On Sat, 11 Aug 2001, Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
> Communicative action is the fundamental category through which human beings
> reproduce social relations. Inherent within the logic of communication
> action is the potential for rationalization, which can occur through the
> reciprocal process of giving and taking reasons. This is ethically binding
> insofar as it is necessary for any possible orientation in the world
> (external, internal, social) and insofar as there is no possible
> alternative. A person who rejects communicative relations literally
> exorcizes themself from all living relations - this can happen
> intentionally or not - and when it does the only possible means of
> restoring such relations is through language.
>
"there is no alternative"--man, you sound like somebody at a WTO meeting! The long history of our existence on this planet has shown quite clearly diverse social patterns and diverse linguistic and nonlinguistic strategies for communication. You're taking the patterns of interaction in a specific social setting--a graduate philosophy seminar, more or less--and then treating this language use (reason-giving, unforced consensus, etc) as fundamental to all communication. You need to get out more, I guess: every day people in diverse cultures contradict each of the supposed necessities you list above. And then if they don't talk like philosophers, well, they just don't measure up to the Universal Standards for Communication.
Have you ever considered the possibility that this rationalization and reason giving, far from being some sort of basis for judging proper communication, is in fact a social product of certain societies with specific economic and political relations? Rather than taking "reason-giving" as some kind of universal normative grounding, it makes a lot more sense to me to observe how reason-giving is actually carried out in everyday life, when reason-giving is completely irrelevant to communication in everyday life, and how the call for reason giving and rationalization is imbricated in certain economic and political relations.
Miles