On the Logic of the Social Sciences by Jürgen Habermas

Author:Jürgen Habermas [Habermas, Jürgen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-10-08T04:00:00+00:00

7 The Linguistic Approach

7.1

Today the problem of language has taken the place of the traditional problem of consciousness: the transcendental critique of language takes the place of that of consciousness. Wittgenstein’s life forms, which correspond to Husserl’s lifeworlds, now follow not the rules of synthesis of a consciousness as such but rather the rules of the grammar of language games. In consequence, linguistic philosophy no longer grasps the connection between intention and action, as does phenomenology, in terms of the constitution of meaning contexts, that is, within the transcendental frame of reference of a world constructed from acts of consciousness. The linking of intentions, a problem that the study of intentional action also encounters, is now explained not in terms of a transcendental genesis of “meaning” but rather in terms of a logical analysis of linguistic meanings. Like the phenomenological approach, the linguistic approach leads to the grounding of an interpretive sociology that examines social action on the level of intersubjectivity. But intersubjectivity is no longer produced by the reciprocally interlocked and virtually interchangeable perspectives of a lifeworld; rather, it is given with the grammatical rules of symbolically regulated interactions. The transcendental rules in accordance with which lifeworlds are structured now become graspable through linguistic analysis in the rules of communication processes.

This shift of analytic approach has as a consequence a transposition of the level of investigation: social actions can now be analyzed in the same way as the internal relationships between symbols. The paradoxical requirement of an empirical investigation from a transcendental perspective no longer needs to lead to misunderstandings; it can easily be fulfilled by linguistic analysis. For the linguistic rules in accordance with which symbols are connected are on the one hand accessible to empirical analysis, as subject matter to be grasped descriptively, but on the other hand they are higher-order data that are constituted not on the level of facts but on the level of propositions about facts. Linguistic investigations have always been empirically directed logical analyses. Now interpretive sociology is also directed to this level; this focus has the advantage of being unambiguous. Transcendental-logical methods of proceeding, which had been reserved to philosophy and had proved themselves only within a specific tradition, are no longer needed. The possibility of a confusion between this level of reflection and the level of experimentally testable propositions is excluded. As an analysis of concepts, linguistic analysis is unmistakably distinguished from a testing of hypotheses.

The linguistic approach owes this lack of ambiguity to its extreme contrast with behaviorism. Whereas the latter identifies society with nature by reducing action to behavior and takes a decidedly agnostic position on structural distinctions between object domains, linguistics removes any trace of nature from symbolically mediated modes of behavior and idealistically sublimates society to a context of symbols. It puts social facts completely on the side of symbol systems. Both positions appeal to the same basis for sociology as an empirical science—a strict distinction between propositions and facts. The internal connections among signs are logical; the external connections among events are empirical.

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