exploring habermas’s critical engagement with chomsky

THEORETICAL / PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER

Exploring Habermas’s Critical Engagementwith Chomsky

Marianna Papastephanou

Published online: 15 February 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract This article explores Jurgen Habermas’s critical employment of Noam

Chomsky’s insights and the philosophical assumptions that motivate or justify

Habermas’s early enrichment of his universal pragmatics with material drawn from

generative linguistics. The investigation of the influence Chomsky’s theory has

exerted on Habermas aims to clarify what Habermas means by universalism, reason

embedded in language and the universal core of communicative competence—away

from various misinterpretations of Habermas’s rationalist commitments and from

reductive, conventionalist readings of his notion of consensus. Much against hasty

and unexamined incriminations of Habermasian pragmatics, a turn to a neglected

and scantly researched topic such as the philosophical affinity of some Chomskian

and Habermasian themes (and to the philosophical justification of the points where

Chomsky and Habermas part company) will retrieve the kind of depth and nuance

that may lead us beyond facile and simplistic understandings of what discursively

reaching consensus might mean from a Habermasian point of view.

Keywords Communicative competence � Rationalism � Universalism �Conventionalism � Validity claims

Introduction

Many years have passed since Noam Chomsky’s path-breaking linguistic interven-

tion, the influence it exerted on various philosophical endeavours and the criticisms

it attracted on philosophical grounds. Yet, although the ‘philosophical relevance of

linguistic theory,’ as put by Jerrold Katz in his 1971 essay on this topic, has, in

M. Papastephanou (&)

Department of Education, University of Cyprus, Po Box 20537, 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus

e-mail: [email protected]

123

Hum Stud (2012) 35:51–76

DOI 10.1007/s10746-012-9210-8

general, been rarely questioned ever since,1 the role that Chomsky’s conception of

language has played in the formation of some major philosophical trends has not

adequately been discussed. In the case of Habermas’s pragmatics, in particular, too

little has been said about the philosophical reasons for the former’s critical

engagement with Chomsky’s theory, although the names of Chomsky and

Habermas are often placed side by side in generalized, sweepingly dismissive and

popularized accounts of universalism and of rationalism within 20th century

thought. As has been well-documented in the relevant literature (see Norris 1994:

386), many neo-pragmatist and poststructuralist commentators charge Habermas

and Chomsky with ‘a well-founded’ rationalism (and they mean this pejoratively).

To those circles of commentators Habermas and Chomsky appear equally guilty of a

Cartesian commitment to a mentalist dualism of ‘body and mind’ that gives priority

to the latter over the former; and of a dogmatist attachment to the assumption of

truth-accessibility. Christopher Norris criticizes such neo-pragmatist and poststruc-

turalist circles for doing precisely this, that is, for sweepingly dismissing both, the

thinkers they regard as ‘deluded ‘‘Enlightenment’’ types from Kant to Habermas,

Chomsky, Rawls and company,’ and their commitment to reason and truth (Norris

1994: 386).

To show that the charges of mentalism, rationalism and the like cannot be equally

directed at Habermas and Chomsky one has to study carefully their respective

theories as well as the points on which Chomsky’s work has influenced Habermas.

For this reason, it is unfortunate that the stakes of the convergence and divergence

of Habermasian and Chomskian insights have rarely been indicated—with the

exception of a recent essay by Cooke (2011)—let alone explored in the years that

followed Bar-Hillel’s (1973) criticisms of Habermas’s theory of language2 and

Hymes’s (1972) criticisms of Chomsky in virtue of the notion of communicative

competence.

In this article I attempt precisely this, i.e., to explore those Habermasian and

Chomskian insights that add a nuance that is increasingly missing (or so it seems to

me) from older accounts to current commentaries on linguistic and pragmatic

aspects of (inter)subjectivity. But this nuance is not only necessary in order to refute

positions that charge Habermas and Chomsky equally and invariably with

rationalism. It can also be conducive to refuting charges that are directed at

Habermas alone. Leading figures of 20th century philosophy, J.-F. Lyotard, for

instance, attacked Habermas’s consensus-based theory of intersubjectivity on

grounds of a supposedly violent rationalism that overlooks the obstacles to

consensual common truth that the incommensurability of language games raises.

Lyotard asks, ‘is legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion,

as Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language

games. And invention is always born of dissension’ (Lyotard 1984: xxv). Since

then, and more broadly, Habermas theory has not only been criticized as

1 For such a questioning, see Nielsen (1993).2 In that article, Bar-Hillel emphasized that ‘we certainly are badly in need of a conception that will

synthesize Chomsky’s theory of linguistic competence with the theory of speech acts’ (1973: 11) but he

downright rejected the plausibility of Habermas’s response to such a theoretical demand.

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(supposedly) rationalist, foundationalist, transcendentalist, and Eurocentric (in its

universalism and assumed essentialism). It has also attracted criticisms about the

opposite vices, that is, it has been viewed as ‘conventionalist’ (the term meaning

that Habermasian truth is reduced to a matter of convention and socially current

validity) and, thus, as lacking a notion of consensus that would go adequately

beyond neo-pragmatist modus vivendi.Especially outside the circles of Critical Theory, Habermas’s pragmatics is

typically viewed, and largely dismissed, as susceptible to both of these oppositional

charges which are issued depending on the camp: those who favour an anti-

rationalist and skepticist worldview see Habermas’s ideas as fraught with Cartesian-

mentalist connotations and commitments and, thus, not conventionalist enough.

Those who favour rationalism and a notion of truth that is radically transcendent and

critical of the existing society see the Habermasian notion of truth as too

conventionalist. They see it, ultimately, as a vehicle for advancing unreflective and

conservative notions of consensus that assist the recuperative mechanisms of liberal

capitalism. Consider the following as examples that correspond to these two (and, in

fact, contradictory) disparaging lines of reading Habermas. On the one hand,

M. Foucault associated Habermas with an obsolete utopian rationalism and

criticized Habermas’s supposed assumption of a purely transparent communication,

free from all constraints (Foucault 1991: 18). All in all, Habermas stands accused of

unrealistic transcendentalism and purist humanism based on a rejection of

convention for the sake of a metaphysical notion of truth. On the other hand,

consider, for instance, A. Badiou’s following indicative and very telling comment

on Habermasian consensus: ‘What I call a weak negation, the reduction of politics

to democratic opposition, can be understood as a subtraction that has become so

detached from destructive negation that it can no longer be distinguished from what

Habermas calls consensus’ (Badiou 2008: 653). All in all, Badiou charges

Habermasian consensus with too much conventionalism and too little society-

transcendent rationalism.

Much against such hasty and unexamined incriminations of Habermasian

pragmatics, a turn to a neglected and scantly researched topic such as the

philosophical affinity of some Chomskian and Habermasian themes (and to the

philosophical justification of the points where Chomsky and Habermas part

company) will retrieve the kind of depth and nuance that may lead us beyond

facile and simplistic understandings of what discursively reaching consensus might

mean from a Habermasian point of view. This aim may be all the more justified

now that critical realist (Bhaskar 1997) as well as speculative realist (Harman

2010) approaches to the linguistic turn and a very important attack on the

correlationism (Meillassoux’s term 2008: 5ff) that grounded most 20th century

philosophy: revive issues about realism, rationalism and Cartesianism that had, at

some point, been branded obsolete by poststructuralism; and necessitate far more

accurate depictions of the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of

versions of the linguistic turn, if philosophical dialogue between diverse

persuasions is to be furthered.

That, despite its various theoretical and political shortcomings (Papastephanou

2010), Habermas’s conception of consensus neither affirms transcendentalism nor

Exploring Habermas’s Critical Engagement 53

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serves a pacifying outlook on the conventions of liberal society can be argued out in

many ways. For instance, it can be argued out by direct reference: to the details of

what counts as will- and opinion-formative dialogue; to a head-on discussion of his

consensus theory of truth; and to how Habermas differentiates his own project from

Rorty’s notion of conversation or from Rawls’s later concessions to neo-pragmatist

modus vivendi consensual agreement.3 But there is also another way of setting the

record straight, one that has not yet been adequately followed. The way that I would

like to pursue here, then, is the one that demonstrates that the deeper philosophical

assumptions of Habermas’s theory of language (supporting his idea of consensus)

comprise post-conventional commitments. The latter assist Habermas in avoiding

pitfalls of pacifying pragmatism; and also in steering clear from ultra-rationalist

groundings of such post-conventionality. Attention to the philosophical underpin-

nings of Habermas’s critical engagement with Chomsky can make all these stand

out more clearly.

