Since the ideal speech situation serves as the intrument for emancipatory critique, the question of the nature and adequacy of Habermas's proposal will concern this and the following chapters. This chapter will limit itself to considering the adequacy of the formal conditions of the ideal speech situation as these refer to a logic of theoretical discourse. Such a discussion is crucial for deepening the distinctions that mark the realm of material objects from the human/ social realm of communicating subjects. The question of the adequacy of the ideal speech situation as it refers to a logic of prac­tical dis­course will then be the focus of the following chapter. The present aims will be pursued (A) by presenting a reconstruction of consensual speech, (B) by articulating his discourse theory of truth, and (C) by consid­ering how Habermas's notion of truth functions within the con­text of a pragmatic logic of theoretical discourse in function of the conditions of the ideal speech situation.

RECONSTRUCTION OF CONSENSUAL SPEECH

          Universal pragmatics, as a reconstructive science, investigates the “universal and unavoidable presuppositions” that are operative in the successful employment of speech acts oriented to achieving mutual un­derstanding. Theoretical linguistics abstracts from the pragmatic context of language so as to limit its sphere of con­sideration to sen­tential analysis and the generative ability of the speaker. Universal pragmatics, in contrast, is concerned pre­cisely with the structures and pro­cesses from which linguis­tics abstracts. The move from a consider­ation of langue to that of parole,[iv] as carried out in the work of Haber­­mas, purports to lay bare the foundations of speech oriented to reach­ing understand­ing. In this sense that universal pragmatics:

          . . . thematizes the elementary units of speech (utteranc­es) in an attitude similar to that in which linguistics does the units of language (sentences). The goal of reconstruc­tive language analysis is an explicit description of the rules that a competent speaker must master in order to form grammat­ical sentences and to utter them in an ac­ceptable way . . . . It is . . . assumed that communicative competence has just a universal core as linguistic compe­tence. A general theory of speech actions would thus describe exactly that funda­mental system of rules that adult subjects master to the extent that they can fulfill the conditions for a happy em­ployment of sentences in utteranc­es, no matter to which individual languages the sentences may belong and in which accidental contexts the utterances may be embedded.[v]

          Universal pragmatics then involves explicating what accounts for the ability of a speaker to bring about an interpersonal engagement with a hearer, such that “the hearer can rely on him.”[vi]  The crucial point for Habermas is that the theory of speech acts, whose material object is a concern of universal pragmatics, cannot be viewed as a purely linguis­tic enter­prise in abstraction from the pragmatic dimen­sion present in every speech performance oriented to understanding. Indeed, the plausibility of Habermas's reconstructive effort is directed toward an explicitation of all that is involved in the deceptively sim­ple, double-struc­ture of the speech act. The ensuing section will brief­ly articulate the master lines of his analysis, includ­ing: (1) the dia­logical versus monologi­cal paradigm constitu­tive of speech; (2) the double-structure of the speech act; (3) the performative component, including the relation between a typology of speech acts based on performative verbs and the various “realms of reality” to which they refer; (4) the validity claims and the ground of successful engagement; and (5) the distinction between levels of communica­tive interaction.[vii]

          An obvious feature of speech-act theory is that the first notice­able characteristic of universal pragmatics is its shift from the mono­logical paradigm present in Knowledge and Human Interests to a dialogical one. The root presup­position in such a theory is that lan­guage is not an autono­mous being in and of itself, but, rather, a high-order faculty specific to homo sapiens. Accordingly, this reconstruc­tive science[viii] does not initiate its investigations within the chambers of an utterly isolated cogito that ultimately doubts, strictly speaking, not only the veracity of its private, inner impressions,[ix] but also the fact of its very existence as an integrat­ed knowing and acting self. Universal pragmatics repudi­ates this view of knowledge and explicitly recognizes the existence of selves other than one's own. This point needs to be emphasized, for it represents one critical feature in which universal pragmatics differs from such other recon­struc­tive sciences as theoretical linguistics that conduct their investi­gation in abstraction from the dialogical context in which speech transpires; their concen­tration is upon the generative ability of a speaker understood within the closed-context of a monologi­cal frame­work.[x] The essential no­tion operative in universal pragmatics, in contrast, is that there are no speech acts without dialogical participants; that is, speech is not pos­sible without, at the very least, a speaker and a hearer engaged in the process of communication. Once the emphasis on dialogical partici­pants as the source of speech act employment and deployment, it becomes necessary to examine the speech act itself and show its re­lationship to the issue of truth.

