On Habermas's Formal Pragmatics

Habermas is recognized as one of the most influential thinkers in modern time.This paper will discusse his thoughts on Formal pragmatics,mainly demonstrating the basic role of Pragmatic meaning in the new pragmatics,and illustrating the philosophical purportand significance and limitations of Formal pragmatics.From the perspective of practice,Habermas constructs Formal pragmatics based on Pragmatic meaning.If "pragmatics" points out the ideological tradition to which it belongs,then "form" identifies its theoretical originality.Meaning is the core of traditional pragmatics,and the new pragmatics is also based on the new meaning theory--Pragmatic meaning.He had revealed that the key of Speech act is not to show the interactivity of communication,but to construct interpersonal relationship,and holds that meaning does not depend on the grammatical rule system of language,but determine by the general situation constituted of pragmatic rules,rely on the unthemed Life-world and exist in the intuitive rule consciousness of the participants.In the practice of communication,the background knowledge of the themed Life-world is manifested as the meaning of proposition,the meaning of the speaker's intention and the meaning of constructing interpersonal relationship through specific speech act,which respectively point to the three kinds of validity requirements of Speech act: Authenticity requirement,Sincerity requirement and Legitimacy requirement.When we meet the validity requirement of Speech act,we can understand the meaning of language and promote consensus.In a word,from the perspective of practice,Formal pragmatics studies the communicative qualifications of communicative participants with mutual understanding and consensus(construction of reasonable interpersonal relations)based on the Pragmatic meaning of speech acts,so as to establish and reconstruct the general premise of communicative behaviors.This paper will analyze the philosophical purport of Formal pragmatics from four dimensions.As a new pragmatics,formal pragmatics redevelops pragmatics and integrates transcendental and empirical pragmatics;Formal pragmatics develops the philosophy of language based on inter-subjectivity by sublating and discarding the philosophy of subjectivity;The re-examination of "rationality" in Formal pragmatics opens up the dimension of rational communication;The re-construction of the theory of meaning by Formal pragmatics creates the idea of Pragmatic meaning based on Life-world.Formal pragmatics not only establishes a general precondition for communicative behavior theory,but also lays a pragmatic foundation for dialogue ethics and contributes practical value to social development.However,just as any theory is limited by the limited vision of the theoretical formulators,so is Formal pragmatics.Although Habermas recognizes the importance of practice in Marx's critical theory,and also tries to reconstruct pragmatic theory from practice.Compared with Experiential pragmatics and Transcendental pragmatics,his pragmatics are not different in some aspects.They all proceed from pure reason and are divorced from practice and ignore the constraints of social existence.As a result,Formal pragmatics can hardly lose its utopian color.In addition,Habermas ignores the dialectical unity of Life-world and communicative behavior,which makes it difficult for Formal pragmatics to get rid of the characteristics of abstract and static.