Reconstruction and Universal Pragmatics

In his effort to avoid the metaphysics of consciousness, its primacy of the isolated

subject and its objectification of the world, Habermas has subscribed to the version

of the linguistic turn that puts linguistically mediated human interaction centre

stage. To single out the normative and political significance of intersubjectivity

Habermas connects reason and language in the idea of a communicative action that

is guided by a rationality oriented to reaching mutual understanding. What is, then,

required for such an understanding to have the epistemic strength that a

reformulated notion of reason can provide is a consensus theory of truth—against

possibilities of grounding agreement on mere strategic compromise, unreflective

persuasion or even coercion. A Habermasian consensus based on the possibility

(evoking the so-called ‘ideal speech situation’) of a communication that is

undistorted by asymmetrical power, domination, strategicality and the like is not, as

sometimes presented by critics of Habermas, a residue of holistic humanism, but

rather an exploration of a potential intrinsic in ordinary language.

Yet, such a conception of consensus presupposes a comprehensive theory of

language. What is meant by ‘comprehensive’ is that language should not be treated

as just a system of signs either from a structuralist or from an analytic-empirical

point of view. It should also be treated in its relevance to reason and to

communication, with features to be analysed, with a relation to the intentionality of

the speaker and with underlying ideologies and value systems that can be exposed

by means of deliberation. In other words, consensus requires a theory of meaning

and validity and their stakes. For Habermas, this theory is one of universal (or

formal) pragmatics: ‘universal’ in the sense of general and necessary conditions of

possible understanding; and ‘pragmatics’ for taking into consideration the

pragmatic-contingent aspects of ordinary languages (Habermas 1984: 1) that unveil

the connection of meaning with validity claims raised by each speech act. Whereas

3 See, for instance, Papastephanou (2004, 2010) respectively.

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for Karl-Otto Apel pragmatics is transcendental (see, Papastephanou 1997), for

Habermas, it is, at most, quasi-transcendental; as is well-known, this has been a

point of debate between Habermas and Apel for years. An alternative path would be

empirical pragmatics, i.e., one that does not deal with competences or structures

behind communication but focuses instead, say, on the use of expressions as

indicators related to temporal, social and content dimensions of speech. For

Habermas (and, evidently, for Apel too), who wants something stronger, something

that has the theoretical power to illuminate our intuitions, empirical pragmatics is

too limited to the functionality of language and cannot reveal ideology, deceptions,

confusions regarding validity claims and regarding reality, and various other sorts of

communication distortions.

Already the above demarcate the scope of Chomskian influence that Haberm-

asian pragmatics can accommodate. For, the latter requires nothing less than an

account of language as a species-specific competence that can be approached not

just analytically-empirically but also reconstructively. As Maeve Cooke puts it,

‘Habermas sees it as the great merit of Noam Chomsky to have developed’ the idea

that ‘what begins as an explication of meaning ultimately aims at the reconstruction

of species competences’ (Cooke 2011: 292). Not only theories about meaning,

reference and truth but also theories about human linguistic competence are of great

importance for a systematic account of language that can ground a post-

metaphysical notion of reason. Seen as a deep-seated property of the human

species implicit in language, reason ceases to present itself as an absolute and

transcendental origin (Ursprung) and appears no longer ahistorical but transhistor-

ical, as language is transhistorical itself. Chomsky does not reduce language to a

totally historical product, if by the latter predicate we understand a conception of

language that relativizes it to a virtually contingent device the origin of which could

be traced back to a historical moment.

At the same time, the philosophical justification of the Habermasian consensus

requires those aspects of philosophy of language that deal with the pragmatic

dimension of speech and the conditions of possibility of reaching understanding and

agreement in contexts of real talk.

Humboldt had a notion of ‘form’ as ‘generative process,’ which is considered by

Chomsky as a ‘very original and fruitful contribution to linguistic theory’ (Chomsky

1964: 17). However, Habermas would expect linguistics to draw also on other

important aspects of the Humboldtian theory, such as, for instance, ‘the

intersubjectivity of possible understanding’. Thus, Habermas remarks (1991: 215)

that ‘neither Saussure nor Chomsky conceives of conversation as the crux of

language, as Humboldt did’. As we shall see later on, the commitment to

Cartesianism and mentalism that explains the reluctance on Chomsky’s part to take

up the communicative aspect of language also reveals indirectly the onto-

epistemological differences of the two thinkers. Overall, that such aspects are not

covered by Chomskian accounts of language but rather by theories of speech-acts is

quite well-known, but what is important here and will be shown throughout this

article is the rationale for this divergence between Habermas and Chomsky—one

that assists a better justification of why attacks on Habermas’s supposedly rationalist

universalism or unreflective conventionalism are misdirected and wrongheaded.


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Chomsky’s theory has been important for Habermasian pragmatics for two main

reasons. First, (a) Habermas has made clear from the very beginning that his notion

of communicative action ‘cannot be completely expressed in terms of adaptive

behaviour’ (Habermas 1970: 372).4 This clarification is meant to facilitate the

elaboration of a theory that does not naturalize language and allows philosophers of

the post-Kantian persuasion to avoid Bloomfieldian linguistics since the latter has

proved to be more compatible with Quine’s holism (Katz 1998) rather than post-

Kantian constructivism.5 Given that Habermasian pragmatics has more affinities

with Kantianism than with epistemological behaviourism, it is no surprise that

Chomsky’s ideas have exerted more influence on Habermas than the behavioural

linguistic counterpart might have done. To deal with language in a behaviouristic

way means that one investigates it by using descriptive-empirical methods. But, as

Humboldt showed and Chomsky developed further, language must not be

considered as a dead Erzeugtes but more like an Erzeugung (Chomsky 1964: 17).

Moreover, behaviourism does not seem to have a convincing answer to the

question of language acquisition. The creative aspect of language offers a solid

ground to Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis, at least in principle. To explain: with

just a few words at their disposal competent speakers can produce an infinite

number of sentences, comprehensible by hearers. Also, participants in a commu-

nication have the ability to identify deviant utterances. These two facts show that

there must be some a priori properties of mind, or a set of rules to sustain these

capacities. There must be some kind of competence that can be activated by, but

precedes logically rather than temporally, learning processes, for the latter on their

own do not appear effective enough to provide a development of language when

applied to non-human beings. This a priori character of some linguistic patterns

seems to be both, a point of agreement and of disagreement between Chomsky and

Habermas. Habermas would accept the innateness hypothesis, though not in its

strong version as formulated by Chomsky. A theory that overstates the role of

biology in linguistic competence turns out to minimize or even exclude the socio-

cultural contribution to the linguistic development. For a philosophical theory

deeply influenced by G. H. Mead’s concept of a socially constructed self, to accept

such a presupposition would mean to succumb to either a crude materialism or pre-

Kantian metaphysics. Chomsky’s theory faces this predicament, although one must

concede that in its anthropological assumptions, generative grammar sounds more

tenable than the behaviouristic alternative. For, Chomsky has shown that the process

of language learning cannot be adequately grasped within the framework of learning

theory. B. F. Skinner, according to Chomsky, does not take into consideration the

4 Contrast this, for instance, with Kivinen and Piiroinen’s view that ‘pragmatists manage just fine with an

understanding of human beings as organisms that transact with their environment, cope, and adapt,

forming ever new habits in the process’ (Kivinen and Piiroinen 2007: 106).5 Much of what will crop up here reflects, amongst other things, the polemics between Habermas and

Chomsky on the one side and the behaviourists on the other as well as the polemics between the

traditional analytic philosophers and the theorists of ordinary language. Important as such polemics might

have been at those times for the emergence and shaping of the theories in question, attention to them here

would sidetrack us. Thus, I will presuppose some knowledge of the premises of such debates somewhat

axiomatically. For a concise account of such debates and their relation to the linguistic turn, see Norris

(1994: 375–387).

56 M. Papastephanou

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synthetic achievement of the rules that organize the elements of language.6

Habermas praises Chomsky for successfully showing that linguistic communication

cannot be adequately understood on the level of stimulus–response behaviour alone:

‘for reasons that Chomsky has set forth convincingly’ a general theory of ordinary-

language structure ‘cannot proceed behaviouristically’. This is so because such a

theory ‘is dependent on data that are given only in communicative experience’

(Habermas 1990: 141). To shed more light on the complexity of Habermas’s

position, let us consider a relatively recent criticism of Chomsky on the part of

Deweyan pragmatist thinkers. O. Kivinen and T. Piiroinen argue against ‘what is

being implied by, for example, Chomskian linguistics, or by the now fashionable

neuroscience’. They maintain that ‘the key to understanding human being, language

and mind cannot lie inside the skulls, where one only finds brains; instead, the great

secret of being human—if there is any—is open to sociological explanations’

(Kivinen and Piiroinen 2007: 98). Although Habermas would not defend Chomsky’s

bipolar reasoning on such matters, he would not be willing to endorse Kivinen and

Piiroinen’s conclusions, so long as those simply invert the binary opposition.

