Habermas & the proper 'language' for social theory.

Societies are statistical ensembles featuring strategic games of various types. The proper 'language' for social theory is Statistical Game Theory eked out by various Structural Causal Models of a representative agent type. 

Communication is about solving coordination or discoordination games. Where there is a high incentive for both parties, ceteris paribus, solutions are highly efficient & consume minimal cognitive or other resources.  That's why a businessman in China can do a 100 million dollar deal with a businessman in Chile after speaking for 5 minutes on the phone even if neither speaks any language but their own. One reason for this is because 'the law of increasing functional information' goes into overdrive to provide better & better signalling and screening mechanisms such that communication becomes much more efficient where mutual benefit greatly burgeons.

Habermas had studied worthless shit at Uni & thus was unaware of contemporary developments in Econ & STEM subjects. 

William Rehg writes-

Drawing on insights from American pragmatism and the speech-act theories of ]. L. Austin and John Searle, Habermas considers a "formal-pragmatic" approach to language as most adequate for social theory.

What are 'the structural, universal conditions necessary for successful communication'? The answer has to do with the utility of communication. If it is higher than the cost, it will occur. If it isn't, it won't. The cost goes down if there are 'non-convexities' in provision- i.e. economies of scope & scale. The same is true of the benefit. Communication isn't 'philosophical' or 'linguistic'. It is economic & information theoretical. 

This approach goes beyond semantic and syntactic analyses of meaning and grammar

which aren't needed for communication. Get a fucking interpreter & you are golden. But, even that becomes unnecessary as purpose built screening & signalling devices become cheaper & better. 

to examine the general structures that enable competent speakers actually to engage in successful interaction, which involves more than simply knowing how to form grammatical sentences.

Sadly, the 'i-language' approach did not enable the creation of accurate machine translation or computers that can talk like HAL in Kubrik's 2001. The 'e-language' approach did but only because computing power started falling exponentially in price.  

 Specifically, competent speakers know how to base their interactions on validity claims that their hearers will accept or that could, if necessary, be redeemed with good reasons.

Nonsense! Chomsky was a competent enough speaker. Smart people thought he was babbling paranoid nonsense or indulging in magical thinking. .  

As already mentioned, this involves a tension between facticity and validity insofar as a claim to validity raised here and now, and perhaps justified according to local standards, ultimately points beyond a particular community.

I suppose Christians can say that about the New Testament & Hindus can say that about the Gita & Muslims can say that about the Quran. 

But only the STEM subjects can say that it is likely that sentient beings in other galaxies would consider their findings valid.  

At least this is the case with truth claims and moral claims. As understood by participants engaged in interaction and discourse, truth claims are claims about the objective world that all human beings share,

only if they share the same frame of reference.  

and moral claims have to do with norms for interpersonal relationships that any autonomous adult should find rationally acceptable from the standpoint of justice and respect for persons.

There are no such moral claims.  

If such claims are valid, then any competent speaker should, under suitable conditions, be able to accept the claim on the basis of good reasons.

Did you know that if you are a competent speaker you will agree that you should only eat dog turds? Why aren't you eating dog turds? Do you want people to think you are an incompetent speaker?  

When a claim is contested, actually bringing about such rational acceptance requires actors to shift into a discourse in which, the pressures of action having been more or less neutralized, they can isolate and test the disputed claim solely on the basis of arguments.

This is 'gaslighting'. You say you don't want to suck my cock. This proves you want to suck it. Your arguments are self-defeating.

The proper response to gaslighting is kicking the fucker's head in. Competent speaking can also be done by sticking a broom up the interlocutor's arse.  

To be sure, not all types of claims anticipate the agreement of a· universal audience.

None do. But then 'virtue signalling' is just 'cheap talk'. It doesn't mean shit. 

The differences between types of discourse can be quite important in this regard. For example, claims about what is good for a particular group (or person),

if there is a costly to disguise signal, there can be a 'separating equilibrium'. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry supporting a Eusocial bourgeois strategy.  

or about a particular group's authentic self-understanding, may be addressed only to the individuals concerned and those who know them well. Such discourses, which Habermas labels "ethical," differ both in theme and scope of audience from the "moral" discourse concerned with universal norms of justice. 

Habermas's shite was displaced by Woke 'Grievance Studies' shite. Boo fucking hoo.  

But even these more limited ethical claims presuppose an orientation to mutual understanding,

there is a discoordination game. It pays to say 'this is a Black (or Lezza or Islamist etc.) thing. You wouldn't understand.'  

which for Habermas is constitutive of communicative action.

