The Nature of Political Theory

286 The Nature of Political Theory

and political implications. Each sphere of knowledge presupposes concepts which
are vital to it. However, for Habermas, these concepts cannot be enunciatedwithin
the substantive terms of that sphere. The upshot of this is the demand for a form of
transcendental pragmatism.
One of the more systematic turning points for this perspective is Habermas’s
essay ‘What is Universal Pragmatics?’. He indicates, in this essay, that ‘The task of
universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible
understanding. In other contexts one also could speak of “general presuppositions of
communication”, but I prefer to speak of general presuppositions of communicative
action’ (Habermas 1979: 1). The gist of this perspective, for Habermas, is that any
speech act raises ‘universal validity claims...that can be vindicated [or redeemed:
einlösen]. Insofar as he wants to participate in a process of reaching an understand-
ing, he cannot avoid raising the following validity claims’ (Habermas 1979: 2). Not
all speech acts are aimed at genuine communication, they may be purely strategic,
symbolic or just instrumental to further an agent’s personal interest. However, if the
aim of a speech act is to be understood and really communicate, then, it follows, for
Habermas, that validity claims are presupposed implicitly. Themodus operandiof
this argument is the ability to redeem ‘validity claims’ present in ordinary language.
These embody the normative foundation of what ideal speech requires.
The validity claims are: comprehensibility or intelligibility, truthfulness, sincerity,
and rightness.^14 The agent in any speech act must want to be understood or must
want to try to come to an understanding with another. The speech act therefore must
be comprehensible or intelligible intersubjectively, qua a society of speakers. Second,
the speaker must ‘have the intention of communicating atrue proposition’, namely, he
‘must want to express his intentiontruthfully’ (Habermas 1979: 2). The condition of
the truth of a statement is the potential agreement of speakers and hearers. Third, the
speaker will want to express his intentions with sincerity—namely that the speaker
is honest and sincere in what he says. Fourth, the speaker ‘must choose an utterance
that is right so that the hearer can accept the utterance’ (Habermas 1979: 3), that is to
say what the speaker says is right in the light of existing social norms and values. The
goal of speech acts is to come to an understanding, or, to share the knowledge of a
speaker. Such validity claims can also be used to challenge particular utterances. If and
when claims are challenged, they can only be rescued through further interaction that
discloses as to whether the speaker has been genuine.^15 It is important to realize that,
for Habermas, any understanding that is in any way forced by an external authority
is not valid. It is the force of the argument that should be crucial. Any discourse is
gauged by the ‘ideal speech situation’, which is, by definition, free from power and
domination—equivalent to Apel’s concept of ‘non-repressive deliberation’.^16
A key theoretical background influence here on Habermas’ theory is J. L. Austin’s
account of the ‘illocutionary force’ of speech acts.^17 For Habermas, communicat-
ive action is linguistic interaction where participants pursue illocutionary aims. The
speakers have the direct intention in a speech act of communicating a true pro-
positional content.^18 For Habermas, therefore, ‘In all cases in which the illocutionary
role expresses not a power claim but a validity claim, the place of the empirically