Page 77 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

54 Communication and Evolution of Society

timate (or illegitimate) interpersonal relation between the par-
ticipants, is borrowed from the binding force of recognized norms
of action (or of evaluation); to the extent that a speech act is an
action, it actualizes an already-established pattern of relations.
The validity of a normative background of institutions, roles,
socioculturally habitual forms of life—that is, of conventions—is
always presupposed. This by no means holds true only for institu-
tionally bound speech actions such as betting, greeting, christen-
ing, appointing, and the like, each of which satisfies a speczfic
institution (or a narrowly circumscribed class of norms ). In
promises too, in recommendations, prohibitions, prescriptions,
and the like, which are not regulated from the outset by institu-
tions, the speaker implies a validity claim that must, if the speech
acts are to succeed, be covered by existing norms, and that means
by (at least) de facto recognition of the claim that these norms
rightfully exist. This internal relation between the validity claims
implicitly raised in speech actions and the validity of their norma-
tive context is stressed in the interactive use of language, as is
the truth claim in the cognitive use of language. Just as only
constative speech acts are permitted in the cognitive use of lan-
guage, so in the interactive use only those speech acts are per-
mitted that characterize a specific relation that speaker and hearer
can adopt to norms of action or evaluation. J call these regulative
speech acts.®’ With the illocutionary force of speech actions, the
normative validity claim—rightness or appropriateness [Richizg-
keit, Angemessenheit built just as universally into the struc-
|—1s
tures of speech as the truth claim. But the validity claim of a
normative context is explicitly invoked only in regulative speech
acts (in commands and admonitions, in prohibitions and refusals,
in promises and agreements, notices, excuses, recommendations,
admissions, and so forth). The truth reference of the mentioned
propositional content remains, by contrast, merely implicit; it
pertains only to its existential presuppositions. Conversely, 1
constative speech acts, which explicitly raise a truth claim, the
normative validity claim remains implicit, although these too
(e.g., reports, explications, communications, elucidations, narra-
tions, and so forth) must correspond to an established pattern of
value orientations—that is, they must fit a recognized normative