Ep. 252: Habermas on Communication as Sociality (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 252 is something like, what's the relation of individual to society? And we read Jurgen Habermas's Action Speech Acts, Linguistically Mediated Interactions and the Life World from 1998, which is chapter four of on the Pragmatics of Communication. More information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, making this speech act offer valid only for a limited time. So please fulfill the desired illocutionary effects of this request and a, understand what I'm saying, and b, act now.

0:42 Seth: This is Seth Paskin hoping to come to some kind of rational understanding by the end of this episode.

0:48 Wes: This is Wes Alwan Living My Best Life World in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:53 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, purposefully active, trying to make linguistic utterances about actions and speech acts. In Madison, Wisconsin, this is John Foster.

1:04 John: I'm trying not to get caught up in any performative contradictions here in Cleveland, Ohio.

1:08 Mark: Welcome, John.

1:09 John: Thank you. This is really exciting for me. I've listened to this podcast for a long time, but I was talking to a friend of mine who's a professional philosopher, if you will, and he was, like, looking at us like, oh, my gosh, that's the greatest thing I've ever seen. So

1:22 Dylan: that's a good start, John.

1:23 John: My fan cushion went up really high, but Seth mentioned this to me. I was kind of excited for the reason that Habermas not only is kind of an interesting philosopher, just sort of generally, but as Seth will know, as we were under graduates together, Habermas was like a really big part of undergrad life, which illustrates how weird Reed College was back in those days. There was a sort of Habermas faction. And it's weird to think about now. Like there was a kind of Foucault faction, there was a kind of a Habermas faction. There was a very strong analytic philosophy faction.

One of the analytic philosophy people who now is a philosophy professor at Oglethorpe, wrote in the student handbook, sort of introduction to what the kind of intellectual life of the campus was. And he accused us of staging Haber masses because we're Jesus. Such intense followers of Habermas. And also, you know, I also, just as an disciple, say that somebody once described me when I was an undergrad as the most engaging of the philosophy of engagement types, which I was sort of a compliment. I certainly took it as such. But People got very intense about it back then.

I mean, this was 1987.

2:25 Seth: Eight.

2:26 John: Yeah. Habermas was very fresh in the English speaking world. And you know how undergrads are of a kind of more bookish type. You feel like you've discovered the key to everything. Like Habermas explains everything. Of course, why not? So people got very intense about it.

2:39 Dylan: Really, really interesting. I had never read Habermas before. It's the most interesting thing that I've enjoyed the least reading in my life.

2:50 John: Yeah.

2:50 Dylan: And to hear that there was, for a bunch of 18 to 20 year olds, a Habermasian faction as opposed to a Nietzschean or a Schopenhauerian faction strikes me as really, really O.

3:05 John: It's a weird thing for sure when you tell people about it. I mean, it sounds weird. Like I'm saying it now and I'm like, wow, did that really happen?

3:11 Mark: Oh yeah, it did.

3:12 Dylan: The systematic synoptic thing he's trying to do would certainly appeal to a person of a certain age.

3:19 John: Sure.

3:19 Mark: Would it be correct in characterizing this as the bridge between analytic philosophy of language? Some of what we did with J.L. austin's how to Do Things with Words, and then the stuff about how the subject and everything we think are part of the social web that we were seeing in Butler and you know, we were rooting this in Lacan, but I. It makes a lot more sense to me being rooted in what we read today. I haven't completely connected the dots yet, but I'm a lot more comfortable with the idea that, yeah, human psyches are not just this separate little territory that's set against the world.

We are embedded with the world, because we are. I'm going to characterize this wrong, I'm sure, because he says we are specifically just receptacles for linguistic ideas. It's more like society and the life world more generally, which we'll have to describe are made up of the sedimentations of language. And that's what our heads are filled with. That the human personality, I think he says is of a piece with that is also a bunch of sedimented pieces of language, which. It all sounds very weird. I put this question, even though this doesn't come up until the very end of the reading as the relationship between the individual and society.

Because that's what really resonated with me as, you know, the entire life world, which we have to point back to our Husserl episode. The sort of everyday beliefs that underlie are just assumed in how we understand each other, how we Understand the world, how we interpret the world, which is of course, depending on the particular culture or the particular world you've grown up in that we are of a piece with that.

4:53 John: Yeah, I think that's really right. I mean, the interesting thing about Habermas, or I guess one interesting thing is, is that he brings in a lot of different things. Like he's not quite, you know, some people sort of critically say, well, he's just philosophically syncretic or intellectually syncretic. But he says, okay, I have these problems. What are the tools that I can bring in to fix them? He's very aggressive about because he's come up in this Frankfurt School. He's a sort of latter progeny of the Frankfurt School, although his relation to them is not straightforward.

You know, he says, instead of, let me just sort of look at the sort of narrow canon of European philosophy or what have you, he says, what can Max Weber, what can talk Parsons, what can George Herbert Mead? What can these other people offering us tools to look at the way that we relate to our world, specifically linguistically, but in a lot of different modes of action. So that's, I think, a really fascinating thing, but also a thing that makes him really difficult to read. If you're not used to the terminology of systems theory, if you're not used to the terminology that George Herbert Mead uses.

