Ideal speech situation

In the earlier philosophy of Jürgen Habermas it is argued that an ideal speech situation is found within communication between individuals when their speech is governed by basic, but required and implied, rules. These rules of speech, Habermas suggested, are generally and tacitly accepted by both of the communicating parties, but even if they are not—perhaps in the case of one party telling a lie—the "ideal speech situation" nevertheless remains a more broadly required principle.

The concept of the ideal speech situation came under attack in the 1970s by theorists who persistently relativized the concept, arguing that any "particular" conception of an ideal speech situation could not be proven completely correct, so that any (still-unknown) gaps would allow associated oppressions to arise or persist. Habermas responded to this in 1983 with "Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action" (English trans. 1990). In this work he no longer spoke of a known ideal speech situation but instead of a new moral system ("Discourse ethics") that could be derived from the "presuppositions of argumentation". These in turn could "initially" be postulated by philosophical analysis in the same way that Immanuel Kant tried to justify his own moral system through transcendental arguments. However, in contradistinction to Kant, Habermas recognizes that the presuppositions of argumentation can be tested in practice by a device he terms "performative contradiction". If critics object to the presuppositions of argumentation, their argument "might" be turned on them to demonstrate that their argument has already granted the existence of whatever specific presupposition of argument they object to. However, if such a performative contradiction cannot be found, then the presuppositions of argumentation must be revised to take account of the criticism and the moral system derived from these presuppositions altered accordingly. In other words, "performative contradiction" is not a trump card to dismiss all objections but a fair test of those objections. The dialectical nature of Habermas's argument often goes unrecognized.

Use in Pragmatics and Speech-Act Analysis

The ideal speech situation, in its assumption of literal rather than figurative language function (language "below" rather than "above" the context-forming horizon of the lifeworld), is taken as the model for formal pragmatic analysis of speech-acts.