Joseph Heath

Review essay
Habermas and speech-act theory

Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s

Pragmatics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994)

Maeve Cooke’s recent book the first extended analysis of Jurgen

’is
Habermas’s speech-act theory and its position within his larger
philosophical project. In contrast to the almost uniformly crItical
journal literature, Cooke’s treatment is a friendly attempt to explain,
buttress and occasronally patch up Habermas’s basic line of argument.
This, it should be noted, is from the start a somewhat daunting task.
The section of Habermas’s The Theory of Commzmicatiue Action!
devoted to speech-act theory is clearly the least satisfactory segment of
that work, and has, in his subsequent writings, been selectively
disambiguated, glossed, modified and retracted. While Cooke does an
admirablc job of sorting through this confusion and, in particular,
reconciling pre- and post-~I~CA statements, her reconstruction in the
end falls prey to the same internal tensions that she unsuccessfully tries
to dispatch from Habermas’s work.
The core of the book consists of two chapters dealing with
Habermas’s appropriation of speech-act theory. The first analyzes his
doctrine of the three validity claims, the second investigates his general
program for a pragmatic theory of meaning. The other three chapters
m the book serve to set the stage for this discussion, providing a
general
overview of Habermas’s conception of communicative action and

141
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rationality. (All of this discussion, incidentally, while largely exposi-

tory, is not rntroductory. Cooke at various points presupposes
considerable familiarity with Hahermas’s work, e.g. by referring to
diagrams in TCA without reprc>ducrng them.) Since most of C:ooke’s
5uhstantrve discussion is concentrated rn the two speech-act chapters, I
will confine my discussion to issues she raises there.
In both chapters, Cooke manages to lay out Hiberniis’s basic
argument quite w~ell. 1B1y central concern is that, in the course of her
discussion, Cooke often catches him in some rather difficult dilct-nmas.
While in itself this rs a sign of perspIcuity, the proNem m that she then
proceeds to let him off the hook all too quickly. Two examples of thrs I
found illustrative.
In the first of the speech-act chapters, Cooke accurately diagnoses a
major tension in the roterpretatroo of Hahermas’s conception of a
‘rightness’ claim. In his e lrly essay ’B’Vh.1t is Llniversii Pr,lgm.1tlCs?,2
Habermas suggests a very u~c~~n ;in,ilogv~ between rightnevs and truth.
In every speech act Mp, the speaker raises a truth cliini for the
propositional content, p, and a rightness claim for the illocutionary
component of the act, M. Although Habermas retaiiis this rnterpre-
tation in 7,CA, he also offers an alternative view that suggests a much
stronger analogy. In constative speech acts the speaker uses the
rllocutionary component ~1 to raise a truth cL1Ím for ~, white 111
regulative speech acts the spcaker uses M to t-nike a rightness claim for
p. This stronger version dominates all post-TCA writings.’ As Cooke
correctly points out, these two interpretations are incompatrhle
(6~-N).
The dilemma, as I see it, is as follows. If one adopts the weak
analogy, then the comparison between rightness and truth becomes
completely unmotivated. The point of using truth or .1ssertlbtlity
conditions as the central concept in a theory of meaning is that logical
or inferential relations reveal semantic structure, and can therefore
provide a compOSltlOllal account of propositional content. This is
required in order to explain how we are able to understand an infinite
number of sentences with only finite resources. The illocutionary
component of the speech act, however, has no semantic structure, and
therefore need not be explained with a compositional theory. A theory
of meaning for illocutions could just be a finite set of primitive axioms.
Since looking something up in a list does not require any form of
inference, there is no reason to bring in rightness claims here at all.
While a speaker’a understanding of a speech act may always coincide
with knowledge of the reasons that can be given for it, it is only because
of the compositionality requirement that anyone has ever thought that
the former might be constituted by the latter. -
 143

Furthermore, if rightness claims refer only to the speaker’s act, and

not its content, then they cannot properly be regarded as a component
of linguistic meaning. Under this interpretation, evet~y norm-governed
action makes a rightness claim, just as every action has existential
presuppositions. Every tit-nc I follow a rule, I am in a certain sense
claiming to fellow it correctly. But we would not want to say that by
sliding rnto second base, or opening the door for a colleague, I am
raising a rightness claim, any more than we would want to say that
when ! I step out my front door, I am making a truth claim for the
existential presupposition that the steps will not collapse. In order for
the rrghtness claim to belong in an account of utterance meaning, it
must have some direct bearing on the specific content of that utterance,
otherwise the arguments simply trades on a confusion between the
’meaning’ of an utterance and the ’meaning’ of an action.
So what if rightness is construed as governing the propositional
content of the utterance? This interpretation is strongly implied in
most of Habermas’s later work, especially when he suggests that moral