I find myself still, and I've read a lot of Habermas over the years, going along and being like, wow, I'm two paragraphs removed now from the last time I understood what was going on here. I need to stop and go back. Because he uses a lot of terminology that's hard to parse and it's not straightforwardly within the sort of normal philosophical vocabulary.

6:08 Seth: What's the problem for Habermas? Like, at least as far as we're concerned, what's the problem statement? What is it that he is trying to get at in the readings that we took on today, which we should

6:17 Mark: say that this is about a 40 page essay which is a distillation of his earlier the Theory of Communicative action is this 1981 book, which is two volumes. I looked through it a little bit. It seems like all really intense wrestling with other thinkers. I wanted to just. Oh, can I just add a chapter from this? Can I just add a few pages? No, it seemed like I need to know George Herbert Mead or something to appreciate what he's doing here. Whereas what we read, apart from some J.L. Austin and some other things that were building on that John Searle. It was difficult, but at least it didn't rely on the intense knowledge of other thinkers to understand it.

6:53 John: Yeah, that's a lot of what Habermas does, if you want to talk about the philosophy of engagement. A lot of what he's done over the course of his career, which runs back into the late 1950s, is engaged with other thinkers. And a lot of what he's tried to do is carried forward by the way he wants to engage with other thinkers. So if you look at his sort of larger philosophical agenda, it comes out of this Frankfurt School, very pessimistic take on the world, starting with Max Weber, who in the Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism says, what is modern capitalist society producing?

It's producing specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart. This nullity imagined Marx and their experiences with the rise of National Socialism to say, the problem with Western society, like Adorno says at the beginning of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, that reason has been over the long sort of history of Western civilization, Western society supposed to set us free. But then he says in this very famous line, but the fully enlightened world is radiant in the sign of triumphant calamity. And he's writing this in the course of the Second World War.

And what he's saying is that we've had this idea that enlightened is going to fix us, that reason is going to fix us. And it turns out that reason can also be used to build a better gas chamber. And it's a very depressing prospect. The Frankfurt School are really bummed out. And then along comes Habermas, and he wants to say, you've got a lot of this right, except that there's this other kind of reason. You've just limited reason to this kind of instrumental approach. But reason can also be used to come to understandings, to form understandings, to bridge this gap between our subjectivities.

And when he does this, he's doing it as a sort of ethical project. So our problem in the modern world is to come up with an ethics that's not just, I like vanilla and you like chocolate and never the twain shall meet. But it's also, there's this natural law built into the world. Habermas wants to say, there's a kind of intermediate point. And that's why communication and communicative rationality is so important, because instead of specifying values, it's a way that we can discuss values and move forward meaningfully on that basis.

8:43 Dylan: Mark brought up this image that's at the end of the essay about a vessel. And it seems to me that what you just said, a way to distill the project is wanting to talk about being, talk about personalities, talk about society, avoiding the vessel and contained way of speaking about metaphysics, right? So it's a really hard problem to talk about how something is what it is based upon the constituents, without resorting to saying it's a container of some sort. Aristotle has this problem talking about things. He has the problem because you always end up getting to say, well, people make up society and society is a bucket of people or something like that, and then you lay on interactions on top of them.

But he wants to go full on and say that, try to come up with a way of talking about these things where you fundamentally deny that container and contained way of speaking about. About things. And at the end he's like, well, if I haven't convinced you, go read this other stuff, because I know this is hard.

9:48 Seth: There's another characterization that came up in the reading John first suggested, which I think I was the only one intrepid enough to dig into. It's a series of responses by Habermas to his critics. There's a way you can cast the project as an attempt to find some kind of. I'm going to put it in scare quotes, universalizing ethics. So if on the one hand you have relativism, and if on the other hand you have ethics that appeal to a transcendental idea which divorces itself from the lived context, and you don't want to appeal to the transcendental ideal because it doesn't take into account any actual intersubjective action.

And if pure relativism is just the subject drawn into themselves, he says no, there's this mode of intersubjectivity, this life world, and there's a mechanism there which is not wholly subjective and it's not wholly transcendentally objective, that's the way we experience the world, frankly. And the mechanism by which we can then come to a consensus to be able to agree on values and principles and so forth, is what he's trying to lay out in his project. And that's at least how it came across to me at first glance.

10:54 Mark: I was also wondering about the connection. We recently sort of revisited Merleau Ponty in our policing episode with some more modern interpretations of him. The idea that there's something wrong with the objectivating mode of knowledge, in other words, the everything is an object. And this of course then creates this dualism of how do we bridge subject and object and how can we objectively know anything. And Merleau Ponty is saying, no, no, there's this primacy of. Unthematized is the word Habermas uses, you know, and of course, he's taking this from the same source that Habermas is, which is Husserl's idea of the life world, that there's this basic way of experiencing things that then, according to Merleau Ponty, we abstract from that and create scientific languages, and that's what creates the illusion of objects.

