on dialogue. Mutual understanding (like co-operation in Grice’s theory of
conversation, which is one of Habermas’s sources of inspiration)^1 is the
consensual negotiation of truth claims: Habermas’s philosophy of language
is an ethics of discussion, which generalises Grice’s maxims of conversation to
the social structure.
The second concept is that of life-world, whereby Habermas affirms his
adherence to the European philosophical tradition (he is the only philosopher
really to have attempted, and possibly succeeded in, a synthesis of the
antagonistic European and Anglo-American philosophical traditions – what
are sometimes called analytical and continental philosophies).^2 The concept
is, of course, borrowed from Husserl. It aims to answer the question: why
are speakers not a threat to one another? There are two answers: because
the very structure of language obliges the speaker to co-operate with the
other (this is the anthropological foundation of the possibility of a form of
communism which is not exactly of the Marxian sort: but, of course, Habermas
does not proclaim himself a communist); and because discussions always
occur on the basis of background knowledge that is neither arbitrary nor
separate, but which forms a life-world:
Subjects acting communicatively always come to an understanding in the
horizon of a lifeworld. Their lifeworld is formed from more or less diffuse,
always unproblematic, background convictions. This lifeworld background
serves as a source of situation definitions that are presupposed by participants
as unproblematic.... The lifeworld also stores the interpretive work
of preceding generations. It is the conservative counterweight to the
risk of disagreement that arises with every actual process of reaching
understanding....^3This life-world, which involves recourse to the concepts of tradition and
common sense, is at once a horizon and a limit to discussion and interpretation –
that is, to what constitutes the very content of inter-subjective understanding.
The object of universal pragmatics is to study the presuppositions of
communicative action. We are in what Habermas calls a ‘weak transcendental’,
Critique of the Philosophy of Language • 47(^1) See Grice 1975.
(^2) See Lecercle 1999.
(^3) Habermas 1984, p. 70.