arguments should be analyzed in the form ‘It is right that p’, on analogy
with ’It is true that p’.4 The idea here is presumably the entirely natural
one that a viliditn, claim is a propertv ~ f se11te11ces that is preserued

thnorrglmterertce. For this reason, the only predicates that would

qualify as validity claims are those that could reasonably be thought to
function as designated values in a logic. (This is something whrch
Cooke is often not clear on, but which it is important to keep straight.
Hahermas needs some principled account of why saymg ’The cow is
brown’ does not raise a ‘brow~nness’ claim, but rather a ’truth’ claim.)
The problem here is that rightness, when applied to imperatives,
does not expose compositional structure in the way that truth does for
assertions. It therefore cannot be thought to have the same relationship
to the meaning of the utterance. Consider that in order to understand
’It is true that A or B’ one must know that this is equivalent to ’It is true
that A or it is true that B’. This is the central reason for thinking that
knowledge of meaning is c011stituted by knowledge of truth conditions
(or, for Dummett, truth conditions via canonical verihcation). But
rrghtness does not distribute over the logical constants, e.g. ’It is right
that A or B’ is certainly not equivalent to ’It is right that A or it is right
that B’ (this is why deontic logics still use ’truth’ as their principal
validity claim). This means that any speaker would already have to
know the compositional meaning of the proposition in order to raise a
rightness claim for it. Thus the strong atiilogy with truth collapses.
One is inclined to think that neither of these two options is
satisfactory. Cooke, however, suggests th at Habermas can simply back
down from the strong anatogy and hang on to the weak one. Because of
144

this, she places enormous emphasis on the early pragmatics paper, and
endorses a number of formulations that Habermas himself later drops.
But setting aside the more general question of whether rightness claims
of this weaker type even belong in a theory of meaning, adherence to
this position clearly blocks a number of important post-TCA program-
matic developments; in particular, the basis for the discourse ethics
schema. By rigidly indexing the rightness claim to the speaker’s own
action, the weak interpretation makes it impossible for agents to talk
about (much less infer) the rightness of anything.
This brings us to the other dilemma, which Cooke raises in the
second of the speech-act chapters. Habermas distinguishes two
components that go into understanding an utterance: the satisfaction
conditions and the validity conditions ( 101 ). To know the former is to
know what action or state of affairs satisfies the propositional content
of the utterance, to know the latter is to know what sort of arguments
could be adduced in Support of the validity claims raised. But Cooke
rightly points out that knowledge of the satisfaction conditions must
be conceptually prior- to knowledge of the validity conditions, e.g. to
decide whether ’Stop smoking’ is a legitimate imperative when given by
a flight attendant, you must already know that he is asking you to stop

smoking and not, say, to buckle your seatbelt. Cooke then asks, what is
it to know these satisfaction conditions? Here the problem arises, since
satisfaction conditions in a non-L1tomi~tlc theory of meaning are just a
way of specifying truth conditions. But if this is so, then Habermas
must not only acknowledge a significant dl~L1l1.110gy between truth and
the other validity claims, he must grant that it has conceptual priority
as well.
Cooke suggests that this problem can be avoided by characterizing
knowledge of satisfaction conditions as straightforward knowledge of
linguistic meaning: ’That is, in order to know the conditions under
which the speaker could have convincing reasons for holdmg a
statement with the content &dquo;Your vacation is going to be spoiled by
rain&dquo; to be true, the hearer has to know what a vacation is, what rain is,
what counts as raining, what it means for a vacation to be spoiled, and
so forth’ (104). But by introducing a completely unexplicated notion of

linguistic meaning into what is supposed to be a theory of meaning, this

option comes across as more a reductio of Haberllus’s theory than a
defense.
What Cooke glosses over is that, either way, Habermas must
presuppose a strictly semantic account of sentence meaning in order to
get his own theory off the ground. This means that he is not offering a
pragmatic theory of meaning as advertised, but just a theory of
pragmatic,,. This reduces the difference between his speech-act theory
 145

and ’formal semantics’ (in the tradition of Frege and Dummett) to just
a question of emphasis, since he is more or less assuming that the

