Speech acts would be ‘based on recognition of the corresponding validity claims of compre-
hensibility, truth, truthfulness and rightness’, Habermas (1979: 3). Occasionally Habermas
indicates three such claims and sometimes four.
‘In context of communicative action, we call someone rational not only if he is able to
put forward an assertion and, when criticized, to provide grounds for it by pointing to
appropriate evidence, but also if he is following an established norm and is able, when
criticized, to justify his action by explicating the given situation in the light of legitimate
expectations’, Habermas (1984: vol. 1, 15).
‘What Habermas seeks to establish in his theory of communicative competence...parallels
what Marx sought to accomplish in his own critique of political economy. Marx argues that,
implicit in the concrete historical forms of alienation and exploitation that now exist, are
the real dynamic potentialities for radically transforming this existing historical situation’,
Bernstein (1978: 209).
In Austin locutionary acts refer to a propositional content, perlocutionary refers to the
effect on speakers and illocutionary refers to the act performed in saying something.
As a result of the ‘appeal to universal validity claims, the speech-act-typical commitments
take on the character of obligations to provide grounds or to prove trustworthy, the hearer
can be rationally motivated by the speaker’s signalled engagement to accept the latter’s
offer’, Habermas (1979: 63).
Or, as he states more fully elsewhere, ‘The analysis of what Austin called the illocution-
ary force of an utterance has led us back to the validity basis of speech. Institutional
unbound speech acts owe their illocutionary force to a cluster of validity claims that
speakers and hearers have to raise and recognize as justified if grammatical (and thus
comprehensible) sentences are to be employed in such a way as to result in successful
communication’, (Habermas 1979: 65–6).
We need a concept of reason ‘that attends to the phenomenon of the lifeworld and per-
mits the outmoded concept of the “consciousness of society as a whole” (which comes
from the philosophy of the subject...) to be reformulated on the basis of a theory of
intersubjectivity’, Habermas in Schmidt (ed.) (1996: 419).
He sees Derrida, for example, as even denying the validity of everyday communication.
Discourse ethics rests on the intuition that the application of the principle of universaliz-
ation, properly understood, calls for a joint process of ‘ideal role taking’. It interprets this
idea of G. H. Mead in terms of a pragmatic theory of argumentation. Under the pragmatic
presuppositions of an inclusive and noncoercive rational discourse among free and equal
participants, everyone is required to take the perspective of everyone else, and thus project
herself into the understandings of self and world of all others; from this interlocking of
perspectives there emerges an ideally extended we-perspective from which all can test in
common whether they wish to make a controversial norm the basis of their shared practice;
and this should include mutual criticism of the appropriateness of the languages in terms
of which situations and needs are interpreted, Habermas (1995: 117).
As far as I have been able to ascertain though Habermas has not addressed himself to the
reform of national educational curricula in Germany or elsewhere.