Habermas has sought a mediatory approach to rationalist-realist accounts of

language and reason and to their pragmatist-sociological counterparts.

(b) The second reason why the findings of generative grammar are relevant is the

alternative they offer to the Russellian-(early)-Wittgensteinian logical atomist

account of meaning. A pragmatic philosopher of language has to supply her theory

of language with a theory of meaning, but not of a Russellian-(early) Wittgensteinian

sort. To connect meaning with reference in the way logical atomism does, i.e., to match

atomic sentences to atomic facts in the world is to limit language to a descriptive role

and to efface its action-orienting aspect. If one wants to bring the action-orienting

function of language seriously into play, one has to abandon the purified formal

language that, for instance, a theory of definite descriptions would provide. Let us

deploy this counter-argument to logical atomism by considering the most common

criticism which analytic philosophers used to direct at their German idealist

colleagues. The early analytic philosophers argue that the precarious and deceptive

language the Idealist uses derives from an isolated subject’s introspection, a subject

that deludes herself by thinking that this introspection is a matter of consciousness or

of an Absolute Spirit (Geist). Ironically, this can also be addressed to the analytic

philosopher herself who, in order to favour logic, puts aside the communicative aspect

of language as she undertakes the task of formalizing/rationalizing it. In this way, she

establishes only cognitive relations between language and the world and thus abstracts

from ordinary language, from the ‘ready-to-hand,’ from the complexity of the human

relation to the world and from contextual knowledge.

Hence, there appears an important question to be answered: where does

Chomskian theory stand regarding cases of conflict between logic and grammar and

why might that be of use to a Habermasian approach? Russell attributed the

inadequacy of grammar to the ostensibly misleading character of ordinary language.

A possible way to refute this explanation would be to level logic and grammar, thus

eroding the underlying binary opposition. Katz in his essay on the philosophical

6 On how Habermas makes use of this specific point, see Habermas (1990: 68–69).


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relevance of linguistic theory suggests that Chomsky’s segregation between a

surface and a deep structure could offer an alternative to the Russellian view (Katz

1971: 101–120). Although this is true, Chomsky’s surface/deep structure analysis is

not free from problems either, and his apriorism is an additional difficulty. Thus, as

Habermas writes, ‘to break through the grammatical boundaries of individual

linguistic totalities we need not follow Chomsky and leave the dimension of

ordinary language’ (Habermas 1990: 143). But, this difficulty aside, the distinction

between surface and deep structure could justify the claim that the grammatical

form is not incompatible with the logical form. Furthermore, it can show that

experience is not necessarily defined as the other of reason; on the contrary, logic isin language. Subsequently, ordinary language should not be regarded as the other of

logic, under the pretext that it is precarious and infused with metaphysics and thus in

need of a refinement and ‘therapy’ of the sort that scientism demanded.

Thus, Chomsky’s views have been useful to Habermas because they have led his

insights beyond the conceptual horizons of the analytic and some of the post-

analytic philosophy of language, allowing him to maintain the critical outlook he

has had from the very beginning of his preoccupation with the linguistic turn. A

succinct way of putting this is found in Emilia Steuerman’s formulation: ‘Habermas

wants to maintain that language has an objective as well as an interactive

dimension’ (Steuerman 2000: 25). Then again, just as the objective dimension

cannot be given in logical atomist terms, likewise, and despite other theoretical

debts of Frankfurt School thinkers to the later Wittgenstein, the interactive

dimension that those thinkers have in mind cannot be exhausted in terms of rule

following and language games. Especially, the use to which the idea of the

incommensurability of language games has been put by some postmodern

philosophers and the contextualist, conventionalist and relativist conclusions that

those have drawn are incompatible with Habermas’s idea of consensus and his

expectation that, through the quest for truth, interlocutors can and should be

elevated beyond the narrow confines and particularism of their own lifeworld.

Hence, when Habermas chastises the Rortyan version of pragmatism for its anti-

realist jettisoning of all epistemology (1998a [1996]: 353), he once again affirms the

communicative, cognitive, ethico-political and affective merits of universalism—

just as he had done when writing his ‘what is universal pragmatics?’ (1998b [1976]),

that is, 20 years before his critical text on Rorty’s neo-pragmatism. Contra Rorty’s

contextualism, Habermas sees a possibility and a necessity of rescuing emancipa-

tory action through a universal pragmatics that escapes the charge of Eurocentric

universalism by being viewed as universal qua species-specific rather than West-

originated and West-disseminated/expanded. The non-circumventible deliberative

competences of interlocutors are not private and exclusive capabilities of specific

groups. They are universal to the extent that they belong to the species and they

ground general validity claims (Habermas 1984: 14ff). For instance, specialized

discourse should not be used as an alibi for avoiding to transform scientific progress

into lifeworldly knowledge and then for failing to transform the communicative

power of all citizens (as informed interlocutors affected by or interested in a

situation) into institutional power. Habermas has reproached the ongoing control of

public affairs by groups of ‘experts’ and on this he has been on a par with Chomsky

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in many respects. As an example, I cite Chomsky’s position on the participation of

the citizen in the public sphere: ‘A truly democratic community is one in which the

general public has the opportunity for meaningful and constructive participation in

the formation of social policy’ (Chomsky 1988: 135). Surely, most liberal thinkers

would also subscribe to the rejection of group elitism for the sake of a non-

exclusivist conception of conversation. But, the contextualism of some liberal

thinkers, their reluctance to acknowledge the possibility of discursively building on

the universalizability and generalizability of human interests, ultimately re-

introduces the kind of limited consensus that fails to engage in dialogue all those

affected or to open all matters to public interrogation. Contextualism does so by

enforcing a sense of incommensurability of the language games of those who are

potentially involved or affected by a debated topic/issue. Unlike such relativist-

prone theorists who rush to endorse contextualism, both Chomsky and Habermas

assume generalizable interests allowing an enlargement of the public sphere with

more participation in decision making. Hence both divest the isolationist, private

sphere and the epistemology that grounds it of the primacy it was attributed to by

liberalism in its most relativist and conventionalist moments.

We have so far clarified that when Habermas sets out to develop a theory of

communicative action, he needs the assistance of other disciplines, especially those

that have a reconstructive core. Thus, Habermas’s employment of insights from

reconstructive approaches that, at some stage, say something about human evolution

either ontogenetically or phylogenetically is not accidental. Not just theories within

psychology that involve accounts of human development, e.g., psychoanalysis,

Piaget’s cognitive psychology, or Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, but also

theories such as Chomsky’s that conceive of language as a competence are

important from a Habermasian point of view. In relation to language, Chomsky’s

theory is fruitful in so far as it conceives language as a competence that

differentiates the human lifeworld from the non-human7 in the sense that the human

world is not passively and deterministically conditioned by biology or experience.

In turn, this is significant not just in ontological terms but also in anthropological-

political terms since it upholds the image of a human being who can transcend

animality (and its priority on self-preservation—see, for instance, Badiou 2001) by

uttering confrontational words, by challenging established pseudo-consensuses and

by unveiling coercive ideological commitments.

Thus, Chomsky’s linguistics is appealing since it does not confront the

predicament behaviourism faces, namely, how to explain freedom of choice and

action. For Chomsky, humans are not machines precisely because they possess

language and therefore have free will. In lacking free will, a machine ‘acts in

accordance with its internal configuration and external environment, with no choice’

(Chomsky 1988: 6). Chomsky’s criticisms of behaviourist theories that presuppose a

7 Here I should emphasize that this point does not imply that those who lack the ability to speak (babies

or mute people) are not human beings or are not equipped with basic human rights like those of all other

humans. The distinction between ‘performance’ and ‘competence’ shows that a property or a feature can

be either actual or potential and thus resolves this problem. As concerns animals, the distinction between

humans (speakers of a language of quasi-transcendental nature) and non-human beings by no means has

negative implications for the discourse on animal rights.


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purely mechanistic, stimulus–response model of subjectivity are very plausible also

when applied to poststructuralist theories with similar assumptions—notwithstand-

ing their far greater degree of theoretical refinement and sophistication (Frank 1989;

Norris 1994). Chomsky’s rejection of the mechanistic model of explaining human

action renders his thought directly at variance with a postmodern-cybernetic

understanding of human beings as machines (as in Deleuze and Guattari for

instance).8 Finally, his conception of language as a species-specific property

epistemologically and ontologically accommodates a potential for a universalism

that urges the inclusion and engagement in dialogue of all those affected by, or

interested in, a theme. It does so beyond relativist assumptions of inexorable

context-specificity of dialogue or dogmatic assumptions of any exclusivist and

privileged access of the Western world to reason and argumentative force.

