Still pondering Habermas’s notion of illocution, I wanted to add some informal thoughts. He criticizes first- and third-person thinking, and suggests that they are actually parasitic on a more primary, second-person thinking that would be characteristic of what he calls communicative action and illocution. I find this quite intriguing.

Second-person thinking would be “dialogical”, in contrast to the “monological” character of first- and third-person thinking. These terms, used by Habermas, were introduced by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. According to Habermas, monological thinking is objectifying, whereas dialogical thinking has the character of participation in a dialogue.

What psychologists more commonly refer to as internal “monologue” is sometimes also called internal dialogue. Apparently not everyone experiences this, but it is considered completely normal. Common speech says “I” talk to “myself”, but the self involved here is not really clear. “I” is a convenient shorthand (a sort of indexical reference to a flowing movement toward unity of apperception, as Kant said).

It is a bit ambiguous whether we are addressing “ourselves” or an imagined other when we have internal dialogue, but then the notion of self is itself ambiguous (see numerous posts under Subjectivity). Paul Ricoeur wrote a fascinating book called Oneself As Another. Plato in the Republic has Socrates compare the soul to a city. Aristotle says we regard our friend as “another self”. (Descartes did not really invent the so-called Cartesian subject either, as Alain de Libera has amply documented. Insofar as there is a common modern notion of a strongly unified self, it has a long prehistory in certain strands of theology.)

Habermas uses his notion of communicative reason as a way of getting at an originally intersubjective character of thought. As Brandom has noted, this picks out essentially the same conditions that Hegel associates with the ideal of mutual recognition. But Habermas apparently does not accept Brandom’s provocative claims that mutual recognition is by itself sufficient to ground genuine objectivity, and that normative discourse under conditions of mutual recognition can bootstrap itself.