(it corresponds to internal reality), and accuracy (it corresponds to social
reality).
We see how Habermas takes up Anglo-American pragmatics – i.e. Austin
and Searle’s theory of speech acts – and Grice’s theory of meaning as intended
meaning, as well as his theory of conversation as obeying a co-operative
principle. We can also see how he expands it, by introducing the normative –
i.e. the social – with its historical sedimentation in the form of traditions, laws
and norms. We can also see how this first philosophy of language is an ethics.
At the centre of the adoption and extension of the concept of ‘illocutionary
force’, which is itself at the heart of the theory of speech acts, is to be found
the notion of ‘commitment’: the essential condition for an illocutionary act
(promises are a good example) is that the speaker on each occasion makes a
commitment which allows the interlocutor to trust her (as to the truth of the
propositional content of the act, as to the sincerity with which the act is
performed). For Habermas, this explains the illocutionary forceof the act
(which obviously does not correspond to physical violence or moral coercion):
the fact that it leads the interlocutor to trust the commitment made. With
Grice, who speaks in terms of the (co-operative) ‘principle’ and ‘maxims’ (of
conversation), we were already in the universe of the second Kantian critique.
With Habermas, we are explicitly, and not only allusively, in the universe of
ethics: consensus, commitment, responsibility, trust. But, for him, it is not a
question of a moral decision, of a constraint imposed on linguistic practice
from without, but of the very structure of interlocution: mutual communicative
obligations have a rational basis and to refuse them (e.g. to defend a theory
of linguistic exchange as agon– that is, as a verbal contest) involves abandoning
the framework of reason.
Thus we end up with a comprehensive theory of language – a truly universal
pragmatics. Habermas distinguishes four sectors of reality (external nature,
society, internal nature, and language), to which correspond four types of
relationship to reality (objectivity, normativity, sincerity, and inter-subjectivity);
our four validity claims (in order: truth, accuracy, sincerity, and intelligibility);
and three functions of speech acts (the presentation of states of affairs, the
establishment of inter-personal relations, and the expression of subjective
experience). To readers who might protest that Habermas’s obsession with
making correlations (four elements per column) is not complete in the last
column, it may be replied that the establishment of inter-personal relations
Critique of the Philosophy of Language • 49