Abstract

Jürgen Habermas derives his political theory and discourse ethics from a view of language based upon “universal pragmatics.” Universal pragmatics is identified by Habermas to reveal universal conditions of possible understanding with the belief that not only syntactic and semantic characteristics of language, but also pragmatic characteristics of utterances related to speech should be reconstructed to build an undistorted communication. Nevertheless, the communicative competence, which is supposed to be related to pragmatics of language, is derived from the misinterpretation of J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances. Linguistic as well as communicative competences have a universal core in universal pragmatics, which paves the way for the essentialist depiction of language having the Chomskyian overtones. Austin’s theory of performative utterances, on the other hand, does not have a universalistic claim. Because Habermas derives universal pragmatics from the misinterpretation of Austin’s theory of performative utterances, it is important to evaluate Austin and Habermas’s views of language by comparing and contrasting them with one another. The first part of the paper consists of the articulation of universal pragmatics. The second part of the paper focuses on Habermas’s unjustified critique of Austin.