          The typical speech act reveals a charac­teris­tic double-structure: a performative component followed by a propositional one.[xi] The surface structure of explicit speech acts in the standard form can be analyzed according to the following paradigm:

          [Performative Component]/[Propositional Component]

The form of any speech act could thus be specified as follows:

          “[I (hereby) performative verb to you]/[that S is P.]”

The expressed form of the performative component is as follows: “I (hereby) performative verb to you.”  The personal pronouns, “I” and “you,” serve to indicate the level of intersubjectivity in which speech acts are exchanged; the adverb “hereby” in paren­thesis serves to indi­cate that the speech act originates from a speaker, and that it indeed consists in a certain proposal that is expressed to a hearer; lastly, the performative verb serves to indicate the illocu­tionary force, i.e., the specific interpersonal relation in which the speaker wishes to engage another dialogue participant. The form, in turn, of the propositional component is as follows: “that S is P.”  The noun clause functions here as the direct object of the performative verb and, as such, refers to the level of predication, which mediates the experiences and states of affairs about which the speaker/hearer want to come to an under­standing.[xii] The double-structure then serves to indicate the point that dialogue participants communicate at two levels:

          (1) the level of intersubjectivity on which speaker and hearer, through illocutionary acts, establish the relations that permit them to come to an understanding with one another, and

          (2) the level of propositional content which is communi­cated.[xiii]

          For Habermas communicative speech acts, in contradis­tinction to strategic speech acts,[xiv] are oriented to reaching understanding[xv] wherein the relation intended by a speaker and signalled by a perform­ative verb is established. An inven­tory of all possible performative verbs indicates, moreover, that these may be clas­sified into four broad categories: (a) the communicatives, (b) the constatives, (c) the regula­tives, and (d) the avowals.[xvi] Communicatives (say, ask, etc.), refer­ring to the first type of speech act, are language-immanent insofar as they are directed to the very process of communication, i.e., concern themselves with the intelligibility of an ut­terance. The other three categories refer to extralinguistic “domains of reality”: constative speech acts are about “the” world of external nature (asserting, de­scribing, narrating, etc.); regulative speech acts are about “our” world of society (commands, requests, and warnings, etc.); and avowal speech acts are about one's “own” world of internal nature (to reveal, expose, pretend, etc.).[xvii] Thus, in addition to the speaker/hearer pre­sup­posed in speech, the successful employ­ment and deployment of speech acts involves having mastered three distinct yet related extralinguistic, coordinate systems, viz.: that of “the” world, “our” shared lifeworld, and one's “own” world. In the case of speech acts involving the pri­vate inner-world of someone other than oneself, the ability to ex­change such speech acts derives from the empathetic familiarity be­tween members of a species.  This enables one to attain an empathetic understanding with others given the common experien­ces and circum­stances to which members of the same species are subject.

          However, the distinctive contribution of universal pragmatics as a reconstructive science rests in examining the nature of the ground, i.e., the sufficient conditions that account for the achievement of the interpersonal engagement intended by the speaker. The crucial busi­ness of universal pragmatics—in contradistinction to other fields of inquiry concerned with language—consists in accounting for this third component that is im­plicitly or explicitly present in non­strategic speech acts oriented to understanding. Indeed, the speaker by means of his utterance is making a proposal to a hearer, who can either accept, reject or question that which the expressed statement signifies. Wheth­er the utterance be an assertion (constative speech act), a command (regulative speech act), or a personal intention or state of being (avowal speech act), in each case the speaker—by presenting his utter­ance to the hearer, by the very act of vocalizing his proposal, i.e., his utterance—is telling the hearer: (1) that he has grounds or reasons for holding and hence for stating his utterance, and (2) that what he is express­ing is indeed what he sincerely considers to be the case. The hearer, in turn, is not a mere mechanical recorder of sounds but is in a position to agree fully, partially, or not at all with the speaker's proposal.[xviii] If he does agree, the inter­personal engagement sought by the speaker is established; if he does not, the relationship does not come to pass.