And of course, it's a very useful thing to talk about objects, to manipulate them, to do physics with them, but that we can't let that determine. Then, oh, well, we need a scientific ethics and somehow derive that from the abstraction of modern science that we've created. No, no, no. For ethics, we need to somehow go back to something that is unthematized, that is pre. Abstracted. And so it seems like Habermas is doing something similar. He references somewhere in passing here about how he doesn't think that the body is primary, you know, bodily ways of knowing things.

It's lang. It's the way language has been sedimented around us. I'd love to see those two guys debate or read something that fully connects the two, because I feel like they're serving the same purpose in terms of getting past the ills of the modern age, but doing it in subtly different ways.

12:30 John: Yeah. Habermas is, in one respect, very much associated with what's often referred to as the linguistic turn. Modern philosophy. There's a lot of dimensions to it, but is connected in very fundamental ways with a sort of move away from the philosophy of the subject and all of these phenomenological thinkers. There's a whole sort of theme of embodiment that comes up through Husserl. I mean, Husserl has all those language classes about how it is that we know that we're standing up and how it is that we, like, perceive the furniture of the world around us.

And then Merleau Ponty, who takes Heideggerian phenomenology and says, well, what would it be like if we took Heidegger's phenomenology and made it about the body as opposed to being about being, which is not about the body, at least predominantly. But Habermas wants to say there's a kind of way out of the problems that we've been experiencing in political, modern ethical thought. That's not just a return to Aristotle. That's not just a return to the idea that ethics is a kind of. I like this. You like that, but that we can come together. I do want to mention too, and by way of apology, by the way, I'm not really a philosopher in a certain sense.

I'm an intellectual historian. And a friend of ours, a mutual friend of Seth's and mine, asked me, who's a professional philosopher, what the difference was. And my take on it is that I never really care about who's right. But one way that this plays into this, I'm always kind of fascinated about sort of what the kind of historical coordinates of things like this are. I always think of Habermas as a species in a way of neo Kantian in the following respect. One, he's got a great project that, you know, it's a brilliant idea, maybe doesn't quite come off in the same way that the Critique of Pure Reason is a really brilliant, elegant way of trying to resolve the problem of how we relate to, of how our consciousness relates to the world.

And he never gets over that sort of division between the noumenal world and us. But there's a way, I think, that you can read Kant pragmatically, that is to say we don't have direct access to the noumena, but say the four of us undertake a project, we have to sort of collaborate communicatively about what the actual world is and we can be wrong about it. But at a certain point the rubber hits the road and we find out, oh, the chair is like this and not like that. And Habermas in a way is taking forward this idea. He's sort of saying like, well, we can't necessarily know like what's ethically right in a capital R for everybody sense.

But what we can do is have a kind of civilized discussion about it, a sort of rationally inflected discussion about it, or rationally characterized conducted discussion about it. It's a process. It's about how we come up with these ideas rather than in a certain sense what the ideas are or what

14:54 Seth: the absolute grounding of those ideas are. That's not the point.

14:57 John: Yeah, if you look at Habermas coming up, he's born in 1929. He's a part of what's called the Flakhelfer, the anti aircraft gun helper generation of kids who are just sort of slightly too young to fight in the German war effort. He was a member of the Hitler Youth, although he didn't really get along very well because your viewers may know that he has a cleft palate which didn't match up very well with the blonde Superman type of aesthetic. When you look at the collapse of German democracy in the 20s and early 30s, you can use that to kind of read him as a text of how is it that we can avoid the Nazi idea? Is basically what Hitler said as recently as 2 minutes ago is definitively the right thing. What Habermas wants to say is how can we, wanting to be civilized, resolve ethical questions, resolve like disputes about what's going on in a way that's non lethal and rational?

15:43 Mark: For that reason, we've been talking about his overall project, which I think extends beyond this essay, in that all the stuff about ethics is just implied near the end. We're reaching a common understanding, but this is all about the pragmatics of communication. Wes, did you have a good outline of the bullet points that he kind of goes through his distinct topics in what we read?

16:06 Wes: So, yeah, I think part of the motivation for this, it's a response to pessimism about the possibility of reason and the possibility of communication. So you might think of the people communicating with each other as you might try to reduce that to an interaction of the same sort as any other causal interaction in the world. And so propaganda, for instance, or manipulation or an example he'll use here, threats. There are certain ways in which speech might just constitute a way of manipulating other people in the same way that you can manipulate the world to achieve your own goals.

Right? So in the same way you can pick up a tool, a hammer, because you want to build a house for yourself, you might say things to certain people in order to get them to do things. And that sort of pessimism, I think is part of the tradition of Marx in the form of concept of ideology and the social effects of that. And it's there in Nietzsche and the reduction of morality to unconscious revenge, fantasy to ressentiment. And it's there. And Freud. This is an attempt to vindicate through speech act theory, to vindicate the possibility of real communication and real agreement and real mutual understanding.

So to do that, the way he starts the essay is through just trying to draw some distinctions between what he calls purposive action and then speech acts in particular. So the distinction is going to be between what we do when we're trying to again achieve a certain kind of goal in the world. We want to have a causal effect on the world. We want to bring about a certain state of affairs and we make a plan for that. We use our hypothetical reasoning and say, if I do this, then this will happen. That's one form of action. The other form of action that he's concerned with in speech is the possibility of a goal which is shared.

