I’ve recently been writing about the use Habermas makes of Austin’s notion of illocution and illocutionary speech acts. Illocution refers to the various kinds of purely linguistic or “performative” doing — to acts or purposes that are accomplished entirely within the use of language.

Aristotle’s famous definition of what it is to be a human, which is traditionally rendered “rational animal”, is equally well translated as “talking animal”, or animal that uses language. He calls this distinctively human activity “saying”. Saying for Aristotle is never a mere event or occurrence. It always has what contemporary philosophers would call a normative sense. In fact, what mainly counts as a saying for Aristotle is precisely what Habermas would call an illocutionary act.

Although Wittgenstein famously claimed that “meaning is use”, pragmatics or inquiry specifically into language use generally received little attention in 20th-century philosophy of language, while it made great advances in the technical study of logical syntax and representational semantics. A pragmatist minority, however, urged an alternative “pragmatics first” or “use first” approach to language. This has been taken up most prominently in recent times by Habermas and Brandom.

The current topic takes me back to the original goals of this blog. The idea was to develop in an expanding spiral, starting from personal reflections and an extremely informal exploration of how Aristotle and Brandom could be inter-articulated. I wanted to show that this could be both interesting and serious, and that it was not the quixotic task it might sound like. Nowadays the scope is broader, and I more often start by commenting on some text or other, which helps provide focus. Anyway, with the current topic, it feels like I just completed another expanding lap. This time it is an unexpected strong connection between Aristotle and Habermas.

I want to seriously suggest that Aristotelian “saying”, in what Aristotle would call its proper sense, refers to what Habermas would call an illocutionary act. Conversely, a Habermasian illocutionary act can be identified with the proper or strong sense of Aristotelian saying.

Aristotelian saying and Habermasian illocution both refer to expressions or articulations of meaning, rather than to events of producing sounds or characters.

Nothing is more fundamental than inquiry into meaning. At the same time, there is more to meaning than representational semantics. Sociality, insofar as it is achieved, is founded on shared understanding that depends on articulation in language. Aristotelian saying and Habermasian illocution name the intrinsic normative dimension of natural language use. Unlike artificial formal languages, the understanding of natural languages is inseparable from the taking of positions on questions of normative interpretation and judgment.