central component of that program - a compositional account of

sentence meaning - can be carried through. Once we distinguish
property between semantic and pragmatic levels, many of Habermas’s
criticism> turn out to have very little bite.’
Throughout her discussion of these problems, Cooke clearly pulls
her Punches, leavlng the reader with a sense that the analysis is being
conducted far too charitably. This impression is reinforced by some of
the more general interpretive policies that she adopts to govern her
exposition. In partlcular, many readers will take exception to her
stated intention to avoid evaluating the adequacy of Habermas’s
treatment of the secondary literature that he draws upon (54). For
instance, although Dummett is the most frequently cited secondary
author in the book, Cooke does not give any independent presentation
or analysis of his views. At the same time, she enters into a lengthy
discussion and evaluation of Habermas’s criticisms, viz. (1) that
Dummett ’neglects’ non-assertorl uses of language, and (2) that his
theory of meanlng is ’t-nonological’ ( 10_S).
As a result the discussion is quite unfair to Dummett, since both of
Habermas’s claims here are either false or in need of serious
qualification. The claim that Dummett ’neglects’ non-assertoric uses of
language is peculiar, since Dummett has written more pages specifi-
cally on the rel~~tious~~ip between assertoric and non-assertoric modes
of L1llgU.lgC use than Habermas has written on the entire topic of
philosophy of language.&dquo; The clairll that Dummett’s theory is mono-
logical is tlatly incompatible with what he says,7 and demonstrates a
significant misunderstanding of the underlying motiv.1tion of his
philosophical project; in partlcular, his (explicitly ~X~ittgensteinian)
reasons for rejecting both classical logic and truth -conditional seman-
tics. Cooke’s policy of evaluative neutrality may make perfect sense
when Habermas’s interpretations are merely controversial, and per-
haps somewhat tangcntial to the subject-matter at hand. But glaring
error is not something that can be passed over without comment,

particularly not when the issues involved are central to the main topic
of the book.
Finally, many readers will undoubtedly be dissatisfied with
Cooke’s declared policy of sticking to the ’philosophical’ portions of
Habermas’s argument, while setting aside the ’sociological’(4). This
may work for the analysis of H,lbermas’s speech-act theory, but it
becomes extremely problematic when the attempt is made to hook this
up with his general theory of social action .1nd order. The Illost obvious
example of this occurs in the first chapter. Cooke claims that
146

Habermas ’attempts to show that communicative action is the primary

mechanism of social integration in modern societies through showing
that the communicative mode of language use is the primary one’ (21).
She then goes on to criticize this argument at length, on the grounds
that the comeptttal primacy of communicative over strategic uses of
language does not establish ’the firnctioua! primacy of communicative
action over strategic action in the integrative and reproductive
processes of the lifeworld’ (22).
Although Cooke’s criticism seems correct, the argument she
attacks is unfortunately not one that Habermas ever makes. In the
‘sociological’ portion of his argument, Habermas makes it clear that he
regards it as having been conclusively demonstrated by Parsons that
social order cannot be achieved through instrumental action.‘‘ Thus the
question is never whether the lifeworld could be integrated through
strategic action, but rather how the lifeworld is integrated, given that it
cannot be done through strategic action. By ignoring this sociological
background, Cooke ends up with a dramatic reassignment of the
burden of proof.
Overall, and in spite of herself, Cooke tends to decrease rather than
increase the Suasive power of Habermas’s claims. As a theonst,
Habermas manages to combine an enormous genius for architectonics
with an equ,ll1y extraordinary disregard for detail. The reader is left
wath a constant sense of hyperopia - the project seems clear from afar,
but becomes fuzzier as one approaches. Simply by going over the
arguments carefully, Cooke reinforces the impression that Hahermas’s
appropriation of speech-act theory cannot survive careful scrutiny.

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

Notes >

1 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols

(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987); hereafter TCA.
2 In Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979).
3 See TCA, Vol. I, p. 309; Moral Consciousness and Communicative
Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 53-6; and ’Toward a
Critique of the Theory of Meaning’, in Postmetaphysical Thinking
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 75-7. Cooke appears not to
notice this temporal shift.
 147

4 Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 53.

5 For instance, Habermas accuses formal semantics both of privileging
truth conditions and of privileging assertions, as if these were equiv-
alent. But while the former, as a semantic notion, is clearly essential to
the program, the latter, as a pragmatic claim, is clearly not. So even
though Frege and Davidson may be vulnerable to the charge that they
privilege assertions, this is not a criticism of formal semantics as such, it
is a criticism of the particular pragmatic theories that they use to
complement their semantics.
6 See, for example, Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language,
2nd edn. rev. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981),
pp.295-364, or Michael Dummett, The Seas of Language (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 202-24.
7 See Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 81-106, esp.106.
8 See TCA Vol. II, pp. 205-13; also Jürgen Habermas, ’Actions, Speech
Acts, Linguistically Mediated Interactions and the Lifeworld’, in G.
Fløistad (ed.) Philosophical Problems Today, Vol. 1 (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic, 1994), p. 63.