Habermas

The first thing that stood out to me while reading about Habermas was his quote, “One should accept others according to their strengths and then see how one can go from there.” I like the idea that he takes the good ideas from lots of people and builds off of the best part of their theories. In a way, I guess this idea relates to how he thinks society should operate. He thinks that society should resolve a problem through discourse and argument with words, with everyone given an equal say in the matter. If this were to happen, the strengths and good parts of what everyone had to say could be combined to make something new and better happen, something that is made up of parts coming from the ideas of everyone.

Habermas has a theory of communication which involves six interdependent ideas. The first idea is reason and the public sphere. The public sphere is the people in society who can join in on an argument. These people must have access and openness, according to Habermas. Access is the right to engage in a discussion with others. Openness is the right a human has to voice their own opinion. Habermas makes a valid point that this ideal situation for argument with the public sphere involved is limited when individual interests take over, as in politics today. After the election, we have one group whose interests rule the country, therefore, all people do not have a say in discussions anymore.

The second idea is human knowledge, made up of three parts: work, interaction, and power. He combines these three into two larger categories called communicative action and strategic action. Communicative action relies “on consensus to achieve understanding”(242). I would say this is what I talked about in the first paragraph, people working together to achieve something better. Strategic action is working to persuade others to gain something for yourself. This, I would think, would apply to the political parties who work to get voters on their side so that they might win and ultimately rule according to their own wishes, ideas and opinions.

The third idea is the lifeworld and system idea. Lifeworld refers to actions we do day to day that we learned from others and simply do them without thinking. Our thinking is influenced by the lifeworld and we make decisions based on ideas we have formed from the lifeworld. The system, from what I get, regulates certain aspects of the lifeworld. System deals with material things like money or technology. Habermas talks about there being an imbalance between these two, with the system overpowering the lifeworld (243-244).

Universal pragmatics are the fourth idea. This idea includes the speech act which states the way something is said is more revealing of meaning than the actual words. There are three kinds of speech acts. Constative speech acts are truth claims, stating factual information. Regulative speech acts establish relationships between the speaker and audience bases on norms(246). Avowal speech acts are claims that what is being said is true. These tie into the fifth idea involving validity claims. For each speech act, validity should be established. With constative speech acts, validity is proven through facts. With regulative speech acts, validity is proven by the amount of appropriateness there is in the argument. An argument must conform to the norms of society for an audience to accept it as valid. With avowal speech acts, validity is established if the audience believes the speaker to be genuine.

The sixth idea is the level of discourse. This occurs when agreements cannot be reached in the ideal speech situation. Discourse follows Toulmin’s layout of argument including the backing and warrants to prove one side of an argument. Discourse involves talking an argument out further, with more proof to back one’s side. There are four levels of discourse where validity is questioned in different ways at each level. In other words, if people cannot come to an agreement, a question of validity is brought up, whether it be pertaining to the facts of the argument or norms of society, and the people engage in discourse to talk the argument out.

As I was reading the commentary, I wanted to say that I agree that some people are able to make their arguments better through actions rather than words. Protesters are examples of these kind of people. While some may be able to convey their ideas elegantly through words and discussion, some people are just not good communicators and might choose to share their opinions through actions. Sometimes actions are louder than words….