Universal pragmatics
"[1] where he suggests that human competition, conflict, and strategic action are attempts to achieve understanding that have failed because of modal confusions.
[1] In other words, the underlying goal of coming to an understanding would help to foster the enlightenment, consensus, and good will necessary for establishing socially beneficial norms.
Universal pragmatics (UP) is part of a larger project to rethink the relationship between philosophy and the individual sciences during a period of social crisis.
However, unlike those fields, it insists on a difference between the linguistic data that we observe in the 'analytic' mode, and the rational reconstruction of the rules of symbol systems that each reader/listener possesses intuitively when interpreting strings of words.
In this sense, it is an examination of the two ways that language usage can be analyzed: as an object of scientific investigation, and as a 'rational reconstruction' of intuitive linguistic 'know-how'.
This is in contrast to most other fields of linguistics, which tend to be more specialized, focusing exclusively on very specific sorts of utterances such as sentences (which in turn are made up of words, morphemes, and phonemes).
However, Habermas is quick to note, different modes of interaction can (in some ways) facilitate these social functions and achieve integration within the lifeworld.
On the other hand, actors employing strategic actions do not exploit the potential of communication that resides in the mutual recognition of a shared action-oriented understanding.
The essential insight has already been mentioned, which is that communication is responsible for irreplaceable modes of social integration, and this is accomplished through the unique binding force of a shared understanding.
In one direction is a kind of linguistic analysis (of speech acts), which can be placed under the heading of the validity dimensions of communication.
Additionally, to illustrate that all other forms of communication are derived from that which is oriented toward mutual understanding, he argues that there are no other kinds of validity claims whatsoever.
In order for anyone to speak validly — and therefore, to have his or her comments vindicated, and therefore reach a genuine consensus and understanding — Habermas notes that a few more fundamental commitments are required.
Habermas claims that communication rests upon a non-egoistic understanding of the world, which is an idea he borrowed from thinkers like Jean Piaget.
A speech act can be understood as an offering, the success or failure of which depends upon the hearer's response of either accepting or rejecting the validity claims it raises.
When individuals pursue actions oriented towards reaching an understanding, the speech acts they exchange take on the weight of a mutually recognized validity.
This means each actor involved in communication takes the other as accountable for what they have said, which implies that good reasons could be given by all to justify the validity of the understanding that is being achieved.
Habermas claims that all forms of argumentation, even implicit and rudimentary ones, rest upon certain "idealizing suppositions," which are rooted in the very structures of action oriented towards understanding.
Habermas refers to the positing of these idealized presuppositions as the "simultaneously unavoidable and trivial accomplishments that sustain communicative action and argumentation".
Discourses often occur within institutionalized forms of argumentation that self-reflectively refine their procedures of communication, and as a result, have a more rigorous set of presuppositions in addition to the ones listed above.
Presupposition (5) points out that the validity of an understanding reached in theoretical or practical discourse, concerning some factual knowledge or normative principle, is always expanded beyond the immediate context in which it is achieved.
Recall that, for Habermas, rational reconstructions aim at offering the most acceptable account of what allows for the competencies already mastered by a wide range of subjects.
In order for discourse to proceed, the existence of facts and norms must be presupposed, yet the certainty of an absolute knowledge of them must be, in a sense, postponed.
The pursuit of truth and normative certainty is taken to be motivated and grounded, not in some objective or social world that is treated as a "given", but rather in a learning process.
In any case, reconstructing the presuppositions and validity dimensions inherent to communication is valuable because it brings into relief the inescapable foundations of everyday practices.
Everyday practices, which are common enough to be trivial, such as reaching an understanding with another, or contesting the reasons for pursuing a course of action, contain an implicit and idealized rationality.
Nor could the specialized discourses of law, science and morality continue if the progress of knowledge and insight was denied in favor of relativism.
It is possible to ignore these facts by limiting the scope of universal pragmatics to current forms of discourse, but this runs the risk of contradicting Habermas's own demand for (5).
Moreover, the initial unease with the classical and liberal views of rationality had to do precisely with their ahistorical character and refusal, or perhaps inability, to acknowledge their own origins in circumstances of the day.