Affiliative action. No Communication is necessary.  

The orientation to reaching understanding about validity claims

doesn't exist even within families, let alone any larger social unit.  

serves as a mechanism for social integration

that mechanism is family, school, job, Church, Pub, etc. The 'validity' claims of the padre are different from those of the publican.  

inasmuch as it grounds shared expectations,

based on asking a smart guy what is likely to happen 

ways of interpreting situations, and so forth. To illustrate Habermas's approach further, imagine that a dispute arises within a group and that its members wish to resolve it consensually on the basis of validity claims.

I can't. Such a thing is impossible. Habermas can't point to any such group as having existed or as existing now.  Consensus is arrived at by horse-trading. 

According to Habermas, conflict resolution on the basis of reasoned agreement involves at least three idealizing assumptions:

impossible assumptions 

members must assume they mean the same thing by the same words and expressions;

Very true. When you use the word 'me'- as in 'this belongs to me' , you mean the book belongs to me, not you, because 'me' is the word I use to mean myself.

they must consider themselves as rationally accountable;

It is not rational to think you yourself can be 'rationally accountable'- more particularly if you need an accountant to file your tax return for you. Similarly, I expect the Doctor to account for the fact that I keep throwing up. He thinks it is because I drink too much. It isn't morning sickness because I'm a virgin. Also I have a dick, not a vagina.  

and they must suppose that, when they do arrive at a mutually acceptable resolution, the supporting arguments sufficiently justify a (defeasible) confidence that any claims to truth, justice, and so forth that underlie their consensus will not subsequently prove false or mistaken.

If Field Medal winning mathematicians can't reach this sort of consensus, what hope is there for the rest of us? 

No  local, spatiotemporally finite consensus can fully realize these idealizations; yet if they should subsequently prove false-if members discover that a crucial term was understood in two different ways or that they were seriously self-deceived or that they were mistaken about certain facts or norms- then there are grounds for questioning the original agreement and reopening the discussion.

These are grounds for never having it in the first place.  

That is, these idealizations

lies 

imply a tension between the de facto social acceptance (soziale Geltung) of a group consensus and the idealized validity ( Gilltigkeit) that such a consensus must claim for itself if members are to accept it as reasonable.

We are welcome to say that God guided each and every one of us to agree that we are truly sweet and nice and greatly superior to those savages across the border. One may say this is a 'white lie' or a polite fiction. One can't say it has any sort of validity- let alone that of an ideal type.  

Communicatively achieved agreements are in principle always open to challenge,

only to the extent that everything is.  

and thus are at best a precarious source of social integration.

They are irrelevant.  

If a community is to be a stable one, then,

certain economic & military conditions must be met 

it requires more than explicit agreement as a basis for social cooperation.

The basis of every type of cooperation is utilitarian gains in factor productivity.  

Conflict resolution will be rendered easier the more the members of the group can limit their discursive efforts to a few problematic validity claims.

Limit it to zero & there is no fucking conflict 

For example, if they are at odds over how best to manage a particular environmental threat-one might imagine a city council debating how to deal with an imminent flood

hire the guy best able to do it. Don't fucking debate the matter.  

-they have a better chance of reaching agreement if they only have to resolve an empirical question about the effectiveness of two competing strategies, and do not also have to argue over fairness criteria, or what would count as a successful outcome. In short, reaching agreement communicatively requires a large background consensus on matters that are unproblematic for group members.

Agree that hiring the guy best able to get the job done or don't. Just let it happen. The question is how will the thing be paid for. This is called 'mechanism design'. Habermas understands that there will be preference revelation (free-rider) problems, holdouts, etc. But there is always a Coasian solution for strategic behaviour irrespective of the law. 

 In fact, the need for modern law partly arises because,

they are public signals which support better Aumann correlated equilibria.  

with the growth of capitalist market economies,

which happens even faster where there are Coasian mechanisms rather than complex law codes 

contexts dominated by strategic action become increasingly important for social coordination.

No. The more State intervention there is, the more law there will be. Consider a situation where an industry is self-regulating. No laws with respect to it need be passed. The moment there is Government certification or licensing, there will be a substantial and evolving body of law concerning that industry. 

Haberman didn't bother to communicate with smart people over the course of his long, useless, life. He was wrong about everything because he held absurd beliefs- e.g. that a fucking Kraut like himself could understand Democracy or Rationality or how Discussions can be made productive. That's what happens when a boy studies, and then teaches, a non-STEM subject- more particularly if he is as stupid as shit.  

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