephen Toulmin. This approach dwells on the validity of arguments, rather than the deduction of conclusions from assumptions.

“Thus the rationality proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible to continue communicative action with other means when disagreements can no longer be repaired with everyday routines and yet are not to be settled by the direct or strategic use of force” (pp. 17-18).

“Corresponding to the openness of rational expressions to being explained, there is, on the side of persons who behave rationally, a willingness to expose themselves to criticism and, if necessary, to participate properly in argumentation” (p. 18).

“In virtue of their criticizability, rational expressions also admit of improvement; we can correct failed attempts if we can successfully identify our mistakes. The concept of grounding is interwoven with that of learning” (ibid).

“In philosophical ethics, it is by no means agreed that the validity claims connected with norms of action, upon which commands or ‘ought’ sentences are based, can, analogously to truth claims, be redeemed discursively. In everyday life, however, no one would enter into moral argumentation if he did not start from the strong presupposition that a grounded consensus could in principle be be achieved among those involved. In my view, this follows with conceptual necessity from the meaning of normative validity claims” (p.19, emphasis in original).

“Anyone who systematically deceives himself about himself behaves irrationally. But one who is capable of letting himself be enlightened about his irrationality possesses not only the rationality of a subject who is competent to judge facts and who acts in a purposive-rational way, who is morally judicious and practically reliable, who evaluates with sensitivity and is aesthetically open-minded; he also possesses the power to behave reflectively in relation to his subjectivity and to see through the irrational limitations to which his cognitive, moral-practical, and aesthetic-practical expressions are subject. In such a process of self-reflection, reasons and grounds also play a role” (p. 20).

“One behaves irrationally if one employs one’s own symbolic means of expression in a dogmatic way. On the other hand, explicative discourse is a form of argumentation in which the comprehensibility, well-formedness, or rule-correctness is no longer naively supposed or contested but is thematized as a controversial claim” (p. 22).

“We can summarize the above as follows: Rationality is understood to be a disposition of speaking and acting subjects that is expressed in modes of behavior for which there are good reasons or grounds” (ibid).

“Argumentation makes possible behavior that counts as rational in a specific sense, namely learning from explicit mistakes” (ibid).

“But if the validity of arguments can be neither undermined in an empiricist manner nor grounded in an absolutist manner, then we are faced with precisely those questions to which the logic of argumentation is supposed to provide the answers: How can problematic validity claims be supported by good reasons? How can reasons be criticized in turn? What makes some arguments, and thus some reasons, which are related to validity claims in a certain way, stronger or weaker than other arguments?” (p. 24).

“We can distinguish three aspects of argumentative speech. First, considered as a process, we have to do with a form of communication that is improbable in that it sufficiently approximates ideal conditions. In this regard, I tried to delineate the general pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation as specifications of an ideal speech situation. This proposal may be unsatisfactory in its details; but I still view as correct my intention to reconstruct the general symmetry conditions that every competent speaker must presuppose are sufficiently satisfied insofar as he intends to enter into argumentation at all” (p. 25).

More generally, I think we can say that an ideal speech situation is characterized by dialogue under conditions of mutual recognition.

“Participants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by virtue of features that can be described in purely formal terms, excludes all force — except the force of the better argument (and thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that of a cooperative search for truth). From this perspective argumentation can be conceived as a reflective continuation, with different means, of action oriented to reaching understanding” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The fundamental intuition connected with argumentation can best be characterized from the process perspective by the intention of convincing a universal audience and gaining assent for an utterance; from the procedural perspective, by the intention of ending a dispute about hypothetical validity claims with a rationally motivated agreement; and from the product perspective by the intention of grounding or redeeming a validity claim with arguments” (p. 26).