Mentalism and Monologism

However, a comprehensive and systematic theory of language which is interested in

critique of ideology and exposure of distorted communication requires a strong

pragmatic aspect which is ill-fitting in accounts of language that see it only as

langue. Let us, then, follow this thread: Chomsky explains why he distinguishes

between competence and performance by stating that ‘linguistic theory is

mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying

actual behaviour’ (Chomsky 1965: 4). Although this distinction is of crucial

importance for Habermas, with regard to his aim to grant linguistics the status of a

reconstructive rather than descriptive science, the mentalistic implications Chomsky

draws from it9 would lead on to the kind of rationalism that Habermas would by no

means subscribe to—much against what many of his critics tend to assume.

Therefore, in its further development, Chomskian linguistics is not compatible

with the paradigm shift that Habermas as a pragmatic philosopher promotes.

Chomsky’s Cartesian point of departure restricts him to a monologism that does not

leave room for intersubjectivity as understood by Habermas. The charge of

monologism represents one of Habermas’s most salient criticisms of transforma-

tional-generative linguistics. ‘The thesis of monologism assumes that the universal

meaning components belong to the basic equipment of the solitary organism of the

speaking subject’ (Habermas 1970: 363). Because an analysis of the speaker’s

competence for Chomsky would exhaust itself within either psychologism or

physiologism, there seems to be no need within it for recourse to any communi-

cative-pragmatic models of explanation. Chomsky considers the analysis of the

impact of socio-cultural factors upon language competence as redundant: ‘I

8 Hence, not only Skinner’s behaviourism but also some of Lyotard’s (1993) analyses and some of

Deleuze’s and Guattari’s arguments (Frank 1989) are likewise vulnerable to Chomsky’s criticisms, but

this goes beyond the scope of this article.9 As Allen and Van Buren (1971: ix) observe, for Chomsky, ‘a theory of language is to be regarded as a

partial theory of the human mind’.

60 M. Papastephanou

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emphasized biological facts, and I did not say anything about historical and social

facts. And I am going to say nothing about these elements in language acquisition.

The reason is that I think they are relatively unimportant’ (Chomsky 1988: 173). He

reinforces the antagonism in the dualism regarding innateness and experience. In his

view, one fundamental contribution of Cartesian linguistics is the ‘observation that

human language, in its normal use, is free from the control of independently

identifiable external stimuli or internal states and is not restricted to any practical

communicative function, in contrast for example, to the pseudo-language of

animals’ (Chomsky 1966: 29). Even Chomsky’s (1993) more recent and simplified

model of linguistics that revises the transformative-generative one does not tone

down his ultra-rationalist commitments, but rather strengthens them, as Christopher

Norris remarks, by making our linguistic uptake dependent on the possession of

innate ideas in a neo-Platonist manner (Norris 2010: 108).

A pragmatic philosopher of language would not be willing to regard language

only, or primarily, as a system of signs that expresses human thoughts. That would

appear as regression to solipsism. Hence Habermas reproaches Chomsky’s

monologism. Chomsky’s project is monological because ‘it is founded in the

species-specific equipment of the solitary human organism’ (Habermas 1970: 361)

(emph mine). In Steuerman’s words, ‘Habermas criticized Chomsky’s monological

approach to competence, but he upheld the Chomskian idea of a universal grammar

that makes language possible’ (2000: 24). Monologism is not compatible ‘with the

proposition that semantic universals could also be parts of an intersubjectively

produced cultural system’. Moreover, ‘universal semantic fields can also reflect the

universality of specific scopes of experience’ (Habermas 1970: 363). At this

juncture, the paradigm Chomsky opts for obliges him to conceive of universality

only mentalistically, which in this context would mean only as a neurophysiological

product. Habermas thinks of universals not just as a priori species-specific

properties but also as a posteriori elements of a common response to a commonly

shared experience—shared by the whole of humanity understood as a species.

Therefore, from a Habermasian point of view, a theory of linguistic competence

cannot be expected to account for language as a whole. It must be accompanied by a

theory of communicative competence which is no less universal. ‘The general

competence of a native speaker does not extend merely to the mastery of an abstract

system of linguistic rules, which—pre-programmed by his organic equipment and

the processes of stimulated maturation—he introduces into a communication in

order to function as a sender or receiver during the transfer of information’

(Habermas 1970: 366). What is Cartesian in Chomsky’s model is the view that ‘the

intersubjectivity of meaning—that is, the mutual sharing of identical meanings’

should be attributed ‘to the fact that sender and receiver—each an identity for

itself—are previously equipped with the same programme’ (Habermas 1970: 361).

An aftermath of monologism would be a difficulty to deal with problems of

repetition in language without assuming a static self or a closed symbolic system,

and thus it would be vulnerable to criticisms like those directed by Derrida (1989) to

Searle in the former’s Limited Ink.


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Meaning and Universality

Let us unpack the above points step by step. A full shift of paradigm (from the

philosophy of consciousness to that of intersubjectivity) of the kind that Habermas

promotes can be realized only by returning to the study of ordinary language so as to

accommodate speakers’ intentions. Austin and Searle have inaugurated such a turn

and provided a very influential account of meaning.

Habermas wants a theory of meaning that does not stop at the analysis of the

meaning of the propositional content of an utterance and finds in Austin and Searle

many insights that assist his endeavours. To him, a theory of meaning should go on

to search for the illocutionary force of the utterance itself, or, in his words, for a

‘meaning which is linked to the speech situation as such’. The key for understanding

Habermas’s views on language and meaning is, in my opinion, his decision to bring

into play an idea of universality as a fact of both, biology and social life. Or, in other

words, universality is seen as a fact of the conditions of an interwoven material and

symbolic reproduction of our lifeworlds. Although he has not pursued further the

tentative remarks of his early accounts, I cite some of them in order to show a

possible path opened by universal pragmatics concerning the problem of explaining

universality. This path has, regrettably, remained a counterfactual theoretical

possibility, as it has not been pursued further by Habermas or his followers, in my

view, due to later concessions to neo-pragmatist and anti-realist trends.10

Some meanings are a priori universal in as much as they establish the

conditions of potential communication and general schemes of interpretation;

others are a posteriori universal, in the sense that they represent invariant

features of contingent scopes of experience which, however, are common to

all cultures. For that reason we differentiate between semantic universalswhich process experiences and semantic universals which make this process-ing possible in the first place (a posteriori/a priori) (Habermas 1970: 363)

(emph. mine).

This sort of universalism has the advantage of being flexible (since biology and

society can, in their own, distinct ways, be subjected to historical change) and thus

of not suggesting absolute (in the old, metaphysical sense) standpoints or origins.

Otherwise, if one holds that in all natural languages there is a deep structure with

semantic components which are not affected by the surface structure (as Chomsky,

Katz and Postal in the Standard Theory do), then, one faces an uncomfortable

dilemma. One has to offer either the specific sets of rules that determine the

semantic components or a finite number of these components ‘out of which the

basically solitary speaker can construct all possible semantic contents’ (Habermas

1970: 362). In doing the latter, one attracts the charge of elementarism.

10 Although Habermas’s later work is sometimes at variance with statements like those that I will be

quoting, which in any case even then appeared tentative, I believe that they could be further elaborated

(cautiously so as to avoid reductionism, naturalism, or apriorism) and even backed up with more recent

research in developmental psychology as well as in speculative or realist philosophy. I see no compelling

argument against any further research in such directions.

