Habermas: - Hitler youth
- Fan of the Enlightenment
- Belief in the rational discourse of individuals
- Kinda Marxist
- Preferred theory to struggle
- Eclectic scholarly background
- Enlightenment: private & public (different from Greeks)
- Three domains/interests of humankind:
- Work (technical interest and instrumental rationality)
- Social interaction (practical interest and practical reasoning)
- Power (emancipatory interest and self-reflection through critical sciences/critical theory)
- These three interests later are treated in two larger categories (neither is inherently good or bad):
- Communicative action (oriented to public consent)
- Strategic action (oriented to personal success)
- Components of societies (lifeworlds and systems):
- The lifeworld is the taken for granted stuff of daily life
- The system is imposed structural and material stuff
- We can connect communicative action to the lifeworld and strategic action to systems
- Universal pragmatics (general or universal features of language use)
- Speech act is the most elementary unit of communication
- The way language is used is more important for understanding meaning that language’s logical structure or its connection between symbols and what they represent.
- Every utterance is some form of act (promising, asking, telling, etc.) upon an audience.
- Speech acts have two components
- Propositional content (literal definition)
- Illocutionary force (what action it does)
- Three major speech acts:
- Constatives (truth claims: “the grass is green”)
- Regulatives (appeals to social relationships: “you’re under arrest”)
- Avowals (statements of internal conditions: “you hurt my feelings”)
- For Habermas, constative acts deal with truth; avowals deal with truthfulness (which we could perhaps see as honesty or sincerity)
- The validity of the three acts is determined differently:
- Constative (external world: is the grass really green?)
- Regulative (social conditions: is the speaker allowed to arrest people?)
- Avowels (speaker’s internal world: are my feelings hurt?)
- The speech acts presume the “ideal speech situation,” which means that all participants tacitly agree that everyone can employ speech acts equally, free from constraints (together called the “general symmetry requirement”) with a desire to seek consensus. (Habermas admits this is a hypothetical construction.)
- Unrestrained discussion
- Unimpaired self-representation
- Equivalent obligations to all members
- Discourse
- Occurs when consensus is not reached
- Only constatives and regulatives are included, because you can’t validate avowals through discussion.
- Four kinds (levels) of discourse:
- Theoretic: questions of truth
- Practical: appropriateness or rightness of norms
- Meta-theoretical: questions of truth-making mechanisms in fields
- Meta-ethical: epistemological questions of what counts as knowledge
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