The goal of mutual understanding. It'll ultimately turn out to be. So that's a lead in. I think we ought to get into his talk of the difference between interpreting, because I think this is really important. There's something really fundamental here about the way language works. So I think we ought to talk a little bit about his distinction and the interpretation of someone's action, like someone running and what that means and what their intentions are versus the interpretation of a speech act. I think that's a really important and enlightening comparison.

18:27 Mark: I'm happy to disappear into the details here. I do want to, in anticipation, just trace maybe one or two more steps, because we've got the end now, we've got the beginning. And I think the missing piece here is you've made this distinction, Wes, between speech acts that are treating you like an object, that are ordering you around, that are threatening you, and speech acts that are treating you like a fellow subject, that we are trying to reach mutual understanding. And I think that part of his overall goal here is to address how we give explanations in sociology, in economics, in other descriptions of how society arises from the actions of individuals.

I think he thinks that again, the paradigm natural sciences approach, which is based on physics, is to treat the causal interactions between human being as primary. In other words, you could even go back to Hegel and say the original society is somebody clubs somebody else over the head is the master slave relation. It's not mutual understanding, it's me making you into a tool and exerting my will in that way. But according to Habermas, it's actually the other way around. We couldn't even have abusive uses of language if we didn't have the use, the actual intended use, which is forming a mutual understanding that is actually the basic thing in all forms.

Think about Kant. Lying is something that only as a concept makes sense. If most of the people are telling the truth to each other most of the time, then you can have somebody deviate that norm and lie. So you can't say that manipulation and lying are the primary thing and that, oh, there's this special kind of peace and love communication that emerges in certain cases when we've reached a certain level of enlightenment. Note, fundamental to language is this other kind. So actually there's roots there of an ethical approach right there in what communication is.

20:20 Wes: Right. This is reminiscent of Kant in the sense that there's a kind of transcendental argument here. Which is that this movement towards understanding, understanding is a telos that's built into language, that the grounds for the possibility of language and communication are built on this movement towards understanding.

20:40 Seth: So Mark, I think that was a good clarification. But it also introduced a distinction between different kinds of speech acts that might confuse the initial issue that Wes was trying to make, which is speech versus action. Habermas starts off the essay and he says, I observe a friend hurrying past at a run on the other side of the road. And then he goes on to say, the mere fact of her running on the other side of the road doesn't give me any idea about why it is that she's running. Could be because she's late, could be because she's running from a bear, could be because she's trying to get some exercise.

And he says at the bottom of the first paragraph, non linguistic activity does not of itself afford us such an insight in any way. It does not of its own accord make itself known as the action that it is planned to be. And then he says, speech acts by contrast, do satisfy this condition. So he's trying to make the point that the experience of the world as an objective thing, your subjective experience of the world as objects, when you're just perceiving and there's actions happening, whether they're human actions or physical objects, actions, there's no sense in which actions themselves give you any sense of their telos, as Wes said.

So he says, speech acts interpret themselves. They have a self referential structure. So since speech acts are performative, they announce what they are. They can do this correctly or they can do this in a shifty way or whatever. But the point is, is that speaking versus acting, speech brings with it its own announcement of intention and that it has an assumption that you are going to pick up on that intention in a way that action does not.

22:14 Wes: So I think I just want to amend that a little bit. We can do a little bit of interpretation of the intention of actions just through general context, right? So I might have enough context know that she's hurrying down the street, the woman who's running, I might. If she's being chased by someone with a knife, I think that's a good reason to say that she's fleeing. But ultimately to fully specify others reasons for acting, we need not just that external context, but we would need access to intentions. So no matter how strong our inferences are, and we can make a lot of inferences, intentions are not something to which we have access by virtue of the observation of behavior.

We have to be in language to do that. So language, in a way, does give us a kind of direct, non inferential, non interpretative access to people's intentions. And that's just because of exactly what you said. Language announces its own illocutionary form. Its illocutionary form is contained within the semantic context of an utterance. So if it's a command or an assertion, those things are just built into the speech act in a way that hurrying or fleeing are not just built into the act of running, they're just not right there in it. But the illocutionary forms are right there in the semantics.

So speech acts kind of just do their own self commentary. They kind of have a meta commentary going on about themselves. This is the way that we can enter into what he calls the intersubjectively shared life world of a linguistic community.

23:46 Mark: So without bringing in the element of speech specifically, although this is founded on speech, if you and I are engaged in some cosplay chasing and I have a knife and you are running, or maybe we're being filmed so we both know what we're doing, then in this sense I know your intention. You are fleeing from me. Or maybe I'm the director and I'm still observing two people, but I don't know everything that's in your head. I don't know why you decided to show up and play this particular cosplay or being in my movie or whatever it is, But I know which move in this, I don't want to say language game because maybe you guys aren't talking at all, but I know your intention in playing this game.

