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Foundations of Sociology in the Theory of Language

The Christian Gauss Lectures, which I delivered at Princeton University in 1971, mark a visible caesura in my philosophical development.1 To be sure, my preoccupation with issues in the philosophy of language can be traced back to my student days – among other things, to a seminar with Erich Rothacker and Leo Weisgerber on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of language. The most important formative influence was provided by discussions with my friend and mentor Karl-Otto Apel,2 which had prepared me for the encounter with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Gadamer’s Truth and Method3 and later inspired me to read Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of language and semiotics. Thus, I had already begun to make a linguistic turn in the review essay On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967)4 and shortly afterwards in my communicative interpretation of the structural model of psychoanalysis in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968).5 But my sociological investigations (1962)6 and my reflections on social philosophy (1963)7 remained within the ambit of the Frankfurt tradition until the late 1960s.

Until then, I had not questioned the theoretical background of the older critical theory as such, even though I had been suspicious from the beginning of its implicit thinking in terms of the philosophy of history and of Adorno’s ‘covert orthodoxy’ (specifically, his tacit acceptance of Marx’s theory of surplus value). Since my dissertation, I had been tormented by the question of how to reconcile a radical form of historical thinking with the justification of a substantive normative diagnosis of the present. The more familiar I became with empirical studies of contemporary societies, the less the horizontal differentiation and accelerated increase in complexity of contemporary social life seemed to be compatible with the holism of the Hegelian-Marxist paradigm.8 The same reasons reinforced my doubts about the conceptual foundations of the idealist tradition in the philosophy of the subject, which weighed down Georg Lukács’ paradigm-forming studies on History and Class Consciousness9 with heavy ballast from the philosophy of history.10

Radical critique of knowledge, as I had explained in the preface to Knowledge and Human Interests, is possible only in the form of social theory; in developing this idea there, however, I still tried to explain the normativity of knowledge and the analytical power of self-reflection in terms of a learning subject writ large. Consequently, the detranscendentalization of the achievements of this subject led only to a natural history of the ‘human species’. It was not without reason that Apel described our shared conception of cognitive interests as a form of ‘anthropological epistemology’. Hegel had already toppled Kant’s transcendental subject from its noumenal pedestal and relocated it within the historical development of objective spirit or culture; and Marx has transferred the ethical life of culture into the material reproduction of society. But neither thinker had broken free from the conceptual apparatus of the philosophy of the subject: for Hegel and Marx, the learning process of world history takes place in large-scale subjects such as ‘peoples’ or ‘social classes’. The idea of a history of the species that was no longer supposed to unfold only in forms of socially organized labour, but simultaneously as a communicatively mediated process of cultural formation, also remained captive to the model of subject-philosophy.

The decisive step taken in the Gauss Lectures was to replace transcendental consciousness (as the source of the constitution of social relations) with everyday communicative practices that secure for society the same ‘immanent reference to truth’. Without a reference to reason in its basic concepts, the (as it is now called) ‘communication theory of society’ would lack from the outset the nonarbitrary standard it requires to perform its continuing task of critically evaluating social pathologies. Of course, reason must be situated in social space and historical time. But in order to avoid achieving the detranscendentalization of the mind at the cost of introducing higher-level collective subjects, the challenge was now to ‘found sociology in the theory of language’ in a way that does justice to the decentring power of communication while also conceiving of the collective identities of societies and cultures as higher-level and condensed forms of intersubjectivity and taking into account the pluralistic character of social life. I will discuss the Gauss Lectures at somewhat greater length because they mark a turning point in my theoretical development.

(1) I undertook the overdue ‘reconfiguration’ of the basic concepts of social theory with reference to those individualistic approaches – such as Edmund Husserl’s and Alfred Schütz’s social phenomenology and the neo-Kantian sociology of Georg Simmel and Max Adler – which assume a plurality of transcendental subjects and therefore have to postulate necessary subjective conditions of possible socialization. To be sure, these transcendental approaches remain epistemologies doing duty as social theories, because they conceive of the reproduction of society as analogous to the production of an intersubjectively shared world of possible experiences: from this epistemological perspective, the ‘constitution’ of a shared social world depends on the synthetic acts of consciousness of individual subjects. Despite these weaknesses, these theories served at the time as a bridge for the conception of society I had in mind as something which is not only networked through communication but is also constructed on the basis of acts of communication rich in normative presuppositions.

All that I had to do to bring the rationality potential of everyday communication into play was to replace the ‘acts of cognition’ of the subject of knowledge with the speech acts of acting subjects and to trace the production of meaning back, not to the constitution of the experiential world of conscious monads, but to communication in communities of language users. This establishes a relationship between communicative reason, on the one hand, and the conditions of social reproduction, on the other, through the binding force of factually recognized validity claims. At that time, I was trying a rather clumsy way to clarify ‘the peculiarity of factually effective meaning structures’:

Every society that we conceive of as a meaningfully structured system of life has an immanent relation to truth. For the reality of meaning structures is based on the peculiar facticity of claims to validity: In general, these claims are naively accepted – that is, they are jointly presumed to be fulfilled. But validity claims can, of course, be called into question. They raise a claim to validity, and this claim can be problematized: It can be confirmed or rejected. We can speak of ‘truth’ here only in the broad sense of the legitimacy of a claim that can be fulfilled or disappointed. Thus we say, for example, that an opinion or assertion, as well as a hope, wish, or guess, is correct or justified, that a promise or announcement has been properly made, that advice has been honorably given, that a measure has been properly taken, a description or an evaluation correctly done. In everyday interactions, we rely naively on an unsurveyable wealth of such claims to legitimacy. It is always only individual claims that emerge from this background and that are thematized and checked in case of disappointment.11

Structuralism also presents language as a model for a decentred, subjectless conception of society. But the system of grammatical rules as such does not give rise to any relation to truth; the latter first comes into play with communication about states of affairs. The syntactic dimension of language must be supplemented with the semantic and pragmatic dimensions. If one person wants to reach an understanding with another person about something in the world, their communication can also fail due to incomprehension or misunderstanding, hence due to grammatical errors or because they lack a shared language; but the actual, illocutionary goal – that is, reaching understanding with another person about what one says to the other person – can be missed only at the semantic and pragmatic levels. From the perspective of a sociologist observing everyday practice, the goal of communication is not to understand a spoken utterance per se, but to reach an understanding about what was said. A speaker misses this goal if she cannot convince the addressee, if she lacks reasons to dispel doubts. Inferential semantics (which I would only discover later, thanks to Robert Brandom) is based on this very point: because participants in communication are oriented to the goal of reaching understanding, they always move within a space of reasons by which they let themselves be influenced.

It was only later that I dealt with semantic questions. Starting from hermeneutics, I initially followed the path leading to formal pragmatics (to which inferential semantics also ultimately leads). Still very much following in Karl-Otto Apel’s footsteps, in On the...