Page 223 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

200 Communication and Evolution of Society

pay for the redefinition of his object. If the object domain ts
conceived in such a way that not legitimate orders but only orders
that are held to be legitimate can belong to it, then the connection
between reasons and motives that exists in communicative action
is screened out of the analysis. At least any independent evalu-
ation of reasons is methodically excluded—the researcher him-
self refrains from any systematic judgment of the reasons on
which the claim to legitimacy ts based. Since the days of Max
Weber this has been regarded as a virtue; however, even if one
adopts this interpretation, the suspicion remains that legitimacy,
the belief in legitimacy, and the willingness to comply with a
legitimate order have something to do with motivation through
“good reasons.’ But whether reasons are “good reasons’ can be
ascertained only in the performative attitude of a participant in
argumentation, and not through the neutral observation of what
this or that participant in a discourse holds to be good reasons.
To be sure, the sociologist is concerned with the facticity of
validity claims—for example, with the fact that the claim to
legitimacy raised on behalf of a political order is recognized with
specific frequencies in specific populations. But can he ignore the
fact that normative validity claims meet with recognition because,
among other reasons, they are held to be capable of discursive
vindication, to be right, that is, to be well grounded? It is as with
truth claims; the universality of this claim gives a sociologist the
possibility of systematically checking the truth of an assertion
independently of whether or not it is held to be true in a specific
population. It can be decisive for an analysis to know whether a
population acted on the basis of an accurate or a false opinion
(e.g., to determine whether cognitive errors or other causes were
principally responsible for observed failures). The case could
be the same with the normative validity claim of political insti-
tutions; for example, one might well want to know whether a
certain party renounces obedience because the legitimacy of the
state 75 empty, or whether other causes are at work. To make that
judgment we have to be able systematically to evaluate legitimacy
claims in a rational, intersubjectively testable way. Can we do
this?
Hennis is apparently of the opinion that we can. He holds a