          For Habermas the hearer's confidence in or reliance on the seriousness of the speaker's proposal as signalled by the achieve­ment of the engagement intended by the speaker need not be construed in function of the speaker's ability to influence the hearer by the mere power of suggestion. Neither does it have to be the result of mindless whim on the part of the hearer.[xix] Indeed, the dialogical engagement which may or may not result once a proposal is made public derives its binding force from the supposed satisfaction on the part of the speaker of certain, rational validity claims that, according to Haber­mas, are raised with every utterance aimed at reaching interpersonal under­standing. Habermas puts it in these terms:

          With their illocutionary acts, speaker and hearer raise validity claims and demand they be recognized. But this recognition need not follow irrationally, since the validity claims have a cognitive character and can be checked. I would like, therefore, to defend the following thesis: In the final analysis, the speaker can illocutionarily influ­ence the hearer and vice versa, because the speech-act-typical commitments are connected with cognitively test­able validity claims—that is, because the reciprocal bonds have a rational basis. The engaged speaker normally connects the specific sense in which he would like to take up an interpersonal relation with a thematically stressed validity claim and thereby chooses a specific mode of communication.[xx]

The importance of Habermas's emphasis on “cognitively testable va­lidity claims,” insofar as his philosophy of emancipation is concerned, cannot be stressed enough. If he is correct, then hypostatizations in the form of acts, products, utterances, texts, practices and institutions may be made the object of emancipatory critique.

          The validity claims raised in speech remain largely implicit and unthematized from the point of view of those engaged in ordinary, everyday, pragmatic exchanges. But Habermas claims that an analysis of utterances employed with a view toward reaching understanding indicate that four universal claims are simultaneously raised each and every time an utterance is made. Of the four claims, three—the claim to truth, rightness, and sincerity—deal direct­ly with the aforementioned extralinguistic “worlds” and the fourth—the claim to comprehensibili­ty—concerns itself with language itself.[xxi]

          The speaker must choose a comprehensible expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another. The speaker must have the intention of communicating a true proposition content (or a propositional content, the exis­tential presuppositions of which are satisfied) so that the hearer can share the knowledge of the speaker. The speaker must want to express his intentions truthfully so that the hearer can believe the utterance of the speaker (can trust him). Finally, the speaker must choose an ut­terance that is right so that the hearer can accept the utterance and speaker and hearer can agree with one another in the utterance with respect to a recognized normative background.[xxii]

          Hence, comprehensibility is concerned with the intel­ligibility of speech insofar as a speaker can only pretend to enter into a dialogical relationship with another if he is in fact communicating sequences of signs that satisfy the minimal phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and prag­matic requirements so as to render what he says significative. If this does not occur obviously no dialogue can be sus­tained, for no hearer can entertain holding a dialogue with one who merely babbles incomprehensible non-sense. If it is the case, however, that a speaker is simply not expressing himself with sufficient clarity, it is incumbent upon the hearer, before he can seriously enter­tain the speaker's proposal, to ask for greater elucidation on behalf of the motion. If the speaker cannot provide a sufficient level of transparen­cy, the intended engagement is left in a state of suspension. This validity claim demands, in short, that speech concern itself first and foremost with transmitting sense.[xxiii]

          The claim to truth, in turn, situates the utterance in relation to external reality, i.e., “the” world of objects and events about which one can make true or false statements. The claim to rightness, howev­er, situates the utterance in relation to the normative reality of society, i.e., “our” social lifeworld of shared values and norms, roles and rules that an act can “fit” or “misfit” and that may be regarded as either right—legiti­mate and justifiable—or wrong. Finally, the claim to truth­fulness or sincerity situates the utterance in relation to inner reality, i.e., one's “own” world of intentional experiences that can be expressed sincerely or insincerely. Each of these claims admits of an “either/or” such that: the truth claim is either true or false; the norma­tive claim is either right or wrong; and the truthfulness claim is either sincere or insin­cere.[xxiv]