62 M. Papastephanou

123

To do justice to Chomsky, we have to say that (a) he is well-aware of the

weakness of his semantics;11 (b) he does not have recourse to a Jakobson-type

universalism to offer an elementarist, finite number of semantic units that would

produce the lexica of all languages. Chomsky does not provide any substantive

linguistic universals as Roman Jakobson did when speaking about a finite number of

phonemes. Instead, Chomsky suggests formal linguistic universals as a general

property of natural languages consisting only of a sequence of rules. Consequently,

it is not necessary to assume, as some postmodernist thinkers do, that, because an

actual language may not include the same conception of a noun or a verb, there are

no linguistic universals. The formal universals which constitute Chomsky’s choice

involve ‘the character of the rules that appear in grammars and the ways in which

they can be interconnected’ (Chomsky 1965: 28–29). Also, (c) Chomsky has

reformulated the Standard Theory in a modified one, after some research showed

that the surface does affect the deep structure, therefore, the meaning is not fixed

once and for all. Ultimately, Chomsky neither treats the grammar and the lexicon as

two separate entities nor does he defend an absolute identity of meaning.12

However, if the surface structure can affect the meaning of a sentence, then the

meaning may not be explained totally by a dictionary that belongs to the deep

structure. If this is the case, then the idea that semantic universals arise from pre-

given properties of a subject whose thinking is expressed through language is

untenable. Perhaps this is the reason why Chomsky argues as follows: ‘General

properties of language, if not merely historical accident, and thus of no real interest,

must be attributable to an interaction of (1) genetically determined mechanisms of

mind and (2) uniformities in the empirical conditions of language use and

acquisition’ (Chomsky 1977a: 37). The second point is rather baffling for the

comprehension of Chomsky’s project if one considers what he had to say about the

role of experience in his theory. It is worth citing here a lengthy quotation showing

the role of experience in language acquisition in Chomsky’s work and the difference

between his and Habermas’s account of experience as we have indicated in the

previous section.

The child approaches language with an intuitive understanding of such concepts

as physical object, human intention, volition, causation, goal, and so on. These

constitute a framework for thought and language and are common to the

languages of the world […] The extent to which this framework can be modified

by experience and varying cultural contexts is a matter of debate, but it is beyond

question that acquisition of vocabulary is guided by a rich and invariant

conceptual system, which is prior to any experience (Chomsky 1988: 32).

11 As Searle writes: ‘the weakest element of Chomsky’s grammar is the semantic component, as he

himself repeatedly admits’ (Searle 1974: 23).12 Allen and Paul Van Buren give a detailed explanation of the transition from the Standard Theory to the

modified one (1971: 102–105). The idea that the surface structure does not decisively affect the deep

structure belonged mainly to Katz and Postal (see Chomsky 1977a: 22), and Chomsky seems rather

reluctant to subscribe to this. As he writes, Katz believes that ‘linguistic theory provides a system for

representation of meaning’. ‘My own view is more skeptical’ and further ‘it is also questionable whether

the theory of meaning can be divorced from the study of other cognitive structures’ (Chomsky 1977a: 23).


123

Habermas is justified then in claiming that the model Chomsky offers presents itself as

prior to all communication. We have already seen how Habermas rejects apriorism and

attempts to combine experience and mind in a quasi-transcendental concept of

language, but let us provide textual evidence once more: ‘semantic fields can be formed

and shifted in structural association with global views of nature and society’ (Habermas

1970: 363). For Habermas, the semantic universals are intersubjectively a priori

universal (dialogue constitutive universals), intersubjectively a posteriori universal

(cultural universals), monological a priori universal (universal cognitive schemes of

interpretation), and monological a posteriori universal (universals of perceptival and

motivational constitution) (Habermas 1970: 364).13 Dialogue-constitutive universals

are intersubjective a priori and that means that they are species-specific. They are not

a priori in Kant’s terms, because they do not emerge from human subjectivity and they

determine not primarily our relation with the objective world but our relation with, and

apperception of, the Other: in Habermas’s parlance, ‘it is the dialogue-constitutive

universals, as we now prefer to say, that establish in the first place the form of

intersubjectivity between any competent speakers capable of mutual understanding’

(Habermas 1970: 369). The example Habermas provides, personal pronouns as

dialogue-constitutive universals, shows how intersubjectivity can be grounded in our

capacity to perceive others as well as ourselves within a society and can motivate very

far-reaching debates in the field of developmental psychology.

But let us briefly state some more examples. All of us have at our perceptual

disposal a set of colour words (regardless of the possible differences of the content of

such a set) which is both a matter of neuro-physiological sense organization (thus

monological-biological) and experience (thus a posteriori). Kinship expressions are

a posteriori intersubjective universals because they are empirical-contingent: they

presuppose more than one person, (since by definition a human being has ancestors

and possibly offspring) and they hold for all past or actual societies. The example of

monological a priori universals, i.e., time and space, resembles the Kantian

conception of a priori knowledge. The ‘deictic expressions of space and time, as well

as articles and demonstrative pronouns, form the reference system of possible

denotations’ (Habermas 1970: 370). We use them mainly (not only) in our relation to

the objective world. They ground the cognitive dimension of our being-in-the world.

This attests once more to the idea that epistemology can have a solid ground even

within a theory that understands language as an ‘always already’ (immer schon) of

human experience and avoid the anti-realist conclusions of most versions of

correlationism. This is important for the political-theoretical position that should be

given to knowledge. To anticipate what will be said in another section about

knowledge and to prepare its ground let us just mention here that by relating our

conceptual grasp of objects with a priori cognitive schemes, Habermas once again

grants human knowledge a special status. Knowledge of something in the world is not

13 This specific account of universals may prove to be untenable or inadequate to explain transhistorical

semantic properties of language. Habermas himself has, throughout the years, appeared reluctant to

promote those early ideas of his work and to give any substantive, that is, non-formal account of

universality in language. But universal pragmatics as a linguistic theory does not stand or fall on the basis

of a substantive linguistic component, because its force lies precisely in its formal properties and in the

horizons it opens for a philosophical linguistic paradigm.

64 M. Papastephanou

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the result of a contingent desire which may be empirically explained (a psychoan-

alytic-Freudian interpretation of knowledge might regard it as a disguise of an

unfulfilled drive), but rather, the outcome of transhistorical deep-seated species

faculties (faculties that occur even monologically).

Overall, the way Habermas deals with personal pronouns, or with kinship words,

provides a very interesting alternative for the philosophy of language since these

categories have been treated by the main analytic tradition as mere quantifiers among

many others, or common or proper names respectively. Perhaps this is a reason why

early analytic philosophy failed to offer a more comprehensive theory of language—

one that would embody the findings of other disciplines like those of developmental

psychology or social anthropology or would acknowledge that words are ideologically

‘loaded’ and speech acts have an illocutionary force. As we have just seen, Habermas’s

critical stance to Chomskian mentalism and monologism (established in the previous

section) informs Habermas’s objections to the Chomskian idea of meaning and

validity. Moreover, as we shall see in the next section, this critical stance also informs

Habermas’s reclaiming of experience through the idea of communicative competence.

Finally, it prepares the ground for understanding better how the material that we have

so far covered corroborates the claim (Sect. ‘‘Communicative Competence, Consen-

sus and the Ideal Speech Situation’’) that, much against some commonly-held views,

Habermas neither succumbs to an ill-defined utopian and rationalist ideal speech

situation nor does he concede truth to conventionalism and contextualism.

Mind Versus Body: Reclaiming Experience Via a Notion of Communicative

Competence

As a matter of fact, Chomsky could dispense with the Cartesian worldview without

giving up the core of the innateness hypothesis. Firstly, because Descartes’s ideas

about language are not as relevant as Chomsky believes, at least, on Searle’s

account. Searle argues that Chomsky is mistaken to think of Descartes as his

precursor, (1) because Descartes thought of language not as innate (concepts only

are innate) but as arbitrary and ‘acquired’ and, (2) because Descartes’s theory leaves

no space for unconscious knowledge which is of importance for Chomsky’s theory

(Searle 1974: 21). Admittedly, Chomsky’s citations of Descartes and his disciples

(e.g., of Cordemoy) might be effective in refuting Searle’s claim that Cartesian

thought has nothing to offer to generative linguistics (Chomsky 1964: 8) and I do

not contend that the controversy can be easily resolved. But, still, I think,

Chomsky’s theory would be better related to a Kantian than to a Cartesian context

and perhaps even better to a Habermasian one. At least, if we interpret Kant’s

distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realm as reflecting residues of a

Cartesian ontology, we may conclude that Chomsky’s concept of corporeality,

despite its ambivalence, has, at a deeper level, a less dualistic accentuation than the

Kantian alternative. In this respect it appears to be closer to the Habermasian14

14 As early as 1967, Habermas writes: ‘When it became apparent to some scholars that empirical

statements depend on theories, and theory in turn on paradigms, the strategy of reductionism had to be

thoroughly revamped. This undermined the whole mind–body problem’ (Habermas 1987 [1967]: 356).


123

anthropology. For, neither the notorious Cartesian distinction between Mind and

Body (religious or Shamanistic in origin) as res cogitans and res extensarespectively nor the Cartesian approach to nature more geometrico (Chomsky

1988: 143) hold for Chomsky. He writes, ‘we need not accept the Cartesian

metaphysics, which required postulation of a ‘‘second substance,’’ a ‘‘thinking

substance’’… the seat of consciousness that accounts for the ‘‘unity of conscious-

ness’’ and the immortality of the soul. […] All of this is entirely unsatisfying and

provides no real answer to any of the problems raised’ (Chomsky 1988: 140–141).

