Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

4Chapter 1of life are structured. This rationality is inscribed in the linguistictelos o£ mutual understanding and forms an ensemble of conditionsthat both enable and limit. Whoever makes use of a naturallanguage in order to come to an understanding with an addresseeabout something in the world is required to take a performativeattitude and commit hersel£ to certain presuppositions. In seekingto reach an understanding, natural-language users must assume,among other things, that the participants pursue theirillocutionarygoals without reservations, that they tie their agreement to theintersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims, and thatthey are ready to take on the obligations resulting from consensusand relevant for further interaction. These aspects of validity thatundergird speech are also imparted to the forms oflife reproducedthrough communicative action. Communicative rationality is expressedin a decentered complex of pervasive, transcendentallyenabling structural conditions, but it is not a subjective capacitythat would tell actors what they ought to do.Unlike the classical form of practical reason, communicativereason is not an immediate source of prescriptions. It has anormative content only insofar as the communicatively actingindividuals must commit themselves to pragmatic presuppositionsof a counterfactual sort. That is, they must undertake certainidealizations-for example, ascribe identical meanings to expressions,connect utterances with context-transcendingvalidity claims,and assume that addressees are accountable, that is, autonomousand sincere with both themselves and others. Communicativelyacting individuals are thus subject to the "must" of a weak transcendentalnecessity, but this does not mean they already encounter theprescriptive "must" of a rule of action-whether the latter "must"can be traced back deontologically to the normative validity of amoral law, axiologically to a constellation of preferred values, orempirically to the effectiveness of a technical rule. A set o£unavoidableidealizations forms the counterfactual basis of an actualpractice of reaching understanding, a practice that can criticallyturn against its own results and thus transcend itself. Thus thetension between idea and reality breaks into the very facticity oflinguistically structured forms of life. Everyday communicativepractice overtaxes itself with its idealizing presuppositions, but only