And that seems to kind of get at the distinction without even bringing in language. Are you just observing, you know, a scientific observer trying to figure out someone's motive, or are you participating in an action that has been using speech in some way specified beforehand? You know, if not explicit speech, then, well, customs, There are all these things that are sedimented speech, we were saying, but they're ultimately linguistic.

24:49 Wes: This gets complicated because we can treat behaviors as having semantic content, as forms of communication, as interpretable. But you know, in general, I like this distinction that he's making between speech

25:01 Dylan: and action, just pointing a little bit ahead. We can also speak of things in a way that are manipulative and muddy the waters regarding the plain spoken intentionality of our speech making. He articulates that just so that no one thinks that there's no such thing as lying on purpose.

25:16 John: One of the sort of questions I perpetually have and was reminded of reading this again was that there's kind of levels of symbolic interaction going on. So that if you and I are running and we're involved in some like, collective action, like making a film or whatever, we still understand that there's a gestural language of what's going on. So you might stop and like wave and say, oh, oh, that means cut or whatever. But even at the basic sort of thing, like you start running and then I start running, we both know we're kind of engaged in a combination and not game. But language is clearly different. Is it just a difference of degree or is there something built into the structure of speech acts that's a difference in kind than the kind of gestural language or the things we understand from common action?

25:58 Dylan: He at least wants to assert that there's a difference in kind.

26:02 Wes: We have to think of this in terms of whether we are engaged in a cooperative activity. So that's what the route that Mark took us down and that we're going down now. When behavior can become more like language. I think it helps here to think about the foundation of language, which is even in pointing, right? Pointing is a proto linguistic activity which says just a lot about what language is. You don't have to say anything. And what's important about it is that there's shared attention, for one thing, right? We have the ability to attend to the same object in the world.

But if I am to understand, you know, unlike. Well, there's controversies over whether dogs or chimpanzees, for instance, truly understand pointing. Because there's a controversy of the extent to which they can have a theory of mind, right? So if I'm to understand pointing as a form of communication, I have to not just be guided to the object that's being pointed at. I have to understand that there's another subjectivity over there who is also attending to this object. If I'm to understand it as a communication, I have to know that they desired to point me to that object.

I have to know that they know that I have my own thoughts and feelings that can be pointed to it. And it even gets us into sort of Hegelian mutual recognition territory. So that, I think, is the distinction between when you see someone just running down the street and they're not engaged in any cooperative activity or communication with you, and you're just interpreting their intentions, that's much different than when someone wants to convey their intentions to you. So I think that's the critical criterion that distinguishes these two things.

27:40 John: Habermas. At a point, if I'm remembering correctly. And he does periodically mention threatening as a case. So I don't have to linguistically threaten

27:48 Dylan: you in the sense of an audible speech act.

27:51 John: Right. And there's a sort of, once again, a kind of gestural language about it. But coming to understanding in languages primary as opposed to sort of the other uses that you might make of it, the lying, the pettifogging, the what have you think is intrinsic to it too. One of the things that's definitive about it, that language is always implicitly about intersubjectivity in a way that you can move, you can do things with no cognizance of that any other person or any other that it would be perceived. And that's fine. But even if you're just sitting there talking to yourself, that's still a kind of ghost version of what language is really supposed to do, which is to be a path from what's in my head to what's in your head.

28:29 Wes: There is always an other. There's always at least the fantasy of another. It makes no sense otherwise. So even when you're talking to yourself, right, you're communicating.

28:36 Dylan: And isn't this cash out in terms of talking about the way reason works in these different spheres? So this action case where we're talking about observing someone running, that's part and parcel to scientific observation of the world. You don't have insight into the interiority. And of course it's useful to pick on a case of a person doing that running. You're trying to interpret it, but it's as a mode of inquiry and a mode of reason isn't any different than me watching a tree grow or trying to figure out how many electrons are in a benzene molecule or anything like that.

And it comes down to what Wes was just saying, that there isn't this communicative action going on even really analogically. It's all interpretive. If there are intentions, they're always ascribed intentions, they're not spoken intentions that genuinely come up to you. And even if you analogically talk about how the tree is speaking to you, it has to do with your interpretive framework that you have on what that tree is doing and it's communicating to you through yourself, as opposed to these communicative actions where there is a third thing that is this mutual understanding, this activity of trying to communicate that ends up being somewhere in the middle because you have another active reason going on that is categorically different than the kind of activity you're Having with a tree or a person running across the street.

30:05 Wes: Yeah. And I think even in the case of these examples of threats and deceptions, they're examples of speech acts which are more like forms of coercion and they don't rise to the level of seeking understanding. And I think in a sense they're not even true communication. So if the woman running across the street is aware of you and she's trying to deceive you into believing that she's fleeing, for instance, or that she's late for an appointment, I don't think that rises to the level of. I don't know, I want to say true communication. I might be wrong about this, but there's something radically different about it because for real communication to be going on, she would have to be. Well, we'll get to some of these criteria involving validity claims and sincerity and all the rest of that stuff.

