My first significant issue with Habermas has to do with the reductive way in which he recurringly speaks about “teleological action” as, in effect, any old pursuit of an objective, and thus as to be understood in terms of modern instrumental reason. This puts the primary focus on immediate objectives, whereas for Aristotle, immediate objectives only minimally count as ends. The more proper ends for Aristotle are things sought “for themselves”, and not as part of any utilitarian calculation of means. Aristotelian teleology in its primary sense is not about the mere pursuit of objectives, but relates primarily to those ultimate values that are sought for themselves.

I think that in fact Habermas does not intend a serious reference to Aristotle here. This “Aristotle” resembles the same cardboard stereotype we see cited in discussions of early modern logic.

“Since Aristotle [sic], the concept of teleological action has been at the center of the philosophical theory of action. The actor attains an end or brings about the occurrence of a desired state by choosing means that have promise of being successful in the given situation and applying them in a suitable manner. The central concept is that of a decision among alternative courses of action, with a view to the realization of an end, guided by maxims, and based on an interpretation of the situation” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 85, emphasis in original).

(In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasizes on the contrary that choice is a consequence of deliberation, not an original or ultimately arbitrary decision. What Habermas says gives partial recognition to this. I call it partial because he still calls decision rather than deliberation the “central concept”, whereas Aristotle clearly gives more weight to the deliberation.)

“This model is often interpreted in utilitarian terms; the actor is supposed to choose and calculate means and ends from the standpoint of maximizing utility or expectations of utility. It is this model of action that lies behind decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches in economics, sociology, and social psychology” (ibid).

Clearly, this is very far removed from Aristotelian teleology. Habermas discusses “normative” and “dramaturgical” models of action along with this “teleological” kind that really corresponds to utilitarian calculation. The “normative” kind also has a rather reductive flavor. But all three of these models are really just stage-setting for a contrast with the communicative reason that Habermas wants to recommend, and treats as primary.

“For a theory of communicative action only those analytic theories of meaning are instructive that start from the structure of linguistic expressions rather than from speakers’ intentions” (p. 275, emphasis added).

In general, an expansive rather than narrow approach to the meaning of what is shareably said is more valuable and more relevant than speculation about subjective motivations.

“The organon model of Karl Bühler is representative of this communication-theoretic line of inquiry…. This meaning-theoretic line of development of the organon model leads us away from the objectivistic conception of processes of reaching understanding as information flows between senders and receivers and in the direction of the formal-pragmatic concept of interaction among speaking and acting subjects, interaction that is mediated through acts of reaching understanding” (p. 276).

So far I’ve been keeping aside how this talk about action should be related to a more Aristotelian notion of act, like that developed by Gwenaëlle Aubry. Without a doubt “acts of reaching understanding” come closer to this than any of the other action models Habermas discusses.

Habermas notes that the leading mid-20th century logical empiricist Rudolph Carnap, who approached representational semantics at the less atomistic level of propositions taken as true, almost entirely ignored the pragmatics of language, treating it as basically irrational.

“Starting from the pragmatist theory of signs introduced by Pierce and developed by Morris, Carnap made the symbolic complex … accessible to an internal analysis from syntactic and semantic points of view. The bearers of meaning are not isolated signs but elements of a language system…. With Carnap’s logical syntax and the basic assumptions of reference semantics, the way was opened to a formal analysis of the representational function of language. On the other hand, Carnap considered the appellative and expressive functions of language as pragmatic aspects that should be left to empirical analysis. On this view, the pragmatics of language is not determined by a general system of rules in such a way that it could be opened up to conceptual analysis like syntax and semantics” (ibid).

“The theory of meaning was finally established as a formal science only with the step from reference semantics to truth semantics. The semantics founded by Frege and developed through the early Wittgenstein to Davidson and Dummett gives center stage to the relation between sentence and state of affairs, between language and the world. With this ontological turn semantic theory disengaged itself from the view that the representational function can be clarified on the model of names that designate objects. The meaning of sentences, and the understanding of sentence meanings, cannot be separated from language’s inherent relation to the validity of statements” (ibid).

As usual, I prefer to be very modest about claims to “science”. What Habermas calls a formal science, I would call interpretive work. In the German tradition, Wissenschaft has a broader sense than common English usage of “science”. Habermas has himself written elsewhere about the centrality of a notion of interpretation.