Further, ‘the mind–body problem can therefore not even be formulated’; ‘we do not

see ourselves as investigating the properties of some ‘‘second substance,’’

something crucially distinct from body that interacts with body in some mysterious

way, perhaps through divine intervention’ (Chomsky 1988: 145). Nevertheless, the

break with the problematic aspects of the Cartesian ontology does not suffice for

transcending Cartesian solipsism. The necessity of a departure from the Cartesian

cogito should also be dictated by a willingness to renounce a monological

framework of thought as the appropriate paradigm for explaining language

comprehensively as symbolically mediated interaction.

We may illustrate the role of the dualist substratum in Chomsky’s theory by

reference to some deep-laid assumptions that explain Chomsky’s inadequate

association of language and communication. We can go about this, again, through

Searle’s discussion. Chomsky’s semantic component faces serious problems when it

has to explain in detail how sound is related to meaning (Searle 1974: 23–24)

because such a task could only be achievable through a much richer theory of

meaning. It seems, however, that Searle’s (1974: 15) objection to Chomsky that the

latter, due to his structuralist past, favours the idea of independently studying syntax

and semantics, does not apply to the modified version of generative grammar.

Nevertheless, the structural inheritance becomes evident in the treatment of

language as a system of signs in a one-to-one correspondence with meanings.

Although Chomsky emphasizes the differences between natural languages and other

sign-systems, he does establish mainly a semiotic relation between words and ideas.

Phonetics describes ‘the world of sounds,’ or outward form; ‘the world of ideas’ is

the domain of a ‘sound psychology’. Grammar is concerned with the connecting

links between these two worlds (Chomsky 1977b: 25). For Searle, ‘the glue that

holds the elements together into a speech act is the semantic intentions of the

speaker’ and the weakness of Chomsky’s views on meaning comes from the fact

that he does not connect language and communication (Searle 1974: 29). Although

Habermas disagrees with the Searlian reduction of meaning as a whole to its aspect

of intention, he would agree with the latter of Searle’s remarks.

I believe that a pragmatic philosopher of language such as Habermas would

argue that Chomsky remains trapped into the semiotic understanding of language to

the extent that he sees syntax and not intentionality or use in language games as the

guarantee of meaningfulness. The human being, ‘for Chomsky, is essentially a

syntactical animal. The structure of his brain determines the structure of his syntax,

and for this reason the study of syntax is one of the keys, perhaps the most important

key, to the study of the human mind’ (Searle 1974: 15). Hence Searle’s

interpretation of Chomsky’s emphasis on syntax as a matter of an underlying

66 M. Papastephanou

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anthropology touches upon an explanation of the why of the latter’s reluctance to

draw a stronger connection between language and communication that a Haberm-

asian thinker would find very plausible.

But, then, within such a framework of thought, one of the difficulties a theory of

language may face is in accounting adequately for the intersubjectivity that

characterizes language as a means of communication. A conception of language that

reduces it to a private episode does not have much to say about how we generate

speech acts, share views and come to an understanding. If language is the expression

of thoughts, then these thoughts must occur identically in every mind in order to be

expressible and comprehensible. And if words correspond (John Locke’s theory, for

instance) to monadologically formed signs, or images as inner states, then each

participant should develop her/his own language which might be perfectly adequate

for self-expression but totally inappropriate for interaction. A private language, even

the most articulate and well-ordered, would presuppose an absolute universality and

identity of meaning, in order not to generate Babel-like situations. The inadequacy

of a private language represents a weakness in Chomsky’s linguistics especially

when it comes to a theory of meaning. Habermas again raises the objection to

monologism: ‘the linguistic intuitions of ‘‘native’’ speakers are not private

experiences at all; the collective experience of the consensus that tacitly

accompanies every functioning language game is stored in them’ (Habermas

1990: 141).15 This objection, which I view as based on Wittgenstein’s insights, can

have more targets than Chomsky’s grammar; it is a plausible criticism against

anyone who radically challenges the significance of rule-governed speech.

Let me illustrate this point by reference to how such criticisms can be directed

against D. Davidson and the conventionalism of his idea of a passing theory. This

will help us better unpack what is at stake when Habermas decides to steer clear

from some Chomskian commitments and better show why some attacks on

Habermas’s supposed rationalism are unsubstantiated. ‘A passing theory really is

like a theory at least in this, that it is derived by wit, luck, and wisdom from a

private vocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get their point

across, and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are

most likely’ (emph. added) (Davidson 1986: 443–444). This monist way of bridging

the gap between scheme and content, so admired by Richard Rorty (1980), misleads

Davidson as much as dualism misleads Chomsky. The problem arises because both

theories, Davidson’s and Chomsky’s, adhere for different reasons to an explanation

of our linguistic competence as pointing ideally to an undisrupted order of speech.

Two issues are relevant here: do rules provide the means for accounting even for

their being deviated from? In other words, how do we understand a proposition even

when this deviates from the rule either by being a new metaphor or a malapropism

or an idiosyncratic expression, if we assume that meaning is dependent on

convention? Second, if our linguistic competence is thoroughly explained by rule-

following how does language change and evolve? Had the rules determined

15 This objection is equally plausible when directed against theories that have radically different

assumptions from the Chomskian, i.e., some postmodernist theories. For the latter also confront questions

related to monological assumptions that introduce private language by the back door.


123

communication, the modification of rules or their suspension without the

comprehensibility of the utterance to be disrupted would have been paradoxical.

The notion of communicative competence supplements our linguistic competence

and provides for this flexibility in our understanding for which a linguistic

explanation fails to provide.

A distinction between linguistic and communicative competence ‘would fit in

with the general fact that human institutions—and, thus, the institution of a

language—by conventional rules fulfil the function of unburdening us from

intentional decisions in normal cases and precisely thereby fail to satisfy our special

intentions in particular cases’ (Apel 1984: 24). In his discussion of Davidson, Apel

explains how this distinction could be fruitful as follows:

the general problem to be solved – the problem of our understanding the

occasion-meaning of utterances even in those cases where its verbal

expression deviates from the so-called normal or conventional expression by

language – may be better solved by a division of labour, so to speak, between a

semantic theory of linguistic competence (i.e., of the language-system as a

system of conventional rules that may eventually even be partly grounded on

a universal theory of all possible human grammars) and, on the other hand, a

universal-pragmatic theory of communicative competence (Apel 1984: 24).

The introduction of the notion of communicative competence plays an important

role also in Habermas’s project of a consensus theory of truth. ‘In order to

participate in normal discourse the speaker must have at his disposal, in addition to

his linguistic competence, basic qualifications of speech and symbolic interaction

(role-behaviour), which we may call communicative competence. Thus communi-

cative competence means the mastery of an ideal speech situation’ (Habermas 1970:

367). I hope that all the above prove why Richard Rorty’s charge of Habermas with

a positivist dualism of scheme and content overlooks the distances that Habermas

has taken from metaphysical essentializations of binary oppositions such as ‘form

and content’ or ‘body and mind’. Rorty assumed that Habermas shared with his

positivist enemies ‘the Kantian presumption that there is some sort of inviolable

‘metaphysical’ break between the formal and the material, the logical and the

psychological, the non-natural and the natural—between, in short, what Davidson

calls ‘‘scheme and content’’’ (Rorty 1991: 168–169). By showing how Habermas

distances himself from dualisms operating in Chomsky’s theory without resorting to

a Davidsonian, conventionalist monism we have also problematized Rorty’s

unsubstantiated assertion of positivist, rationalist metaphysical dualisms in Haber-

mas. At the same time, we have displayed that a discussion of the relation between

Habermasian and Chomskian theory sheds a different light on Badiouian concerns

(as we saw them in the introduction of the present article) about a supposed

conventionalism in Habermasian consensus.

The next section will refute another fashionable and related charge, namely, the

one of utopian rationalism. Stepping on the clarifications about what in Haberm-

asian ideas of meaning and validity as well as in his position on the mind–body

dichotomy has been formulated with and against Chomsky, I will show that the idea

of an ideal speech situation does not have a utopian-rationalist character. Instead, it

68 M. Papastephanou

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is used to describe the competence of participants in communication when they

reach mutual understanding, and not a supposed utopian perfection.

