Jürgen Habermas 
On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction 

The core of this book is a set of five lectures delivered by
Habermas at Princeton in 1971 under the title ‘Reflections on the
Linguistic Foundation of Sociology’. These lectures offer a
preliminary view of what would become The Theory of
Communicative Action, and they form an excellent introduction
to Habermas’s ideas about communication and society. They lay out
the general parameters of Habermas’s project in an accessible way,
and situate his work in relation to other theories of society,
particularly those of Edmund Husserl, Wilfrid Sellars, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein.

Two additional essays elaborating the themes of the lectures are
also included in this volume. ‘Intentions, Conventions, and
Linguistic Interactions’ is an essay in the philosophy of action
that focuses on the validity of social norms and examines the
conceptual connections between rules, conventions, norm-governed
action, and intentionality. ‘Reflections on Communicative
Pathology’ addresses the question of deviant processes of
socialization and contains an analysis of the formal conditions of
systematically distorted communication.

This book was designed as a companion to On the Pragmatics of
Communication (1998), which took pieces from Habermas’s later
work to create a systematic introduction to his theory of formal
pragmatics.

Table of Content

Translator’s Introduction vii

Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology: The Christian Gauss Lecture (Princeton University, February-March 1971) 1

I Objectivist and Subjectivist Approaches to Theory Formation in the Social Sciences 3

II The Phenomenological Constitutive Theory of Society: The Fundamental Role of Claims to Validity and the Monadological Foundations of Intersubjectivity 23

III From a Constitutive Theory to a Communicative Theory of Society (Sellars and Wittgenstein): Communicative and Cognitive Uses of Language 45

IV Universal Pragmatics: Reflections on a Theory of Communicative Competence 67

V Truth and Society: The Discursive Redemption of Factual Claims to Validity 85

Intentions, Conventions, and Linguistic Interactions (1976) 105

Reflections on Communicative Pathology (1974) 129

Notes 171

Index 183

About the author

Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt.