Page 27 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

4 Communication and Evolution of Society

basically confronted with the alternatives of switching to strategic
action, breaking off communication altogether, or recommencing
action oriented to reaching understanding at a different level, the
level of argumentative speech (for purposes of discursively ex-
amining the problematic validity claims, which are now regarded
as hypothetical). In what follows, I shall take into consideration
only consensual speech actions, leaving aside both discourse and
strategic action.
In communicative action participants presuppose that they
know what mutual recognition of reciprocally raised validity
claims means. If in addition they can rely on a shared definition
of the situation and thereupon act consensually, the background
consensus includes the following:
a. Speaker and hearer know implicitly that each of them has to raise
the aforementioned validity claims if there is to be communication at
all (in the sense of action oriented to reaching understanding).
b. Both suppose that they actually do satisfy these presuppositions
of communication, that is, that they could justify their validity claims.
c. Thus there is a common conviction that any validity claims raised
are either—as in the case of the comprehensibility of the sentences
uttered—already vindicated or—as in the case of truth, truthfulness,
and rightness—could be vindicated because the sentences, propositions,
expressed intentions, and utterances satisfy corresponding adequacy
conditions.
Thus I distinguish (1) the conditions for the validity of a gram-
matical sentence, true proposition, truthful intentional expression,
or normatively correct utterance suitable to its context, from (2)
the clazms with which speakers demand intersubjective recogni-
tion of the well-formedness of a sentence, truth of a proposition,
truthfulness of an intentional expression, and rightness of a
speech act, and from (3) the vindication or redemption of justi-
fied validity claims. Vindication means that the proponent,
whether through appeal to intuitions and experiences or through
argumentation and action consequences, grounds the claim’s
worthiness to be recognized [or acknowledged: Anerkennungs-
wirdigkeit} and brings about a suprasubjective recognition of its
validity. In accepting a validity claim raised by the speaker, the
hearer acknowledges the validity of symbolic structures; that is,