H. P. Grice's Implicatum and Communicatum

COMMUNICATUM -- communicative action Ethics, political philosophy For Habermas, a distinct and crucially important type of social interaction that is oriented toward reaching mutual understanding through a process of argumentation. Within such action, participants harmonize their respective plans on the basis of having a common understanding of the situation and make claims that all concerned can accept as valid. Communicative action seeks public agreement rather than private advantage: agents do not seek to influence others to act in ways solely favoring their own interests and plans. Communicative action is opposed to strategic action, in which individual participants are oriented toward achieving their own goals by manipulating their opponents. Strategic action is instrumental and egoistic, with individual agents seeking to achieve their ends by any effective means. Communicative action is a matter of dialogue and is characterized by reciprocity. There are implicit canons of normative validity in communicative action, and each side acts out of unforced obligations based upon mutual understanding. Discourse is the idealization of communicative action. Philosophy should reveal the universal conditions determining the possibility of communicative action. It should show how communicative actions of different types are embedded in historical situations and how they change in historical time. The theory of communicative action is inspired by speech act theory. “The concept of communicative action presupposes languages as the medium for a kind of reaching understanding, in the course of which participants, through relating to a world, reciprocally raise validity claims that can be accepted or contested.” Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action I -- communicative ethics, another name for discourse ethics -- communicative rationality: Habermas’s term for the rationality that is implicitly contained in the structure of human speech and shared by all competent speakers. Standard accounts of rationality represent it as involving one-dimensional logical relations between propositions and as centered in the thought and action of individual subjects. In contrast, communicative rationality is twodimensional and involves a dialogical relationship between different speakers. The traditional conception of rationality is represented in the paradigm of our knowledge of objects, while communicative rationality is expressed in the paradigm of mutual understanding between subjects who are capable of speech and action and in an understanding of the world that is decentered away from the individual subject. It is the life-world rationality, dealing with the intersubjectivity of valid claims. Its sphere of validity corresponds to the sphere of human speech. For Habermas, the notion of communicative rationality is the basis for communicative action. He calls the process by which communicative action replaces strategic action communicative rationalization. “This communicative rationality recalls older ideas of logos, inasmuch as it brings along with it the connotations of a noncoercively unifying, consensus-building force of a discourse in which the participants overcome their at first subjectively biased views in favour of a rationally motivated agreement.” Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity -- communicative rationalization, see communicative rationality