Communicative action

In sociology, communicative action is cooperative action undertaken by individuals based upon mutual deliberation and argumentation. The term was developed by German philosopher-sociologist Jürgen Habermas in his work The Theory of Communicative Action.

Communicative action for Habermas is possible given human capacity for rationality. This rationality, however, is "no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory." Instead, Habermas situates rationality as a capacity inherent within language, especially in the form of argumentation. "We use the term argumentation for that type of speech in which participants thematize contested validity claims and attempt to vindicate or criticize them through argumentation." The structures of argumentative speech, which Habermas identifies as the absence of coercive force, the mutual search for understanding, and the compelling power of the better argument, form the key features from which intersubjective rationality can make communication possible. Action undertaken by participants through a process of such argumentative communication can be assessed as to their rationality to the extent which they fulfill those criteria.

Communicative rationality is distinct from instrumental, normative, and dramaturgic rationality by its ability to concern all three "worlds" as he terms them, following Karl Popper—the subjective, objective, and intersubjective or social. Communicative rationality is self-reflexive and open to a dialogue in which participants in an argument can learn from others and from themselves by reflecting upon their premises and thematizing aspects of their cultural background knowledge to question suppositions that typically go without question.

Communicative action is action based upon this deliberative process, where two or more individuals interact and coordinate their action based upon agreed interpretations of the situation. Communicative action is distinguished by Habermas from other forms of action, such as instrumental action, which is pure goal-oriented behavior, dealt with primarily in economics, by taking all functions of language into consideration. That is, communicative action has the ability to reflect upon language used to express propositional truth, normative value, or subjective self-expression.

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