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

18Chapter 1ties of clashes among the doubly contingent decisions of participantsto the point where intentions and actions can form more orless conflict-free networks, thus allowing behavior patterns andsocial order in general to emerge. As long as language is used onlyas a medium for transmitting information, action coordinationproceeds through the mutual influence that actors exert on eachother in a purposive-rational manner. On the other hand, as soonas the illocutionary forces of speech acts take on an action-coordinatingrole, language itself supplies the primary source of socialintegration. Only in this case should one speak of"communicativeaction." In such action, actors in the roles of speaker and hearerattempt to negotiate interpretations of the situation at hand and toharmonize their respective plans with one another through theunrestrained pursuit of illocutionary goals. Naturally, the bindingenergies of language can be mobilized to coordinate action plansonly if the participants suspend the objectivating attitude of anobserver, along with the immediate orientation to personal success,in favor of the performative attitude of a speaker who wants toreach an understandingwith a second person about something in theworld. Under this condition, speech-act offers can achieve anaction-coordinating effect because obligations relevant to further. interaction result from the addressee's affirmative response to aserious offer.Communicative action, then, depends on the use of languageoriented to mutual understanding. This use oflanguage functionsin such a way that the participants either agree on the validityclaimed for their speech acts or identifY points of disagreement,which they conjointly take into consideration in the course offurther interaction. Every speech act involves the raising ofcriticizable validity claims aimed at intersubj ective recognition. Aspeech-act offer has a coordinating effect because the speaker, byraising a validity claim, concomitantly takes on a sufficiently credibleguarantee to vindicate the claim with the right kind of reasons,should this be necessary. However, with such unconditional validityclaims, which point beyond all provincial standards that are locallyaccepted and established, the ideal tension that Peirce analyzed inthe validity of true scientific statements enters into the facticity ofthe lifeworld. The idea of the redeemability of criticizable validity