Habermas and validity claims

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 227-244

  Niemi, Jari I ^a  

^a PURDUE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Agreement; Habermas; Normativity; Rationality; Understanding; Validity

Indexed keywords

EID: 33947113530     PISSN: 09672559     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09672550500080462     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 52-3.
2. I believe that Habermas has also to defend the priority of communicative use of language over the instrumental use, but an analysis of this argument is beyond the scope of this paper. For Habermas's argument for communicative priority, see Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 293ff.
3. My claim here is that while there are many fine scholarly works either on the foundational aspects of Habermas's theory or purely on the practical consequences of those foundations, more work needs to be done on the interconnections of the foundations and the practical connections. For the latter see, e.g., James Bohman, 'The Globalization of the Public Sphere: Cosmopolitan Publicity and the Problem of Cultural Pluralism'
4. Thomas McCarthy, 'Practical Discourse: On the Relation of Morality to Politics'
5. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, 'From a Literary to a Political Public Sphere: Jürgen Habermas', all in David Rasmussen and James Swindal (eds) Jürgen Habermas, Vol. 2 (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2002), pp. 337-69, 389-407.
6. Also, with similar concerns, see Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1996). For works on the foundations, consult the rest of the footnotes in this paper.
7. I have argued elsewhere that Habermas's thesis not only implies that intersubjective understanding is impossible unless the simultaneity thesis is true, but also that self-understanding depends, to a considerable degree, on dialogical argumentation. See Jari Niemi, 'The Foundations of Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Rationality: A Defense' (Dissertation, Purdue University, Indiana, 2004), pp. 78ff.
8. Some critics have argued that this implication of Habermas's thesis commits him to a distinction between 'real' and 'spurious' preferences, with obvious illiberal consequences. For a brief discussion of this and an opposing view, see Chambers, Reasonable Democracy, pp. 155ff.
9. Cooke, Language and Reason, Ch. 3.
10. The denial of the presence of truth claims in non-constative speech acts and the rejection of the claim to truthfulness in constative speech acts show up in Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, pp. 311-15. Habermas identifies A. Leist and Ernst Tugenhadt, respectively, as criticizing him on such grounds and attempts to rebut the criticism on the pages cited.
11. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Ibid., pp. 307-8.
12. Habermas refers to the idea of three formal worlds in several places, but his most recent mention of this concept, as far as I can tell, is in 'Toward a Critique of the Theory of Meaning', in Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), p. 295.
13. Habermas, 'Toward a Critique of the Theory of Meaning', p. 295.
14. Habermas makes this point in numerous places. For example, see 'Actions, Speech Acts, Linguistically Mediated Interactions, and the Lifeworld', in On the Pragmatics of Communication, pp. 230, 231;
15. Naturally, the same point is also made in his magnum opus, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, pp. 306-18.
16. Andreas Dorschel, 'Is There Any Normative Claim Internal to Stating Facts?', in Rasmussen and Swindal, Jürgen Habermas, Vol. 4, p. 204.
17. Dorschel actually takes Habermas to claim that a speaker uttering a communicative speech act raises four and only four claims. This is, of course, strictly speaking true, since every speaker, in addition to the three claims mentioned, also asserts the intelligibility of her utterance. I have omitted the discussion regarding the intelligibility claim raised because it is clearly not central, or sufficient, to Habermas's much more ambitious project. For a fuller discussion of the intelligibility claim, see Dorschel, Is There Any Normative Claim Internal to Stating Facts?'.