          A speech act, then, involving all four validity claims, can be offered only as a “proposal” in hopes of fostering the desired engage­ment. If a hearer is in principle satisfied that all four validity claims have been met or can be met, then he considers that the utterance is comprehensible, true, right, and a reflection of what the speaker sin­cerely takes to be the case. If, on the other hand, the hearer feels that one of these critical claims has not been satisfied, that, for example, the speaker is not saying the truth, or that what he is saying violates established norms, or that he is insincere about what he is saying, the possibility exists that the hearer will demand reas­surances from the speaker. If the speaker cannot provide these the hearer will not attend to his words. Thus communication oriented to understanding involves claims which the hearer can call into question and which can be vali­dated only by further evidences or assurances on the part of the speaker. If he succeeds in meeting the objections of the hearer, he will do so only because the hearer purportedly considers these to be rationally compelling. The supposition is that those engaged in dia­logue know what they are doing and why they are doing it, that they intentionally maintain the beliefs and pursue the ends that they do, and that they are capable of backing them with reasons. Although, McCarthy indicates, this “supposition of responsibility . . . . is coun­terfactual, it is of fundamental sig­nificance for the structure of human relations that we proceed as if it were the case: `on this unavoida­ble fiction rests the humanity of intercourse among men who are still men'.”[xxv]

          Validity claims, moreover, can now be viewed as repre­senting the four dimensions in which communication can undergo disturbances or fail to achieve an intented illocutionary relation. According to Habermas there are three possible levels of communicative exchange into which a speak­er/hearer can enter in function of the relative suc­cess achieved in the intended engagement of the speaker is concerned, viz.: (a) consensus- interaction and (b) discourse. The first of these refers to that level of communication where there has already been achieved a common, uncritical definition of the norms, social practic­es, and belief systems of everyday life. There is, in this sense, a back­ground consensus derived from the reciprocal raising and mutual rec­ognition of the four validity claims. While speech proceeds without violating this shared and unproblematic framework, the engagement intended by the speaker is achieved.

          But as soon as one or more of the validity claims are ques­tioned, the speaker is challenged by the hearer, still within the context of consensus-interaction, to vindicate a validity claim which he con­siders not to have been sufficiently supported. Thus, if the hearer questions the comprehen­sibility of what the speaker is saying, the speaker is expected to provide the needed clarity by means of “expli­ca­tion, elucidation, para­phrase, translation, semantic stipula­tion.”[xxvi]  If the hearer ques­tions the speaker's intentions or his sincerity by accusing the speaker of “lying, deceiving, misleading, pretending,” the in­tended engagement can only be reestablished if the speaker is able to present the hearer with the requisite assuran­ces, as would be indi­cated by the speaker's “consistency of ac­tion, readiness to draw, ac­cept, and act on consequences, willingness to assume implied respon­sibilities and obligations” that follow from the speaker's proposed utter­ance. If, however, the hearer challenges the truth of the propo­sitional contents of one's expression, it is incumbent on the speaker to satisfy the hearer's objections by “pointing to rele­vant experiences, supplying information, citing recognized authorities.”  In cases where the hearer challenges the speaker's right to perform speech acts, i.e., by questioning the speaker's competence, authority or status in a certain area, or by accusing the speaker of violating accepted norms, recognized values, or established relational patterns, the speaker can only meet these objections by appealing to “recognized norms, accept­ed values, established authorities.”

          For Habermas the claims of comprehensibility and truthfulness can be vindicated only within the second level of communication, viz., the interactive. In the case of comprehensibility, either the speaker can provide the needed clarity or not.[xxvii] In the case of the truthfulness associated with the speaker's intentions in uttering the speech acts, either he can provide the needed reassurances as can be tested by consistent subsequent action or he cannot.[xxviii] Insofar as these two validity claims are concerned, either the speaker can meet the hearer's challenges at the interactive level of communication or the speaker fails to achieve the intended engagement with the hearer.

          If, however, the claims to truth and rightness cannot be satisfac­torily vindicated at the level of consensus-interaction, i.e., if the hear­er challenges the truth or rightness claim in so fundamental a way, then the only recourse available to dialogical participants is to enter the second level of communicative interaction, viz., the discursive one, with a view toward determining whether the problematic truth or rightness claim can or cannot be vindi­cated.[xxix] Discourse then themati­zes the naively assumed background consensus by critically evaluating the rationality or irrationality underpinning the questioned norms, values, ideologies, and belief systems. The goal of discourse consists in the achievement of agreement via rational consensus, which is conceived by Habermas as possible insofar as he proposes formal criteria of rationality for distinguishing between a true and false con­sensus. It is at this level—discourse­—that the question of what consti­tutes truth for Habermas becomes crucial, given the normative claim for theory (the truth claim) and action (the rightness claim) that Hab­ermas proposes.

