On the Architecture of Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action : A Formal-Pragmatic Approach to the Discourse Theory

The theory of Jurgen Habermas is now called the discourse theory. Habermas's theory has twin features: on the one hand, it includes very varied fields, that is, social theories, ethics, democratic theries, linguistic theories and so on; on the other hand, it is founded strictly on communicative rationality. In Theorie des kommunikative Handelns (1981), Habermas appropriately presents this concept of new rationality as an alternative to the instrumental-strategic one. In opposition to those positivists who understand rationality just as an instrumental-strategic one, Habermas outlines the project of developing the manifold potential of modernity which contains also communicative rationality. Although Horkheimer and Adorno, who are called members of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, went to a theoretical dead end in the self-critic of reason, Habermas gained control of the fulcrum of social criticism through communicative rationality. From the perspective of Habermas's theoretical self-formation, his presentation of communicative rationality in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns is a consequence of the "communicative theoretical turn," or "pragmatic turn," which arose under the influence of the hermeneutic controversy with H. -G. Gadamer in the 1960's and through studies of the linguistic philosophies of Austin, Scale and Strawson, Apel's formal-pragmatics, Wittgenstein's theory of speech games in the 1970's, and so on. In the post-metaphysical and post-conventional society which loses the ideal of totality, the theory of communicative action, which coordinates and regulates many interactions, constitutes the center of communicative rationality. In this article I analyze and reconstruct Habermas's theory of the communicative action with reference to Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns as follows. First, I have set the concept of communicative rationality against the instrumental one. Second, I have developed the concept of communicative action in comparison with other action models. Third, I have analyzed how communicative action plays the role of coordinating interactions. Fourth, I have treated the interaction-model-tables which depend on the differences of speech acts. Finally, I have shown the problems of communicative action that are not yet resolved.4KJ00004257960departmental bulletin pape