“Speakers and hearers understand the meaning of a sentence when they know under what conditions it is true. Correspondingly, they understand the meaning of a word when they know what contribution it makes to the capacity for truth of a sentence formed with its help. Thus truth semantics developed the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is determined by its truth conditions” (pp. 276-277).

This still presupposes that what knowledge is and what truth is are unproblematic. It really only replaces simplistic word-representationalism with a much richer sentence-representationalism. Sentence-representationalism is just as referential as word-representationalism, just more abstract. Habermas’s use of “true” here strikes me as referential in the same way. It just is not naively referential.

“The limits of this approach become visible as soon as the different modes of using sentences are brought under formal consideration. Frege had already distinguished between the assertoric or interrogative force of assertions or questions and the structure of the propositional sentences employed in these utterances. Along the line from the later Wittgenstein through Austin and Searle, the formal semantics of sentences was extended to speech acts. It is no longer limited to the representational function of language but is open to an unbiased analysis of the multiplicity of illocutionary forces. The theory of speech acts marks the first step toward a formal pragmatics that extends to noncognitive modes of employment. At the same time, … it remains tied to the narrow ontological presuppositions of truth-conditional semantics” (p. 277).

This account of speech acts seems like a nice, careful, balanced judgment.

“The theory of meaning can attain the level of integration of the communication theory that Bühler advanced in a programmatic way only if it is able to provide a systematic grounding for the appellative and expressive functions of language (and perhaps also for the ‘poetic’ function related to the linguistic means themselves, as this was developed by Jakobson)” (ibid).

He doesn’t quite say it, but I think the kind of pragmatics developed by Habermas and Brandom provides a much better account of what meaning really is than standard representational semantics.

“Bühler’s theory of language functions could be connected with the methods and insights of the analytic theory of meaning and be made the centerpiece of a theory of communicative action oriented to reaching understanding if we could generalize the concept of validity beyond the truth of propositions and identify validity conditions no longer only on the semantic level of sentences but on the pragmatic level of utterances” (ibid, emphasis added).

I suspect that in some places where Habermas speaks of validity claims, Brandom would invoke normativity or commitments instead. Habermas seems to work with a narrow notion of normativity that mainly characterizes law and Kantian deontology, but he partly makes up for it by giving what I would call a “normative” aspect to his broad notion of validity. I deemphasize any differences between “ethics”, “morality”, and “normativity”, but Habermas thinks it is important to distinguish them.

“For this purpose the paradigm change in philosophy that was introduced by J. L. Austin [speech act theory] … must be radicalized in such a way that the break with the ‘logos characterization of language’, that is, with privileging its representational function also has consequences…. It is not merely a question of admitting other modes of language use on an equal footing with the assertoric; we have to establish validity claims and world-relations for them as was done for the assertoric mode. It is with this in mind that I have proposed that we do not set illocutionary role over against propositional content as an irrational force, but conceive of it as the component that specifies which validity claims a speaker is raising in his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what…. The corresponding validity claims of truth, rightness, and sincerity can the serve as guiding threads (pp. 277-278).

In Christian theology, logos is primarily representational, but I contend that this is not at all true of logos in Plato and Aristotle, where it always has connotations of reason, reasoning, or discourse. On the other hand, Habermas does not believe in “substantive” reason. He argues for an exclusively procedural communicative reason, in which the procedural aspect has strong affinities with modern procedural notions of justice. For my part, I cleave to a Platonic emphasis on mixed forms, and would like to undo any sharp distinction between substantive and procedural reason.

(And at a sort of halfway point between pure representation and discursive reasoning, Euclid uses logos for what we know as ratio in mathematics. It is historically interesting that logos and ratio have closely related meanings in two senses — representational and inferential — and not just one. Euclid’s theory of ratio and proportion is a historically important paradigm for exact reasoning that is effectively independent of Plato and Aristotle, though later. Compared to Plato and Aristotle, reason in Euclid is more formal and much less discursive. Hobbes and other early moderns looked to Euclid as a model.)

