Abstract:
This thesis takes as its guiding premise the idea that there is a link between the recognition we afford people and our perception of the validity of what they say. In particular, that our esteem for a person as more credible or less so can affect our willingness to trust in her judgment—to take what she says as valid on trust. And conversely, that the saying of valid or invalid things can affect how we esteem a speaker—how credible or trustworthy we take her to be. Both communicative dynamics point to an interrelation between validity and recognition that deserves exploration. In this thesis I consider what Jürgen Habermas has to say about these communicative dynamics. What foothold does his theory of communicative action offer for thinking about how these dynamics between speakers work? Do his pragmatic analyses of communication adequately account for them? If not, which aspects of these analyses are inadequate? And how might we correct them, and revise the presuppositions on which they rest, to better account for such dynamics at the pragmatic level? Answering these questions is the primary aim of this thesis. Owing to a relative scarcity of secondary literature on these themes in Habermas’s work, I explore these questions through a close analysis of the relevant concepts in the primary texts, in particular, the concepts of the warranty and rational trust. I find that while Habermas does acknowledge that how we esteem a person may affect our willingness to accept her claims, he overlooks the corollary dynamic, namely, that the validity or invalidity of a person’s claims can affect the esteem in which we hold her. Both directions of flow need to be acknowledged if we are to give a full account of the relations of recognition involved in communication—especially, relations of recognition that are contingent on our performance as communicators, and which manifest between speakers of unequal standing. Indeed, accounting for these relations requires us to revise a key premise of Habermas’s pragmatics: the idea that speakers necessarily make an idealizing presupposition of one another’s rationality when they enter into communication.