30:46 Seth: Yeah, that's a whole different thing. Let me just read a quote from the text to close this out. So this is page 219. We have distinguished speech acts from simple non linguistic activities on the basis of two characteristics. First, that the former are self interpreting actions with a reflexive structure and second, that they are directed toward illocutionary goals that cannot have the status of a purpose to be achieved in an inner worldly way, cannot be realized without the freely given cooperation and agreement of an addressee, and can be explained only with recourse to the concept of reaching understanding that is inherent in the linguistic medium itself.

31:23 Wes: He goes into more detail earlier in 217 about all this stuff. So he's going to further give more distinctions between speech acts and non linguistic acts than the ones that we've already described. And those distinctions come down to the kinds of goals that those things are directed at reaching understanding on the one hand versus causal intervention in the world on the other. So he gives this ABC a few different criteria, one of which is just that unlike our action where we're intervening in the world in language we can't really separate means from ends.

We can't talk about them apart from one another. And then secondly, and I think this is an important one we ought to linger on, is that to produce understanding in someone is not like causing something to happen. It's not like, okay, there's my hearer over there, there's the person I'm talking to and I'm going to manipulate them, I'm going to cause something to happen in their head, right? I'm going to utter these things, I'm going to give them the stimulus and I'm going to cause this idea to appear in their head. That's not the model that Habermas likes.

Then everything would be reducible to the other sort of action. Rationality has to be at stake. And so he'll say there's rationally motivated agreement or they have to agree of their own free will to a validity claim. It's not that, just we instill something in someone's head. We make these validity claims with our speech act, and then the other person has to agree.

32:46 Mark: I was reminded by our Sartre on Literature episode where he's describing literature in particular in that way, that it's not just sketching out a full artwork, it's setting out an invitation and that the reader has to take that in and do some narrative work to build it. And Habermas is just saying it's not just the written word, it's all word. It's actually that way. I want to argue a little bit at that clean cut distinction that you just made between that if you're actually trying to cause an effect in the world, that that is pursuing instrumental reason.

I think one of the great advances of this over Austin is that for Austin, in most of the book of how to do things with words, performatives are a special kind of speech act for him. And he sort of implies toward the end that even straight up assertions are also performing something, but it's very unclear. And then we tried to do Judith Butler, who wants to use performative, you know, just in I dress a certain way and I'm performing. And it's really hard to connect that with what Austin says, because for Austin, a performative is like, I now pronounce you man and wife or I promise to do this.

And those kind of performatives, they are actually accomplishing something in the world. It's just that they are doing it in a special way. And I think actually it might be that I am in part causing a thing to jump up in your head when I make an assertive statement. But it's not a manipulative way of doing it. It is again, part of the shared activity, whether it be consciously. You know, we've agreed before that we're going to play this game or like most language games, we're always already in the midst of them through social customs. So, yeah, if you're being married by a priest, to use Austin's example again, you've agreed to be in this situation when the priest says, I now pronounce you man and wife.

If you're surprised by this, if you were drugged and kidnapped and woke up in this situation, and they said that perhaps that is not an effective. It would have to be accompanied by a threat or something. It would be something that is parasitic on the normal being married thing. So I think the same sort of thing. I think commands are really interesting here because Habermas wants to allow that a command actually can be not a manipulative, not a threat, but it can be a legitimate part of a shared language game. It's just that there has to be something that you can argue with.

There has to be. If I'm your teacher and I say, let's say at a college level, not where you're six years old and I'm bossing you around, but you're at a college level and I say, you know, take out your books, and you have the option as the student to say, wait a second, you're not my actual teacher. You're just some dude who ran up in the front and said, take out your books. There are other ways to dispute that, but commands are still a legitimate thing in this picture.

35:31 Wes: So you're talking about perlocutionary effects.

35:34 Mark: No, I'm not.

35:35 Wes: Just hold on. When people do things because of what you say, that's a perlocutionary effect. Let's go to section B on 2. 18. The distinction is Habermas understands, and he goes into it in extensive detail on this, that by getting people's rational agreement, you can get them to do things. That's not the distinction. The point is that there's a difference between persuasion and manipulation. There's a difference between, say, a threat where because of external sanctions, I essentially force someone to do something, or where, because of propaganda, for instance, I cause someone to believe something without their true rational assent to it.

That's a kind of instrumental reason version of this, where I'm conceiving of this as directly causing someone's mental states in a manipulative way versus getting their agreement first and then getting them to do something. So in 218, Part B, the speaker cannot intend the aim of reaching understanding as something that is to be brought about causally, because the kind of illocutionary success that goes beyond mere understanding of what is said depends on the hearer's rationally motivated agreement. The hearer must, as it were, of her own free will, give approval to agreement on a matter by recognizing the validity of a criticizable validity claim.

Illocutionary goals can be attained only cooperatively, and they are not unlike causally produced effects at the disposal of the individual participant in communication. So that's the distinction that I'm trying to get at.

37:06 Mark: But that doesn't mention elocution versus perlocution. There's a place where he lays this down. Where is that? Like perlocution sub one, perlocution sub two, perlocution sub three. I mean, that's on page 223.

37:17 Wes: So what's your understanding of prolocutionary effects? I thought he gave a pretty straightforward example of what he means by that.

