Concept
Communicative rationality
Overview
Communicative rationality or communicative reason (German: kommunikative Rationalität) is a theory or set of theories which describes human rationality as a necessary outcome of successful communication. This theory is in particular tied to the philosophy of German philosophers Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and their program of universal pragmatics, along with its related theories such as those on discourse ethics and rational reconstruction. This view of reason is concerned with clarifying the norms and procedures by which agreement can be reached, and is therefore a view of reason as a form of public justification.
According to the theory of communicative rationality, the potential for certain kinds of reason is inherent in communication itself. Building from this, Habermas has tried to formalize that potential in explicit terms. According to Habermas, the phenomena that need to be accounted for by the theory are the "intuitively mastered rules for reaching an understanding and conducting argumentation", possessed by subjects who are capable of speech and action. The goal is to transform this implicit "know-how" into explicit "know-that", i.e. knowledge, about how we conduct ourselves in the realm of "moral-practical" reasoning.
The result of the theory is a conception of reason that Habermas sees as doing justice to the most important trends in twentieth century philosophy, while escaping the relativism which characterizes postmodernism, and also providing necessary standards for critical evaluation.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The transcendental conception of reason is therefore nothing else than the conception of the totality of the conditions of a given conditioned. Now as the unconditioned alone renders possible totality of conditions, and, conversely, the totality of conditions is itself always unconditioned; a pure rational conception in general can be defined and explained by means of the conception of the unconditioned, in so far…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Communicative rationality is; the author is tied to Communicative rationality in the knowledge graph.
But the wingèd words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech. Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public. But it and its results are but tools after all. Their final actuality is accomplished in face-to-face…
John Dewey, The public and its problems
States what Communicative rationality is.
For this accession, then, pure theoretical reason, for which all those ideas are transcendent and without object, has simply to thank its practical faculty. In this they become immanent and constitutive, being the source of the possibility of realizing the necessary object of pure practical reason (the summum bonum); whereas apart from this they are transcendent, and merely regulative principles of speculative…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason
The author is tied to Communicative rationality in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Communicative rationality
Related ideas
- Contextualism
- Foundationalism
- Norm (philosophy)
- Immanuel Kant
- Jürgen Habermas
- Karl-Otto Apel
- Worldview
- Plato
- Postmodernism
- Semantics
- Justification (epistemology)
- Nazism
- Fallibilism
- Objectivity (science)
- Speech act
- Relativism
- Communication
- Phenomenon
- Rationality
- Moral
- Division of labour
- Nikolas Kompridis
- Rational reconstruction
- Universal pragmatics
Place in the tradition
Part of Discourse ethics.
Explore Communicative rationality in the interactive graph →