Cooke Maeve. Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas's Pragmatics

The MIT Press, 1997. — xviii, 207 pp. — (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought). — ISBN: 0-262-53145-3.Language and Reason opens up new territory for social theorists by providing the first general introduction to Habermas's program of formal pragmatics: his reconstruction of the universal principles of possible understanding that, he argues, are already operative in everyday communicative practices.
Readers of Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action and his later social theory know that the idea of communicative rationality is central to his version of critical theory. Language and Reason opens up new territory for social theorists by providing the first general introduction to Habermas's program of formal pragmatics: his reconstruction of the universal principles of possible understanding that, he argues, are already operative in everyday communicative practices. Philosophers of language will discover surprising and fruitful connections between Habermas's account of language and validity (especially his theory of meaning) and their own concerns.Communicative Action: An Overview
Communicative Rationality: An Initial Specification
Speech Acts and Validity Claims
A Pragmatic Theory of Meaning: From Comprehension to Consensus
Communicative Rationality: Concluding Discussion