          It should be clear that universal pragmatics does not consist in a mere consideration of the grammaticality of utterances as may con­stitute the subject matter of theoretical linguistics, nor is it a purely empirical investigation into concrete utterances as conducted in psy­cholin­guistics or sociolinguistics. For Habermas it is a reconstructive science that endeavors to articulate the “universal and unavoidable presuppositions” that make possible speech acts oriented to under­stand­ing. These presuppositions, in turn, should not be understood as the product of an apriori, monological contempla­tion of what is in­volved in dialogue but, rather, as the result obtained from a consider­ation of what transpires in actual speech engagements between and among dialogical participants.

          By way of summary, an inventory of these conditions follows:

(a)      that speech involves an analysis of language as parole that explicitly incorporates a dialogical—versus monological—para­digm, involving more than one competent speaker;

(b)      that the capacity to embed sentences in appropriate speech acts indicates mastery of the four types of speech acts;

(c)      that the capacity to employ these speech acts indicates that the dialogical participants are in relation to three dis­tinct yet coor­dinate worlds: “the” world, the “shared” world, and one's “own” inner world;

(d)      that the bringing about of an interpersonal engagement involves reciprocally raising and mutually recognizing four validity claims: comprehensibility, truth, rightness, and sin­cerity;

(e)      that a challenge to any of the four validity claims jeopardizes the achievement of the intended engagement and forces the speaker to provide the requisite evidence which differs in accor­dance to the type of claim needing vindication.

          Indeed, from the foregoing analysis of consensual speech, Hab­ermas's endeavors to provide a significant instru­ment for probing speech-act proposals. If language can be the locus for interest-oriented distortions, Habermas's aim consists in providing a framework in which the proposals inherent in speech acts may be subject to critical review. Yet to speak of analyzing or examining communicative pro­posals with a view toward critically assessing their validity implies that a criterion of truth is available to the examiners by means of which they can distinguish between those proposals meriting assent from those that do not. Toward a considera­tion of Habermas's dis­course theory of truth this study now turns.

THE DISCOURSE THEORY OF TRUTH

          Whereas at the level of consensual speech, the exchange of speech acts transpires within a naively-assumed background, the par­ticipants in discourse are concerned rather with proposing arguments for the justification of the truth or rightness claim, that implicit in their assertion, has been challenged. Hence once an objec­tion is ad­vanced that so fundamentally challenges the truth or rightness claim of a pragmatic assertion, the assertion then becomes a hypothetical object of discourse, i.e., an assertion that fails to produce the intended illo­cutionary relation. Dis­course pertains to the framework in which and the process under which the participants conduct their examination of the problematicized claim with the sole aim of determining—on the basis of argumen­tation alone—whether the claim merits vindication, modification or rejection. Yet the issue that becomes particularly important in such a discursive process refers to the question of truth.[xxx] This section will specifically (1) endeavor to clarify what the Habermasian discourse theory of truth[xxxi] means within the context of a pragmatics of assertions in light of the Habermasian argument for the inseparability of the criteria of truth from the criteria for the war­ranted assertion of truth claims; (2) review Habermas's constitution theory of objects and his rationale for dismissing both (a) perceptual theories and (b) correspondence theories as criteria of truth; and (3) critically consider three objections which are typically made against Habermas's discourse theory of truth.[xxxii]

          Habermas's characterization of his notion of truth is provi­ded in the following passage:

          I may ascribe a predicate to an object if and only if every other person who could enter into a dialogue with me would ascribe the same predicate to the same object. In order to distinguish true from false statements, I make reference to the judgment of others—in fact to the judg­ment of all others with whom I could ever hold a dia­logue (among whom I counterfac­tually include all the dialogue partners I could find if my life history were coextensive with the history of mankind). The condition of the truth of statements is the potential agreement of all others.[xxxiii]

The statement, “The condition of truth is the potential agreement of all others,” indicates the critical insight for a proper under­standing of the Habermasian notion of truth. A succinct summary of what is in­volved here can be enumerated in four points:

(a)      The predication “true” and “false” may be said of state­ments and not of sentences or speech episodes (i.e. utterances).

