Habermas and Brandom on Discursive Practice

Jürgen Habermas and Robert Brandom provide what are, arguably, two of the most important philosophical conceptions of language available today. Advancing in their own terms a social-pragmatic understanding of language, they each pursue an agenda with implications for epistemology, metaphysics, and moral theory that are centered in their distinctive conceptions of linguistic agency. Yet despite many similarities in their approaches,1 they remain divided on a key point at the heart of each of their respective theories concerning the centrality or priority of a participant perspective onto discursive practice vs. a third-person, observational perspective- an issue which is, for Habermas, decisive for his theory of communicative action as well as the uncompromisingly deontological and universalist conception of ethics he advances in its wake and, for Brandom, closely linked to the phenominalist approach to norms upon which his work is based. In this paper, I examine the dispute as it has been played out in a recent exchange between them, attempting, in particular, to explicate and defend a qualified version of Habermas ’ claim regarding the priority of the participant’s perspective onto language in the light of his more developed treatment of this issue elsewhere. Once the defensible content of Habermas ’ claim is clarified, I argue that Habermas ’ critique of Brandom highlights a