Page 70 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 65

in our assertions about ‘external nature’, legitimacy in our moral
view of society (which includes the legitimacy of the utterance itself
– that it is our place to say or do this), sincerity in expressing our
inner selves, and comprehensibility in relation to our use of language.
Every utterance, in this view, has a performative dimension or
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‘illocutionary force’ even where this is hidden beneath the surface.
Even a purely descriptive statement offers the hearer the possibility
of new understanding of reality.
If a hearer is to be persuaded (rather than simply coerced) to
accept the state of affairs offered by the speaker, the validity claims
raised by the speaker have be redeemed or be seen as potentially
redeemable. Different types of validity claim require different modes of
redemption. ‘We understand a speech act when we know what makes
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it acceptable.’ What makes propositional truth claims acceptable
is the availability of ‘grounds’ or supporting evidence. Of course,
disagreement on the adequacy of grounds or evidence is commonplace
in everyday communication. But if we turn this principle on its head,
we recognise that a lack of any such grounds makes propositional
claims immediately unacceptable. Likewise, we judge the validity of
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normative claims against the availability of reasons and we start
from the premise that the absence of any reasons invalidates the
claim. Sincerity claims are judged somewhat differently, not through
discourse itself but in the degree of consistency between the speaker’s
expressions and their subsequent actions. 24
In most everyday communication, of course, most validity claims
are not ‘discursively tested’. The normal flow of communication

depends in large part upon the assumption that the speaker could,
if called upon, redeem her validity claims:

a speaker owes the binding … force of his illocutionary act not to the
validity of what is said but to the coordinating effect of the warranty that
he offers: namely to redeem, if necessary, the validity claim raised with his
speech act. 25

In large part, everyday interaction proceeds on the basis of ‘good faith’
between social actors. But tokens of good faith are not condemned to
circulate arbitrarily or on a purely irrational basis of blind trust but,
rather, according to the existent possibility that the speaker could,
at any time, be called upon to redeem his validity claims. In other
words, our assumptions of good faith are all the more precarious
where that potential is blocked.

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