(b)      Truth is a validity claim signifying that the assertion of the statement is justified.

(c)      The assertion of a statement is justified if and only if that state­ment would command a rational consensus among all who could enter into a discussion with the speaker.

(d)      A rational consensus is an agreement among all poten­tial partic­ipants argumentively derived under the conditions of the ideal speech situation.

An examination of the first three statements follows.[xxxiv]

          Habermas agrees with Austin and Strawson in their repudia­tion of semantic theories of truth for predicating truth and falsity to sen­tences versus statements or asser­tions. However, Habermas disagrees with Austin's view that truth and falsity should be predicated of utter­ances, i.e., concrete “historic events” or “speech episodes.”  On this point Habermas sides with Strawson's contention that such predication belongs properly to statements understood as that which is asserted in constative speech acts.[xxxv] However, Habermas goes further in noting that the propositional component of an assertion derives its force from the very act of being asserted, i.e., by means of the expressed or unex­pressed performative component operative in constative speech acts. Truth viewed pragmatically then refers not only to the proposi­tion but also to the act whereby it is proposed as true in the first place. By “declaring” a proposition “to be true,” for Habermas, one is engaged in the act of raising a validity claim for the alleged truth of a statement, which, as such, is susceptible to challenge. But “the meaning of truth as implied in the pragmatics of assertions”[xxxvi] is still in need of further elucidation.

          This can be derived from a consideration of Habermas's consti­tution theory of objects, wherein he delineates his position insofar as the relationship between language and the world of objects is con­cerned. His constitu­tion theory develops both as a correction to the positions characteristic of naive realists, on the one hand, and those characteristic of dogmatic conceptualists/ nominalists, on the other. Indeed, as a result of various impediments affecting both the process of experiencing and the act of reporting descriptions of what is experi­enced, that which is experienced, conceptualized, and expressed in language never represents an incorrigible articulation of precisely that which is in some extramental/linguistic sense. As a result of various impediments influencing both the process of experiencing and the act of uttering descriptions, what is experienced is affected by (a) limita­tions from the point of view of the object known, including such external fac­tors as the perspective and distance from which and the medium through which an object is perceived; (b) limitations from the point of view of the knowing subject, including such internal factors as the soundness of the sense organs undergoing an experience, psy­chological integrity and linguistic capability in reporting an experi­ence; and (c) limitations resulting from the ade­quacy of the language used as a medium for reporting an experience. What is experienced, conceptualized, and expressed in language never represents an incorri­gible articulation of precisely that which is in some extramental/lin­guistic sense. For Habermas, then, concepts and words are not the pure conceptual or lexical counterparts (i.e., corresponding represen­tations) of the universe of objects to which they refer. How­ever, nei­ther are concepts and words purely a function of trans­cendental cate­gories or of subjective impressions that stand in relation to the uni­verse of objects to which they refer. Haber­mas rejects the notion that the subject of experience is a transcendental ego equipped, as it were, with a certain prism—the categories of understanding and the forms of intuition—from which to view and understand reality. Instead, he ar­gues that the con­stitution of a world of objects of possible experience is the product of a “systematic interplay of sense reception, action and linguistic representation.”

          Object domains represent systems of fun­damental con­cepts in which possible experiences must be capable of being organized and formulated as opinions. In the case of the organization of experiences with objects, we can view the fundamental concepts as cogni­tive schemata; in the case of the formulation of opini­ons about objects of experience, we can view them as semantic categories. The connection between these two levels of experience and of language is apparently established through action, that is through instrumen­tal or through communicative action.[xxxvii]

          Accordingly, Habermas's rejection of either a realist or tran­scendentalist frame for understanding concepts is grounded in a so­phisticated view of language. If concepts are purely and simply ab­stracted from the world of objects, then humanity, as properly consist­ing of members of a common species, should be able to generate a host of common concepts for viewing and describing the world regard­less of space, time, culture or age. Since this is not the case, Haber­mas rejects the error of arguing for a simplis­tic correspondence be­tween experience and concepts. But what is equally interesting is that he does not feel that this view subjects him to linguistic relativism. Very much to the contrary, Habermas wants to argue that the languag­es that mediate one or another view of that which is experienced may be tested—and hence rejected or accep