On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction

The core of this book is a set of five lectures delivered byHabermas at Princeton in 1971 under the title 'Reflections on theLinguistic Foundation of Sociology'. These lectures offer apreliminary view of what would become The Theory ofCommunicative Action, and they form an excellent introductionto Habermas's ideas about communication and society. They lay outthe 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 LudwigWittgenstein. Two additional essays elaborating the themes of the lectures arealso included in this volume. 'Intentions, Conventions, andLinguistic Interactions' is an essay in the philosophy of actionthat focuses on the validity of social norms and examines theconceptual connections between rules, conventions, norm-governedaction, and intentionality. 'Reflections on CommunicativePathology' addresses the question of deviant processes ofsocialization and contains an analysis of the formal conditions ofsystematically distorted communication. This book was designed as a companion to On the Pragmatics ofCommunication (1998), which took pieces from Habermas's laterwork to create a systematic introduction to his theory of formalpragmatics.