Communicative Competence, Consensus and the Ideal Speech Situation

A possible consensus is not an agreement on the Truth, a truth that has an existence

similar to that of physical objects and is therefore absolute, but rather an agreement

for or against the validity of a given propositional content. And the agreement itself

is not a criterion of truth: any idea even if its acceptability conditions satisfy

consenting free individuals might be fallible and problematic. For pragmatic

philosophers of language such as Apel, Habermas, and Wellmer, fallibilism spells

out the difference between assertability and truth. Although Wellmer modifies

Habermas’s ‘principle of acceptability,’ his version of meaning-theory nevertheless

operates within universal pragmatics and can be employed here for purposes of

clarifying some important epistemic aspects of consensus. Wellmer enlarges the

definition of ‘communicative competence’ by supplementing: the connection of

understanding and acceptability of claims; with a connection of understanding and

conditions of assertability. Wellmer’s enlarged account of communicative compe-

tence reads as follows: ‘a speaker’s communicative competence really involves

both: the knowledge of the respective speech-act-typical general acceptability

conditions for utterances and the at least partial knowledge of the respective special

‘‘assertability conditions’’ for propositions of a certain content’. Therefore, a

pragmatic theory of meaning must attach ‘the analysis of the illocutionary

dimension of language to a generalized understanding of the internal connection

between the meaning of validity claims and the possibility of their justification’

(Wellmer 1992: 215). For Apel, Habermas, Wellmer and their associates, validity

(Gultigkeit) separated out in three basic modes—truth, justice, sincerity—is a

regulative idea that puts social currency (Geltung) and established consensuses to

the test. As Wellmer remarks, ‘the idea of truth contains an unavoidable surplus

over and beyond the concept of a grounded truth claim, in fact even beyond that of a

discursively achieved consensus over truth claims’ (Wellmer 1992: 190).

In the same vein, the regulative idea of an ideal speech situation associated with

uncoerced communicative actions produces a rational consensus, which is not the

vision of a transcendental subject, is not an ideology, but an idealization. When

Habermas comments on Wittgenstein’s conclusions on language games, he argues

against his particularism, his reluctance to develop a theory of language games(Habermas 1987: 354) and this, precisely because, according to Habermas, an

understanding-oriented action can virtually exist only because it assumes idealiza-

tions that transcend any particular language game. This can also be illuminated by

Wellmer’s explanation of the meaning of ‘regulative ideas’ in universal pragmatics.

As he writes, ‘truth is not a regulative idea in the sense that it refers us to some

perhaps even unattainable telos, such as that of an end to the search for truth,

a definite consensus, or simply, a ‘‘final’’ language’. The notion of a regulative

idea is rather meant ‘in the critical sense that it places all knowledge, each

rational consensus, and even our agreement [Ubereinstimmung] in language under a

proviso: with the idea of truth, language submits itself to a standard that reaches


123

beyond every particular language, every particular knowledge’ (Wellmer 1992:

191).

The notion of the ideal speech situation loses the transcendental aura that a

philosophy of consciousness would attribute to it and acquires the quasi-

transcendental character of the language in which it is embedded. Here is Habermas

on this:

A speech situation determined by pure intersubjectivity is an idealization. The

mastery of dialogue-constitutive universals does not itself amount to a

capacity actually to establish the ideal speech situation. But communicative

competence does not mean the mastery of the means of construction necessary

for the establishment of an ideal speech situation. No matter how the

intersubjectivity of mutual understanding may be deformed, the design of an

ideal speech situation is necessarily implied in the structure of potential

speech, since all speech, even of intentional deception, is oriented towards the

idea of truth (Habermas 1990: 70).

Therefore, a consensus based on an ideal speech situation is not a residue of holistic

and humanistic old visions of utopia, as sometimes presented by some critics of

Habermas, but rather a potential intrinsic in ordinary human language. This is a very

important difference between the older accounts of consensus and the Habermasian

version—one that justifies, amongst other things, the deeper and further study of

how language is conceived in Habermasian terms. As has been shown, Habermas

has taken this critical distance from older notions of consensus due, amongst other

things, to his critical engagement with Chomsky.

Ethico-Political Issues Related to Language and the Status of Knowledge

Chomsky’s perspective is not far from that of a pragmatic philosopher such as

Habermas, in its evident propensity for the rejection of a crude conventionalism and

of a mechanistic anthropology. But it differs from Habermas’s to the extent that the

latter’s ethics does not entail the view that moral judgments are right or wrong but

rather that they are valid or invalid (Habermas 1992). This is not only a

terminological difference. For Habermas, truth becomes just one of the possible

validity claims that can be raised or redeemed in a conversation. Validity is much

broader than truth since it offers a whole spectrum of possible claims that would

correspond to different modes of reasoning and kinds of realities. Morality, norms,

and justice belong to language games vis-a-vis the social world. This restriction of

truth to the objective world in order to reclaim epistemically the social and the

subjective worlds has important ramifications. The differentiation of symmetrical

worlds and modes of rationality leads to a reformulation of the concept of interest in

its anthropological significance and encourages mediation between a moral

absolutism and a moral relativism. Habermas’s is an anthropology that, amongst

other things, aspires to a falsification of Malebranche’s dictum ‘private vices, public

virtues’. That ‘private vices’ can be turned into ‘public virtues’ is an idea that

presupposes fixed private interests, fixed interpretations of those interests, and a

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public sphere revolving around them, negotiating them and compromising them. A

pragmatic philosopher of language believes that generalizable interests are not in

real conflict with private ones nor are they of a non-conventional core. They are

related to norms that must be justified in discourses. The validity of norms is a

matter for discussion among citizens with equal rights of participation in discourses

where only the force of convincing argumentation is permitted.

We have seen that on such matters Chomsky and Habermas are generally allies.

However, in his underlying assumptions, Chomsky retains a dualism of mind and

body and confronts the ontological implications of this distinction that put it in a

difficult position in the given context of most current philosophical orientation

which is largely hostile to Cartesian dualism (Kivinen and Piiroinen 2007).

Chomsky believes that a mentalistic account of the human nature can accommodate

moral interests and responsibility, whereas Habermas starts from a different

anthropology to account for a non-relativistic morality. When Chomsky writes

about moral judgments: ‘It cannot be a matter of convention that we find some

things to be right, others to be wrong’ (1988: 152), what lies in the background is the

idea of an ‘external’ experience and an ‘internal’ transcendence of it. As I interpret

him, he holds that there is an outer nature or culture imposing its own rules upon us,

on the one hand, and an inner world transcending conventions in its aspirations to

identify unchangeable truths, on the other. Here again, this starts becoming a

problem when the question is how far one can go to preserve the possibility of

transcending experience without falling prey to the pitfalls of Cartesian ontology.

In an effort to account for the possibility of post-conventional thought and action,

one may lose sight of the weaknesses of understanding subjectivity transcenden-

tally. Although Chomsky’s argument that an absolutization of convention is too

reductive makes perfect sense and is very welcome, his implicit assumption of a

truth that is prior to the intersubjective recognition of it is problematic as it may lead

to all kinds of essentialism. It might be fine, given Quentin Meillassoux’s ancestral

argument (2008: 10ff), to assume that it is possible to have some access to the ‘great

outdoors’ [Meillassoux’s term (2008: 26)] with regard to the objective world of

science and its mathematical structure, but assumptions of absolute ethical and

political truths [in the sense of being dissociated from the relation of the self

(individual or collective) and the world] are more problematic. In ethics and

politics, for instance, this would be tantamount to an intuitionism that is reminiscent

of G. E. Moore’s ethics in its adherence to analytic logic for pointing to values and

norms that we identify intuitively because they exist independently from their

social-normative and historical context. As Norris argues, one must ‘proceed with

great caution in claiming to derive an ethics (or a politics) of the kind that Chomsky

would endorse from any putative basis in a rationalist theory of mind, knowledge, or

language-acquisition’ (Norris 1994: 384). For, there is a danger of conflating the

realm of phenomenal or cognitive experience ‘where intuitions must always be

brought under adequate concepts’ with the realm of noumenal orders of judgment

(of a reflective or ethical character) where the issue of subsuming intuitions to

adequate concepts does not apply (if ethics is to remain theorizable through acts of

freely willed decision). Whenever such conflations occur ‘the old Cartesian

antinomies resurface to much the same troublesome effect, confronting us with the


123

choice between a speculative ethics devoid of all human (real world) consequence

and a determinist outlook that assimilates every kind of thinking—practical reason

included—to the realm of phenomenal necessity’ (Norris 1994: 384). Habermas’s

Kantian-like and cautious adherence to such distinctions is manifest in his

differentiation of validity claims and their relation to different segments of reality

(the objective, social and subjective worlds) and keeps away risks of conflations

such as the above.

