Universal Pragmatics

Abstract

In recent years, the writings of Jürgen Habermas have become increasingly concerned with the development of a programme of ‘universal pragmatics’.¹ Although the details of this programme remain in an unfinished form, the over-all aim is clear: to investigate the general competencies required for the successful performance of speech-acts, and thereby ‘to reconstruct the universal validity basis of speech’.² The supposition is that such a reconstruction will in turn provide a foundation for the critique of ideology, in so far as ideology can be conceived as communication systematically distorted by the exercise of power. This attempt to establish a normative foundation for critical theory through a reconstructive analysis of everyday speech may at first appear somewhat surprising. For even though language has been a focal point of investigation for many years, it is still a topic about which there is a great deal of disagreement and dispute. Nevertheless, Habermas has proposed an original and provocative programme which demands more attention than it has sometimes received in the Anglo-American literature.³ My hope is that the following essay will go some way towards meeting this demand. I shall begin by situating Habermas’s writings on language within the context of his social theory as a whole, indicating a few of the respects in which his earlier views have been transformed by his more recent work. The second part of the essay presents an exposition of some of the central themes of universal pragmatics. In the third part, I select four of these themes and submit them to a critical examination. Finally, in the concluding part of the essay I consider some general issues and offer some constructive remarks, with the aim of indicating ways in which the obstacles encountered by Habermas’s programme might be overcome.