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23 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

tion that one must hand over problems of validity to other do-
mains of investigation, say to the theory of science or of truth.
Of course, the relation between the objectivity of possible ex-
perience and the truth of propositions looks different than it does
under Kantian premises. In place of a priori demonstration, we
have transcendental investigation of the conditions for argumen-
tatively redeeming validity claims that are at least implicitly re-
lated to discursive vindication.**
In my view, it is not merely a terminological question whether
we call such investigations of general and unavoidable presup-
positions of communication (in this case, presuppositions of
argumentative speech) transcendental. If we want to subject
processes of reaching understanding (speech) to a reconstructive
analysis oriented to general and unavoidable presuppositions in
the same way as has been done for cognitive processes,®° then the
model of transcendental philosophy undeniably suggests itself,
all the more so as the theory of language and action has not
(despite Humboldt) found its Kant. Naturally, recourse to this
model is understandable only if one has in view one of the weaker
versions of transcendental philosophy mentioned above. In this
sense, Apel speaks of “‘transcendental hermeneutics’ or “tran-
scendental pragmatics” in order to characterize his approach pro-
grammatically. I would like to mention two reasons for hesitating
to adopt this usage.
a. Something like a transcendental investigation of processes
of understanding seems plausible to me as long as we view these
under the aspect of processes of experience. It is in this sense
that I speak of communicative experience; in understanding the
utterance of another speaker as a participant in a communication
process, the hearer (like the observer who perceives a segment
of reality) has an experience. From this comparative perspective,
concrete utterances would correspond to empirical objects, and
utterances in general to objects in general (in the sense of objects
of possible experience). Just as we analyze our a priori concepts
of objects in general—that is, the conceptual structure of any
coherent perception—we could analyze our a priori concepts of
utterances in general—that is, the basic concepts of situations of
possible understanding, the conceptual structure that enables us