"One never really knows who one's enemy is." (Jürgen Habermas) - The Social Democratic Way

The Theory of Communicative Action, 1987

As medium for reaching understanding, speech acts serve:
a) to establish and renew interpersonal relations, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of legitimate social orders;
b) to represent states and events, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of existing states of affairs;
c) to manifest experiences that is, to represent oneself- whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the subjective world to which he has privileged access. (p.308)

On The Pragmatics of Communication, 1998

The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding. (p.21)

I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated (p.22)

Reaching and understanding is the process of bringing about an agreement on the presupposed basis of validity claims that are mutually recognized. (p.23)