Then again, although Habermas and Chomsky differ in their conception of

subjectivity and in the way that they connect it with ethics and politics, the status

they both grant knowledge is very similar and most likely related to their political

ideals. Unlike the line of thought that derives from Lacan’s view of ‘truth as a hole

on the body of knowledge’ (Badiou 1999: 80), that is, one grounded in a rather one-

sided and dismissive conception of knowledge as established and consolidated

encyclopaedia that enforces systemic conformism and is disrupted only by an

epiphanic notion of truth, Chomsky and Habermas understand knowledge

otherwise. For Chomsky, that each subject is a priori equipped with an endowment

that is activated by experience and itself activates the production of a rich, highly

articulated language demonstrates that knowledge is not a random product of a

historical moment but a deeply rooted drive of the species. And because citizens

have knowledge, they can distinguish between justice and injustice, right and

wrong. For Habermas too, knowledge is not a mere event of a special historical

moment; it is connected with interests which, unlike the generalizable ones, ‘are not

susceptible to justification in practical discourses’. The knowledge-constitutive

interests ‘can only be found to exist as general interests through a process of

rationally reconstructing the conditions of how experience can be objective’

(Habermas 1987: 372). It is through such formal pragmatics that according to

Habermas we may find not a supposedly ahistorical, but a transhistorical weak

linguistic justification of the possibility of knowledge.

The rationale that leads from knowledge to politics is in Habermas rather

different from that in Chomsky’s case, because, as I have already indicated,

Chomsky’s theory involves a kind of naturalism (through a mixture of biology and

Cartesian primacy of consciousness over thought) of the sort that Habermas (1987)

[1967] renounces already in his Knowledge and Human Interests. Chomsky assumes

the kind of rationalist naturalism that prioritizes consciousness (context-independent

full epistemic grasp, a cogito as a punctual and self-validating source of knowledge)

over thought [more context-dependent in its ‘ordinary language’ effectuation of

creative and unpredictable acts that ‘elude or transcend the supervisory grasp of

conscious awareness’ (Norris 2010: 107)] and is led from there to political

commitment to autonomy and to revolutionary criticality. On such grounds

Chomsky links his ‘rationalist view of human language as a product of our highly

evolved cognitive resources’ with ‘his ethico-political views as an anarchist believer

in the freedom, right and obligation of individual citizens to exercise their faculties

of reason and moral conscience over and against the various abuses of government

or state power’ (Norris 2010: 110). In other words, as I see it (following Norris on

this), for Chomsky, an emancipatory interest seems to be grounded in: taking

knowledge of language as exclusively a matter of conscious or reflective grasp; the

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commonality of a language speaking species; a universal and atemporal anthropo-

logical basis of ordinary language; and an ahistorical natural order that can be

obscured by culture and its politics. True knowledge can have an immutable

epistemological foundation and itself can ground truly autonomous political

decision and agency.

For Habermas, the interests that are knowledge-constitutive ‘derive both from

nature and from the cultural break with nature’. The generalizable interests that

should provide the ‘cement’ for the maintenance of society and should inform all

discourse in a political arena are a matter of rational argumentation. ‘The unity of

knowledge and interest proves itself in a dialectic that takes the historical traces of

suppressed dialogue and reconstructs what has been suppressed’ (Habermas 1987:

315). Since reason is embedded in the species, as an interest that both serves and

transcends ‘mere self-preservation,’ a consensus on moral or political issues cannot

be understood through a naturalistic conception of humanity. It can be understood

through history and the power of a thought that cannot be exhausted in conscious

mental goings-on but requires, on the contrary, the acknowledgement of advances in

thinking owed to pragmatic aspects that escape internalism16 and comprise

contingency, context, everyday communication.

Conclusion

This article has briefly sketched some of the similarities and differences between

transformational grammar and a pragmatic philosophy of language and examined

the assumptions motivating the corresponding accounts. It has argued that the

Habermasian critique of mentalism and monologism has made the Chomskian

influence regarding issues of meaning, validity (Sect. ‘‘Meaning and Universality’’),

mind–body dichotomies and linguistic competence (Sect. ‘‘Mind Versus Body:

Reclaiming Experience Via a Notion of Communicative Competence’’) a qualified

and cautious one: the critique in question effected this in ways that have immunized

the Habermasian notion of consensus from facile charges of either ultra-rationalism

or pacifying conventionalism (Sect. ‘‘Communicative Competence, Consensus and

the Ideal Speech Situation’’). The aim of the examination of the influence

Chomsky’s theory has exerted on Habermas has been to clarify what Habermas

means by universalism and the universal core of communicative competence. On

the one hand, he has directed at generative linguistics charges such as elementarism,

monologism and apriorism. On the other, he has shown appreciation for its non-

determinist account of linguistic competence. Both sides of this response to

Chomsky illuminate Habermas’s decision to shift the interests of the Frankfurt

School to the linguistic paradigm without losing sight of the ideologies lurking

behind analytic philosophy and of the pacifying tendencies of neo-pragmatist

accounts of liberalized consensus—much against some current assertions to the

opposite as illustrated in the beginning of this article. They also illuminate his

16 Internalism in the Chomskyan context concerns ‘all and only those constituent features of language

that are capable of specification in speaker-relative but strictly trans-individual terms’ (Norris 2010: 109).


123

search for a third way between rationalism and empiricism, foundationalism and

relativism and linguistic transcendence and immanence. A theory that envisages

linguistics as a reconstructive study of a quasi-transcendental system posits itself as

mediation. It represents a third way between: the idea that language is primordially a

means of thought (Descartes) or self-expression (Humboldt); and the empirical-

behavioural view that language is an animal-like functional communication system.

Chomsky’s rejection of the latter aligns him with pragmatic philosophers of

language such as Habermas, while his reluctance to somehow rehabilitate

experience diverges from the main aspirations of the communicative paradigm as

promoted by Habermas, Apel and their associates.

I hope to have shown that Habermas’s mediatory approach to issues of linguistic

meaning and language acquisition owes a great deal to its being in dialogue with

Chomsky’s work even when this engagement with generative linguistics is not

explicit or, even when explicit, it becomes somewhat polemical. To summarize,

Chomsky accommodates free will and autonomy better than behaviourism and does

more justice to the spontaneity of the speaking subject than his opponents. Then

again, in doing so, he remains exposed to criticisms of nativism, conceptualism and

ultra-rationalism—criticisms that his theory attracts from both sides, i.e., a more

mitigated rationalism and the behaviouristic-adaptivist naturalism that underlies,

say, Deweyan pragmatism [e.g., such as Kivinen and Piiroinen’s (2007)]. The

Habermasian emphasis on intersubjectivity, however, salvages the import of

Chomsky’s insights by couching them in a less ontologically loaded context that is

not as easy a target as some poststructuralist and neo-pragmatist critics assume.

Despite the shift of the Frankfurt School to more politically oriented discourses, the

premises of the early Habermasian project of universal pragmatics still represents an

alternative to dominant accounts of language and can provide a fruitful intervention

in ongoing debates about meaning and linguistic competence while at the same time

making connections with the ethico-political significance of communication that

other contemporary and rival continental theories do not attempt, committed as they

are to a rather one-sided incrimination of communication as supposedly inherently

complicit in the reproduction of liberal capitalism.

Against facile equations of the Habermasian consensus with a pacifying support

of existing democracies (e.g., see Badiou’s charge as stated in the introduction),

there is, within Habermas’s theoretical framework, a clear contrast of the ideal

communication community with the actual and real discursive collectivity. The

ideal communication community entails that the required justification of moral

principles is of the kind that would go beyond the actual communication

community. Habermas’s initial communicative ideal involves an idealized

rational-consensus theory of truth whose relation to universality and reason remains

rather unclear when divorced from the philosophical depth and nuance that

produced it in the first place. Participants in deliberation are expected to be guided

by a regulative ideal of truth as unconditional context-transcendence deriving from

the possible universality and transhistoricality of the raised validity claims. But, as

Habermas himself has made clear in the course of the development of his

communicative action theory, his ideal speech situation has not been an end-state of

complete knowledge; and the idealized presuppositions of argumentation are

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normative, non-circumventible and decisive for the process, not for the final

content, i.e., the conclusion, of the argumentative procedure. Such presuppositions

of argumentation regulate the way in which discussion unravels, they do not

determine in a finalist sense the actual plausibility of the agreed ideas. I hope to

have shown that the course of this version of the linguistic turn, which became

gradually more explicitly stated, had already been set by Habermas’s critique of

Chomsky’s generative model of linguistics in ways that refute facile, contemporary

charges of a consensus theory of truth either with rationalism and toxic universalism

or with politically complicit conventionalism.

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exploring habermas’s critical engagement with chomsky

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