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that enables social order. At the heart of his proposition lies the concept of commu-
nicative action. Communicative action relies on difference, hence on its participants raising
different claims to propositional truth (Habermas 1996b: 162). Key to this conception is the
assumption that social reality can only be constituted, hence attain the status of quasi-facts
that structure interaction, through the employment of the representational medium of lan-
guage. By making use of language, which by definition is a collective and not an individual
resource, actors give expression to their individual understandings of reality. Yet, operational-
ising linguistic capabilities in order to represent reality, i.e. truth, causes actors to draw on
.idealisations. as language consists of general concepts that claim to entail identical meaning
for the entirety of a language community.1 Thus whenever individuals make use of such ide-
alisations, they employ capabilities that claim for themselves the status of facts (facticity)
(Habermas 1996a: 10-3). However, since language can only represent but not embody truth,
individuals. linguistic expressions can only serve as propositional truth, hence representations
that, in Habermas. conception paradigmatically (Baynes 1995: 203), can be contested by
other interpreters. Such interpretation of proposed truth takes place within the individual sub-
ject at the backdrop of the so-called lifeworld, hence personal experiences that operate as
“implicit knowledge […] [and] taken-for-granted assumptions” about the nature of social real-
ity (Habermas 1996b: 168). What follows is that truth must be agreed upon intersubjectively
among the members of an .interpretation https://www.51lunwen.org/politics/2010/0907/1043564717.html community. in order to become true knowledge
about the social reality of the world in which interaction takes place (Habermas 1996a: 16).
This is where communicative action comes into play.

1 If this condition was not met, language would serve no purpose and instead become an arbitrary system that
could not fulfil the function of social coordination (Habermas 1996a: 11).

In order to achieve consensual agreement through communicative action, participants
are required to engage in discourse in which adherence to certain communicative principles
plays a critical role. Accordingly, actors must be compelled to utter their objectives and moti-
vations without reservation and, most importantly, interact with each other on the basis of the
sincere intention to reach agreement over proposed representations of reality (Habermas
1996b: 161-2). Further, propositions must be brought forward in the form of criticisable
claims which each participant can affirm or object to. The limits of communicative action are
defined by the oppositional form of so-called strategic action in which actors neither meet the
necessary requirements nor indicate the willingness to reach mutual agreement, but instead
decide to overpower or manipulate each other (Habermas 1996a: 18).

The crucial role communicative action plays in the constitution of social reality makes
obvious two critical features of this approach. Firstly, if truth is constructed through mutual
agreement, its scope is limited to the specific context it has been negotiated in. Truth can
hence only exist in the form of context-specific validity. Secondly, however,本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。