Sociology and ideas about language
Habermas and communicative interaction
The work of Habermas has consistently placed language at the center of social analysis. Moreover, Habermas has a strongly emergentist view of language, one in which '... sensory contact with the world is reworked into something meaningful through the use of symbols' (Habermas 2001a: 7). The development of symbolic communication is the defining feature of human existence; also, the 'objectifying force of symbolic mediation' creates the distance from the world which makes reflexivity possible. From our perspective, this 'objectifying force' is also the principal means by which a World 3 of the products of human consciousness is sustained.
This view of the central role of symbolic mediation fuels Haber mas's critique of scientism, the notion that empirical knowledge is derived from the direct apprehension of reality and is therefore the only reliable form of knowledge. Symbolic mediation rules out a direct understanding of the world in the sense of an understanding 'uncontaminated' by theory. There are two important senses in which this has to be the case for Habermas.
Firstly, sensory apprehension of the world, if it is to be generalized beyond the experiencing individual, has to be expressed through language, that is symbolically; the communication of sensory experience requires a communicative practice. Secondly, the reality encountered by human beings is a symbolically prestructured reality, which is why, for Habermas, when people engage in interaction they encounter the world and one another as meaningfully structured (Habermas 1984, 1987). Therefore, access to this reality cannot be gained through observation alone (Outhwaite 1994). The core of Habermas's position was worked out in his extended debate with Gadamer (1975). Gadamer argued that people understand each other, insofar as they do, from within their own framework or tradition what he termed their 'horizon'. This perspective is very much that of the tradition known as 'hermeneutics', with which he is closely associated. The necessarily partial perspectives (or 'prejudices'), which are a condition of these 'horizons', are not just obstacles to understanding (what we would describe as 'constraints') but also a possible means towards understanding others (what we would describe as 'enablements'). There is a significant realist element in Gadamer's account of the influence of tradition on the resources for symbolic communication that people encounter (see Davey 1993, How 1995). It is this element that Habermas reworks into a distinctive view of language.
Acknowledging Gadamer's insistence that the hermeneutic process is not the replacement of one horizon by another, 'better' one, but a dialogical process in which horizons are mutually extended, Habermas nevertheless wants to identify two important limits to the hermeneutic approach to language. Language, argues Habermas, is not just a means of communication which mediates our experience of the world, but is also a medium of domination and social power. A social science cannot therefore be reduced to interpretation, as is implied by hermeneutics. The second limit to the hermeneutic approach, argues Habermas, is that it is inattentive to the dependence of language on wider social processes (Habermas 1990). This is important because it is this dependence that generates what Habermas terms 'systematically distorted communication'. 'What raises us out of nature', claims Habermas, 'is the only thing whose nature we can know: language' (Habermas 1986: 314). Language thus performs a double function in Habermas's model of social analysis: as the means through which our apprehension of the world is expressed and as the basis for our claims to truth and knowledge. The roots of rationality are to be found in the structures of everyday communication for Habermas, since such communication expresses our desire to be understood, to achieve an unconstrained consensus with our interlocutors. This claim is the core of Habermas's theory of communicative action.
Communicative action is distinguishable from communication, since it designates a form of social interaction that is managed through speech acts but is not reducible to them. This is because, for Habermas, reaching mutual understanding requires a speaker and hearer to operate at two levels: the level of intersubjectivity on which they speak with one another and the level of objects or states of affairs about which they communicate. These two levels are interdependent- all speech acts have a cognitive and a communicative dimension, that is to say they are both to do with the accomplishment of social interaction (getting somebody to do something) and with the expression of knowledge (claiming that something is the case) (Habermas 2001b: xiii).
Communicative action is therefore irreducibly intersubjective and emergent. Moreover, and this is the legacy of Gadamer, social actors are 'always already' situated within a 'lifeworld' of taken-for-granted assumptions on which actors can draw in trying to understand others. The lifeworld is the world of intersubjectively shared meanings that provides, in Habermas's words, 'a constantly operative context of relevance' (ibid.: xvi). Habermas contrasts the intersubjectively shared nature of the lifeworld, where people strive for consensual understanding as the means of managing social interaction, with the nonconsensual nature of the system, driven by the impersonal forms of instrumental rationality. This distinction has been criticized on various grounds (see, for example, Giddens 1984, Layder 1997, Mouzelis 1991,1995,1997, Outhwaite 1994), and we do not wish to comment on these here. Rather we want to note the significance for our account of Habermas's emergent view of language and the 'depth ontology' that he proposes with the distinction between lifeworld and system.
