Luca Corchia

By addressing the theme ‘Objectivist and subjectivist approaches to theoretical training in the social sciences’, first of all, Habermas classifies the generative theories of society that interest him, excluding behavioral models and rational choice, which reduce the logic of the situation to characteristics too limited and referable to already defined principles of social conduct or operational criteria. Considering, therefore, only the sociological theories that take the generation of meaningfully organized structures of life as a key concept, Habermas examined the four approaches: a) the phenomenological model of the knowing or judging subject that from Kant arrives to Alfred Schutz through Husserl, aimed at reconstructing the constitution of the objects of experience and the everyday world of lived experience (‘lifeworld’) in which we can have experiences, relate to objects and persons, and perform actions. The epistemological origins of this phenomenological theory of society are evident in the title of the well-known study by Schutz’s students Berger and Luckmann. They conceive of the generative process of society as producing an image of reality in relation to which subjects orient their behavior toward one another; b-c) The second and third models of generative theory, structuralist anthropology and systems theory, conceive society in a holistic mode, as a set of rules independent of the sense attributions of the actors. In the first case, these are the grammatical rules of a natural language and in the second case, these are the cybernetic rules of a self-regulating machine. The limit of these two models, according to Habermas, is that the constitutive model no more shows the way out of the monadic shell of the active subject than the systems model can incorporate speaking and acting subjects and, especially, their interrelations. For the system of grammatical rules requires competent speakers for its actualization, whereas the machine regulates itself and has no need of any subject at all. In neither case is the paradigm suited for giving an accurate account of how intersubjectively binding meaning structures are generated (Habermas, 2001 [1971b]: 16); d) The analysis of the subject meanings, of the social norms and of the cultural values is the object of the fourth approach that Habermas defines as the model of ‘ordinary language communication (speech and interaction)’. This is the generation of interpersonal situations of speaking and acting together, that is, the form of the intersubjectivity of possible understanding (Verstdndigung). In this model, the abstract systems of rules must explain two phenomena: ‘The first is the pragmatic generation of the common basis of intersubjectively shared meaning. The second is the more specifically linguistic generation of sentences that we use in speech acts for purposes of both cognition and action’ (Habermas, 2001 [1971b]: 17). The main examples are Mead’s social psychology of role-taking and the later Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, in which the generative rules include not only symbolic forms such as sentences and actions, but also the subjects of speech and action itself, which are formed through normal linguistic communication. For Habermas, these models are ‘communicative theories of society’ and prefigure the universal pragmatics that he takes to be the right kind of foundation for social theory and whose basic tenets he should like to develop. However, they are not appropriate for the logical reconstruction of the historical development of the active subject or the underlying rule systems (Habermas, 2001 [1971b]: 18). In the second lesson, ‘The Phenomenological Constitutive Theory of Society: The Fundamental Role of Claims to Validity and the Monadological Foundations of Intersubjectivity’, we find the second context in which Habermas uses Mead (and Wittgenstein) regarding the genesis of semantic conventions, that is the social construction of identical meanings that are the basis of shared intersubjective experiences: To account for the identity of semantic conventions, Wittgenstein proposed the model of a rule that at least two subjects must be able to follow. Mead recommends the model of a role that establishes reciprocally interchangeable expectations about behavior for at least two subjects. Concepts such as ‘rule’ or ‘role’ must be defined from the outset in terms of a relation between subjects. They circumvent the notion of anything like a private consciousness that only subsequently enters into contact with another conscious being […] Communicative theories enjoy the advantage of being able to take as their starting point the intersubjective relation that constitutive theories attempt in vain to derive from the activity of monadic consciousness (Habermas, 2001 [1971b]: 43-44). According to Habermas, Mead goes one step further. Wittgenstein reduces the uniformity of meaning to the intersubjective recognition of rules, but does not examine the mutual relationship between the two subjects who accept a rule. The fact that each partner must be able to anticipate the expectations of others is not obvious. Mead was the first to analyze this  ‘foundation of intentional action’ (Habermas, 2001 [1971b]: 59).

Luca Corchia