The foundations of Habermas's universal pragmatics

Abstract

Jurgen Habermas has developed an analysis of rationality that, when linked to his theory of societal development, provides a valuable perspective on the predicaments and possibilities within modernity. One of the important claims of his project is that universal pragmatics provides a non-foundational universalism1 for social and political theory. My claim is that universal pragmatics is a form of non-representational foundationalism. This is to say that Habermas's work is not foundationalist in the sense made popular by Rorty.2 The reason is that Habermas does not argue for a correspondence theory of truth.3 For Rorty, representation and foundationalism tend to be joined because the quest for foundations is understood in terms of representation as the search for a transparent, "God's-eye" view of the world.4 But it does not follow that a non-representationalist is always a non-foundationalist. My argument, then, is that Habermas's work, while it does not rest on a representationalist epistemology, is a form of foundationalism. An important part of the article therefore simply seeks to be clear about Habermas's arguments, because his claim is misleading.