On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 358

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The core of this book is a set of five lectures delivered by Habermas at Princeton in 1971 under the title 'Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology'. These lectures offer a preliminary view of what would become The Theory of Communicative Action, and they form an excellent introduction to Habermas's ideas about communication and society. They lay out the general parameters of Habermas's project in an accessible way, and situate his work in relation to other theories of society, particularly those of Edmund Husserl, Wilfrid Sellars, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Two additional essays elaborating the themes of the lectures are also included in this volume. 'Intentions, Conventions, and Linguistic Interactions' is an essay in the philosophy of action that focuses on the validity of social norms and examines the conceptual connections between rules, conventions, norm-governed action, and intentionality. 'Reflections on Communicative Pathology' addresses the question of deviant processes of socialization and contains an analysis of the formal conditions of systematically distorted communication.

This book was designed as a companion to On the Pragmatics of Communication (1998), which took pieces from Habermas's later work to create a systematic introduction to his theory of formal pragmatics.

Leseprobe

Contents

Translator’s Introduction

Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology: The Christian Gauss Lecture (Princeton University, February-March 1971)

I Objectivist and Subjectivist Approaches to Theory Formation in the Social Sciences

II The Phenomenological Constitutive Theory of Society: The Fundamental Role of Claims to Validity and the Monadological Foundations of Intersubjectivity

III From a Constitutive Theory to a Communicative Theory of Society (Sellars and Wittgenstein): Communicative and Cognitive Uses of Language

IV Universal Pragmatics: Reflections on a Theory of Communicative Competence

V Truth and Society: The Discursive Redemption of Factual Claims to Validity

Intentions, Conventions, and Linguistic Interactions (1976)

Reflections on Communicative Pathology (1974)

Notes

Index

This translation Copyright © 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Though substantially revised, this translation is based on Jeremy Shapiro’s original translation of the Gauss Lectures when they were delivered at Princeton.

The lectures and essays in this volume appeared in German in Jürgen Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikanliven Handelns, © 1984 Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. Germany.

First published in 2001 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

First published in paperback 2003.

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ISBN: 0-7456 2551-7

ISBN: 0-7456 3219-X (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Translator’s Introduction

Philosophy in the twentieth century, in both its analytic and continental traditions, has been shaped by what has come to be known as “the linguistic turn.” Be it in metaphysics, epistemology, or value theory, philosophy of language has become a keystone of conceptual analysis. Most profoundly perhaps, the linguistic turn has affected the conception and understanding of reason. It is no longer possible today to defend the universal validity of a transcendent, objective reason, nor can language be regarded any longer as a neutral tool at reason’s disposal. The role of this movement in critical theory is due in large measure to the work of Jürgen Habermas. And yet, in an increasingly postmodern era, Habermas has remained a defender of modernity. While the reason of the enlightenment has come under general attack, he continues to endorse its emancipatory potendal, albeit in the altered form of a “postmetaphysical” reason that is always situated in contexts of interaction. Habermas locates the roots of rationality in the structures of everyday communication such that the critical power of reason is immanent in ordinary language from the start. The aim of his intersubjectivist account of “communicative reason” is to displace both subjectivist accounts that cling to Cartesian concepdons of monological selfhood and objectivist accounts that ignore the agent’s perspecdve endrely.

The essays and lectures collected in this volume explain why Habermas considers a linguistic turn to be necessary, how he thinks it is to be worked out, and what he takes its implications to be. They address questions concerning the nature of social interaction and its connection to communication, and they trace the implications for developing an adequate social theory. They will be of interest not only to readers who have followed Habermas’s intellectual development but also to those looking for an introduction to his theory of communicative action. More generally, philosophers of language will find in these essays a host of original ideas on the relationship between language and society.

Since its publication in 1981, Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action1 has been widely acclaimed for its contribution to philosophy and social theory. However, its two volumes are daunting, not only for reasons of length, but owing to the breadth of its subject matter and the denseness of its argumentation. The essays and lectures in the present volume provide a less arduous route to understanding the theory behind that larger work. They are a partial translation of Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, which was published in 1984 and contains not only preliminary studies leading up to the fully developed theory of communicative action, but also several essays that complement The Theory of Communicative Action in important respects. The first part of this volume, “Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology,” formed the text of the Gauss Lectures that Habermas delivered at Princeton in 1971.2 These lectures are driven by the same theoretical aim that underlies The Theory of Communicative Action, namely, the attempt to ground a theory of society on the foundations of communicative rationality. They provide a largely self-contained account of the philosophical motivations behind the theory of communicative action as well as an elucidation of its theoretical grounding in what Habermas called first and later The presentation of the issues here is more accessible than in precisely because Habermas is occupied with laying out the general parameters of his project and situating it relative to other theories of society. Moreover, he discusses certain issues here, such as “systematically distorted communication,” that he has not addressed in the same detail again. In short, these “preparatory studies” offer important aids to understanding his mature philosophy and social theory.