37:24 Mark: In a normal assertive sentence. You're entirely right. First of all, there's the locution, which he thinks we already know what that means. It's just like the meaning of the words. Right, Right. The locution. In other words, you don't know the context. You can still understand the locution. But to have something have a performative effect, there has to be a context. There has to be a speaker addressing another speaker. That's what Frege didn't understand. Thinking that you can just have sentences in the abstract. Those would have a locution, but they wouldn't have an illocution.

37:51 Wes: Right.

37:51 Mark: Okay, so, so, but the illocution in a normal assertive speech act is just gaining the shared understanding. The elocution in a command is for you to with understanding. Knowing that you can say no is for you to do the thing that I'm commanding. This is why I'm saying that there can be a causal effect in the world if that's what the act was designed to do. Right. If you're only thinking of assertoric sentences, then you're right. Anything that you do based on, you know, if I say the cat is on the mat, what am I trying to do with that? It might be that you then kick the cat off the mat.

But unless we were clearly in a context where, oh, the cat's not supposed to be on the mat, whenever I tell you that it's a command for you to get him off the mat, then that would be a perlocutionary effects. It is something that is just understandable. Maybe I also meant in informing you something I hoped that you would take this action or something like that. But that's not the illocution 223 will

38:48 Wes: shed light on this. Because this is an important distinction we all ought to agree on. So I have subsumed the understanding and acceptance of speech acts under illocutionary success. All goals that go beyond this are to be termed perlocutionary I want to distinguish between perlocutionary effects, which arise from the meaning of the speech act, and perlocutionary effects, which do not arise as grammatically regulated effects, but occur in a contingent way. Right. So if they can occur in a contingent way, that's like the threat. If they occur as a natural result of the speech act, where you make a request and I say, yes, that's legitimate, we're going to comply with your request.

That's prolocutionary effect number one. For example, H understands that's the illocutionary success. He understands your request and accepts. So there's the understanding and the acceptance of it that she give Y some money. H gives Y some money. That's the parlocutionary effect number one. And it gives pleasure to Y's wife. Parallel cushionary effect number two. So when you make a request to someone, their understanding and acceptance of that is an illocutionary effect, but them actually doing it, them actually complying with that request is a perlocutionary effect.

39:58 Mark: Okay. So accepting it, in other words, there is an illocutionary success is not just that. You understand. I think elsewhere in here he says that to understand a command is to feel obligated. Yeah, exactly. There is a motivation that is induced by your acceptance. It's not merely understanding. Yeah, I understand. You gave me a command that would be merely understanding an assertoric sentence.

40:22 Wes: Yeah. My point is that he wants to think of that whether he's right or not. He wants to think of producing that motivation in someone as a matter of their free ascent, not as something that you've just causally implanted in them.

40:34 Mark: Yep.

40:34 John: As I was reading the second section about strategic action versus communicative action, there's a kind of a Kantian dimension to it too, in the sense that that, you know, Kant's position in the Grundlegung that we always have to be treating people from an ethical perspective always end in themselves as opposed to simply a means. And the distinction here, I think is the same. The communicative coming to understanding in communicative action as opposed to strategic action plays out that same distinction. Although the question, and I think this sort of discussion of elocution versus perlocution here gets to this issue too, is can it be both? Or is there like a bright line distinction where can I both be trying to achieve effect X for my own purposes? And also coming to using this sort of like, understanding, generating facility of language at the same time, which I think

41:21 Mark: on our ordinary, before Getting lost in Habermas, you would say, of course, that we all have ulterior motives for things. I really had trouble with accepting, especially in the case of commands and requests like this. You know, again, starting with parents telling your kids what to do, you are bullying them around in a certain way, but you're clearly doing it for their own good. And if they understand and you hope that they gradually, even though your words might not change, please set the table. When they're six, they're doing it merely out of being bullied around.

By the time that they're 10, let's say maybe 18, let's be reasonably here. They rationally accept, I'm a member of this family, I should do things to help out. And so it's almost like you're just reminding them of something that they are committed to doing anyway. It seems like there is no bright line between those, that it's a very gradual process.

42:16 John: Is that representative? Because we're talking about somebody who's not a sort of full blown member of the community of rational people. So I think we could probably. Well, who knows? But I can think of times when my mom made me learn German when I was a kid. Like I hated it. It was like pulling an eyetooth every single time. I'm now very grateful that she did, and she clearly did it with forwarding my humanity as a sort of end result. But can this work between people who are like fully qualified rational people? Can you have that relationship with someone who's like an adult? Does that make sense?

42:48 Mark: I mean, I'm thinking of like drill sergeants and the kind of. Even if I'm your workout coach or something, then like the drill sergeant, it might be, I gotta start by stripping you down and making you respond like you're my slave, like a machine. And then as you internalize what I'm trying to do, then you want to do more push ups.

43:09 Dylan: I was going to ask to be reminded of the distinction that we're trying to make, but I think I kind of get it. And I guess part of it is. Example you just made is that even in the case of the drill sergeant, there's a question of how much of a rational actor is the person who's doing the command thing and how much of that action that's happening is a result of the person doing the command. It seems to me Habermas would say that it's clearly communicative action, even if it's persuasive because the person on the other side has to assent to it.

