is precisely what is common to the social and the linguistic, that inter-
subjectivity is constructed on the basis of normativity, that intelligibility cannot
be understood without accuracy.
To conclude on the philosophy of language proposed by Habermas.
We have seen its advantages over Chomskyan naturalism, but also over
Anglo-American pragmatics: it enables us to move from the individual to the
collective – i.e. the social – and it locates communicative action in a general
theory of action, counter-posing it not only to strategic action, but also to
symbolic action (which is how Habermas describes such phenomena as art).
We have also seen that this description of interlocution is almost obsessive
in its coherence. In passing, it offers us non-trivial theories of truth (obtained
by consensus on validity claims); of dialogue (based on eirene– co-operation –
rather than agon, but, in any event, richer than the usual conception, which
sees dialogue as a mere exchange of information); and even of reality (which,
in Popperian fashion, combines an objective external nature, a subjective
internal nature, and a third world – of tradition, sedimentation, the life-world
shared by interlocutors).
This philosophy of language makes it possible to avoid three pitfalls. As
it is situated immediately at the level of the social, or rather in that it seeks
to found the social on the structure of interlocution (i.e. in that it is derived
from Marx’s emancipatory project), it avoids both Chomskyan naturalism
and the methodological individualism characteristic of the dominant philosophy
of language. And, as it takes into account the tradition and the encyclopaedia
that inform the life-world of speakers, as it situates itself resolutely at the
level of the normative – i.e. the collective – it also avoids, or at least it expands,
the intentionalism that characterises the Gricean theory of meaning, and which
feeds into his theory of conversation. So here we have a philosophy of language
which involves a theory of subjectivation and individuation starting from the
collective, where the egois constituted through the intermediary of the alter,
where the interior can be regarded as an internalisation of the exterior.
Yet, however effective, this philosophy poses problems and must be criticised.
I must therefore think against Habermas.
50 • Chapter Three