Page 25 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

2 Communication and Evolution of Society

identify such presuppositions we must, he thinks, leave the per-
spective of the observer of behavioral facts and call to mind
“what we must necessarily always already presuppose in regard
to ourselves and others as normative conditions of the possibility
of understanding; and in this sense, what we must necessarily
always already have accepted.” * Apel uses the aprioristic perfect
{immer schon: always already] and adds the mode of necessity
to express the transcendental constraint to which we, as speakers,
are subject as soon as we perform or understand or respond to a
speech act. In or after the performance of this act, we can become
aware that we have involuntarily made certain assumptions, which
Apel calls ‘‘normative conditions of the possibility of understand-
ing. ’ The addition “normative” may give rise to misunderstand-
ing. Indeed one can say that the general and unavoidable—in this
sense transcendental—conditions of possible understanding have
a normative content when one has in mind not only the binding
character of norms of action or even the binding character of
rules in general, but the validity basis of speech across its entire
spectrum. To begin, I want to indicate briefly what I mean by
‘the validity basis of speech.”
I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively
must, in performing any speech action, raise universal validity
claims and suppose that they can be vindicated [or redeemed:
eimlésen |. Insofar as he wants to participate in a process of reach-
ing understanding, he cannot avoid raising the following—and
indeed precisely the following—validity claims. He claims to be:
Uttering something understandably;
wp Giving [the hearer} something to understand;

ao Making /imself thereby understandable; and
Coming to an understanding with another person.

The speaker must choose a comprehensible [verstandlich} expres-
sion so that speaker and hearer can understand one another. The
speaker must have the intention of communicating a true [wahr]
proposition (or a propositional content, the existential presup-
positions of which are satisfied) so that the hearer can share the
knowledge of the speaker. The speaker must want to express his
intentions truthfully [wahrhaftig] so that the hearer can believe