Page 18 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

XIX Translator’s Introduction

from this pragmatic point of view, it becomes clear that speech
necessarily (even if often only implicitly) involves the raising,
recognizing, and redeeming of “‘validity claims.’’ In addition to
the (implicit) claim that what he utters is comprehensible, the
speaker also claims that what he states is true (or if no statement
is made, that the existential presuppositions of his utterance’s
propositional content are fulfilled); that his manifest expression
of intentions is truthful or sincere; and that his utterance (his
speech act) is itself right or appropriate in relation to a recog-
nized normative context (or that the normative context it fits is
itself legitimate). The claims to truth, truthfulness, and rightness
place the speaker’s utterance in relation to extralinguistic orders
of reality; the universal-pragmatic infrastructure of speech con-
sists of general rules for arranging the elements of speech situ-
ations within a coordinate system formed by ‘‘the”’ external world,
one’s “own” internal world, and ‘“‘our’”’ shared social life-world.
It is obvious that a fully developed universal pragmatics would
provide a unifying framework for a variety of theoretical endeavors
usually assigned to disparate and only occasionally related dis-
ciplines—from the theory of knowledge to the theory of social
action.

2. It was a characteristic tenet of the early Frankfurt School
that basic psychological concepts had to be integrated with basic
socioeconomic concepts because the perspectives of an autonomous
ego and an emancipated society were essentially interdependent.
In this way, critical theory was linked to a concept of the autono-
mous self that was, on the one hand, inherited from German
Idealism but was, on the other hand, detached from idealist pre-
suppositions in the framework of psychoanalysis. Habermas too
starts from the interdependence of personality structures and
social structures, of forms of identity and forms of social inte-
gration; but the socio-psychological framework he deploys in-
volves much more than a readaptation of psychoanalysis. It is an
integrated model of ego (or self-) development that draws on
developmental studies in a number of areas, ranging from psycho-
linguistics and cognitive psychology (including studies of moral
consciousness) to social interactionism and psychoanalysis (in-