43:43 Wes: Yes, Exactly.

43:44 Dylan: And that's the fundamental thing. And even in that example, he's absolutely right about that. That guy is not going to do any pushups unless in some fundamentally rational way he agrees to do it. This is the most basic bottom line version of agreement. It is not necessarily even a scent that he should have to do it, but he's doing it. And that kind of command is not the command of making his muscles move. It's not in any way like me picking up this container and lifting it up off the table. There's nothing I can say to this container that will have it respond to me and lift itself up.

But in the case of the plebe doing the push ups, or in the case of the kid, simply not doing what you asked him to do, like my kid, who when we were in Nickelodeon park in Florida, he refused, refused to go to dinner that we had planned for weeks. And you know how he got to dinner? I picked him up and carried him like he was a box. He did not agree to go. There was no communicative action. It was definitely not an illocutionary offense.

44:57 Wes: That is definitely not an illocutionary offense.

44:59 Seth: Yes. Let's go back to the text for a second. Page 222. What comes about manifestly through gratification or threat, suggestion or deception cannot count intersubjectively as an agreement. An intervention of this sort violates the conditions under which illocutionary forces arouse convictions and bring about connections. Because communicative action is dependent on the use of language oriented towards understanding, it has to fulfill more stringent conditions. The participating actors attempt to attune their respective plans cooperatively within the horizon of a shared life world, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, so from my perspective, the example of the drill sergeant, okay, what Dylan was talking about with the kid, that's clearly not illocutionary. But even in the case of the drill sergeant, I would say that what is happening when the plebe or the cadet drops down and does push ups is not a cooperative action. And in Habermas sense, that would not be communicative understanding. It would still be manifestly strategic action.

46:05 Wes: So I have to agree with Dylan on that one. Because what makes it communication and understanding? Remember Austin's the context that makes speech acts felicitous. This is all about context. If he's a drill sergeant and that's his role and I'm in boot camp and I'm supposed to be following his commands, if I want to stay in the army, then I do what he says. And I can always say no, I can always leave, I could get into trouble. But in the end, the reason I agree to that is because there's something normative about. There's a normative context that I have, have actually agreed to. I believe he has the authority to do that.

46:43 John: Unless you've been drafted, in which case I've just read a lot of Vietnam memoirs. And the universal experience of those guys was the fear that the drill sergeant, that their boot camp was going to kill them. They didn't do what they said. But I think you've got a valid distinction.

46:57 Wes: What Seth is getting at, and this is important as well, is just that it's not always easy to distinguish those things. Right. What's the distinction between thinking that someone has the right to make a request of me and that therefore I ought to comply, and being afraid of the consequences of not complying? Like feeling shame as a kid. Right. Who's not going to comply with his parents? I think they're not actually as easily distinguished in practice, even though I think Habermas is trying to make that distinction here.

47:25 Mark: Of course, coming out of this critical theory tradition, he's very aware of all these workers. They show up at their jobs, they could just stay home. But the Marxist tradition out of which Habermas is arising is still going to say that those people are not truly making a free, informed choice.

47:42 Wes: Right.

47:42 Mark: So it'd be ambiguous in, I think, a lot of social contexts.

47:45 John: Sure. The Frankfurt School spent a lot of time and a lot of research effort trying to figure out why it was that people thought Hitler was a great idea, or the people who normally had seemed to be like rational self legislators, if you will, when Hitler came to power, like, yeah, you know, I'll go along with, you know, name your atrocity. And that's something that Habermas feels like he's got to explain as well.

48:05 Dylan: So in this section, it's communicative versus strategic action. And for a minute there, I was wondering if, especially since Seth pointed us to a paragraph in which Habermas is clarifying communicative action. That's this whole area where participating actors attempt to attune their respective plans cooperatively within the horizon of a shared life world and on the basis of. Of common interpretations of the situation. So it made me wonder if these cases where it seems to be threats and other kinds of persuasion fall into the case of strategic action versus communicative action, where the hallmark of communicative action is one in which there's a shared cooperative goal in some way. So the drill sergeant is using a speech act, but that is a speech action. That is a strategic speech action as opposed to. To a communicative speech act.

48:58 Wes: Well, it depends. Right. This is the problem. So he makes this distinction. So if you accept the validity of the drill sergeant's request, if it's a valid claim or his order, then you're engaged in a cooperative activity. You agree to it, you do it. That's cooperation. But if it's merely a matter of coercion, whether that's manipulation or threat, then he will call that sanction conditions that are external to speech. And then you get what he calls an if, then structure. Right. It goes back to more of a model of cause and effect in the world, where I'm essentially using people as objects and getting them to do what I want. But again, I think what Seth was getting at is important. I don't know that those things are always that easy to distinguish. So we should, you know, I mean, that's a real concern.

49:45 Mark: Well, let's come back to this in part two. It is already available. It is the very next thing in your feed. Thank you so much. Much for supporting the partially examined life.