In Austin’s terminology, “locution” is what is said and meant, “illocution” is what is done in a speech act, and “perlocution” is what happens as a result. Like Brandom, Habermas treats saying as a kind of doing, and therefore stresses the illocutionary aspect. Habermas has just reminded us that empiricism treats illocution only as an irrational force, and not as something that could be rationally understood. This applies as well to the neo-Kantian sociology of Weber.

“Weber begins by introducing ‘meaning’ as a basic concept of action theory and with its help distinguishes actions from observable behavior…. Weber does not rely here on a theory of meaning but on a theory of consciousness. He does not elucidate ‘meaning’ in connection with the model of speech; he does not relate it to the linguistic medium of possible understanding, but to the beliefs and intentions of an acting subject, taken to begin in isolation. At this first switchpoint Weber parts company with a theory of communicative action. What counts as fundamental is not the interpersonal relation between at least two speaking and acting subjects — a relation that refers back to reaching understanding in language — but the purposive activity of a solitary acting subject” (p. 279).

Habermas is saying that even in Weber’s sociology, the neo-Kantian individual subject remains originally isolated, as in the “Cartesian” stereotype. It only acquires social significance after being individually constituted.

“Thus Weber starts from a teleological [sic] model of action, and specifies ‘subjective meaning’ as a (precommunicative) action intention…. Since Weber starts from a monologically conceived model of action, the concept of ‘social action’ cannot be introduced by way of explicating the concept of meaning…. On the other hand, … Weber stresses that the action orientations of participants have to be reciprocally related to one another” (p. 280).

But “Weber does not start from the social relationship. He regards as rationalizable only the means-ends relation of teleologically [sic] conceived, monological action. If one adopts this perspective, the only aspects of action open to objective appraisal are the effectiveness of a causal intervention into a existing situation and the truth of the empirical assumptions that underlie the maxim or the plan of action — that is, the subjective belief about a purposive-rational organization of means” (p. 281).

“I shall speak of communicative action whenever the actions of the agents involved are coordinated not through egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching understanding” (pp. 285-286).

“Processes of reaching understanding aim at an agreement that meets the conditions of rationally motivated assent [Zustimmung] to the content of an utterance. A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party…. Agreement can indeed be objectively obtained by force; but what comes to pass manifestly through outside influence or the use of violence cannot count subjectively as agreement” (p. 287).

“If we were not in a position to refer to the model of speech, we could not even begin to analyze what it means for two subjects to come to an understanding with each other. Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (ibid, emphasis added).

“Without doubt, there are countless cases [where] one subject inconspicuously harnesses another for his own purposes, that is, induces him to behave in a desired way by manipulatively employing linguistic means and thereby instrumentalizes him for his own success. Such examples of the use of language with an orientation to consequences seem to decrease the value of speech acts as the model for action oriented to reaching understanding” (p. 288).

“This will turn out not to be the case only if it can be shown that the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which indirect understanding, giving something to understand or letting something be understood, and the instrumental use of language in general, are parasitic. In my view, Austin’s distinction between illocutions and perlocutions accomplishes just that” (ibid).

Communicative reason is primary for Habermas in a way much analogous to the way Brandom says we really have “normativity all the way down”. Brandom recalls the figure of speech “turtles all the way down”. This was supposed to be the answer of some primitive to the question that if the world is on the back of a great turtle, what does the turtle stand on? The answer was, supposedly, “It’s turtles all the way down”, which humorously undermines the status of the purportedly foundational world-turtle.

“The self-sufficiency of the speech act is to be understood in the sense that the communicative intent of the speaker and the illocutionary aim he is pursuing follow from the manifest meaning of what is said. It is otherwise with teleological [sic] actions. We identify their meaning only in connection with the intentions their authors are pursuing and the ends [sic] they want to realize . As the meaning of what is said is constitutive for illocutionary acts, the intention of the agent is constitutive for teleological [sic] actions” (p. 289, emphasis in original).

In a situation where the meaning of what is said is constitutive, we have something like what Aristotle called an entelechy. This is the purest form of Aristotelian teleology, applicable to the values that are sought purely for themselves and not for any egocentric reason. Habermas in effect wants to say that communicative reason is closely related to entelechy, though he would not use that term. I would go further, and relate it to the pure entelechy and contemplation that Aristotle associates with the first cause and with the goal of human life.

Next in this series: Habermas on Intersubjectivity