Page 47 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

24 Communication and Evolution of Society

to employ sentences in correct utterances. Concepts such as mean-
ing and intentionality, the ability to speak and act (agency), in-
terpersonal relation, and the like, would belong to this conceptual
framework.
The expression “situation of possible understanding” that
would correspond to the expression “object of possible experi-
ence’ from this point of view, already shows, however, that
acquiring the experiences we have in processes of communication
is secondary to the goal of reaching understanding that these
processes serve. The general structures of speech must first be
investigated from the perspective of understanding and not from
that of experience. As soon as we admit this, however, the
parallels with transcendental philosophy (however conceived)
recede into the background. The idea underlying transcendental
philosophy is—to oversimplify—that we constitute experiences
in objectivating reality from invariant points of view; this objec-
tivation shows itself in the objects in general that are necessarily
presupposed in every coherent experience; these objects in turn can
be analyzed as a system of basic concepts. However, I do not find
any correspondent to this idea under which the analysis of general
presuppositions of communication might be carried out. Expert-
ences are, if we follow the basic Kantian idea, constituted; ut-
terances are at most generated. A transcendental investigation
transposed to processes of understanding would thus have to be
oriented around another model—not the epistemological model
of the constitution of experience but perhaps the model of deep
and surface structure.
b. Moreover, adopting the expression transcendental could
conceal the break with apriorism that has been made in the mean-
time. Kant had to separate empirical from transcendental analysis
sharply. If we now understand transcendental investigation in
the sense of a reconstruction of general and unavoidable pre-
suppositions of experiences that can lay claim to objectivity, then
there certainly remains a difference between reconstructive and
empirical-analytic analysis. But the distinction between drawing
on a priori knowledge and drawing on a posteriori knowledge
becomes blurred. On the one hand, the rule consciousness of com-
petent speakers is for them an a priori knowledge; on the other