Jürgen Habermas

From Geography

Habermas is a famous German philosopher and sociologist (1929). He is recognized as one of the most influential post war thinkers on topics such as capitalist society, democracy, politics, reason and language. There is much to be said about Habermas’ work, and information on his legacy can be easily found online. However the focus in this wiki lies on his influence in the field of human geography.

Speech act and Habermas

Habermas has done the ground work for the development of the concept of speech act. According to Habermas speech acts should be seen as social action. There are three universal types of speech acts (Werlen, 2009, presentation):

- Constitutive: descriptive etc.: cognitive level (truth)

- Expressive: desiring, hoping etc.: intentions and attitudes(truthfulness)

- Regulative: excusing, ordering, warning etc.: social norms and institutions (correctness)

Each speech act needs to be valid for Habermas since his goal is to create an ideal speech situation. He comes up with four types of validity claims:

- Comprehensibility (understandability)

- Truth (consensuality)

- Truthfulness (sincerity)

- Correctness (normativity)

To reach an ideal speech situations the four criterions of validity have to be adopted under condition of rationally legitimized consensus. For that four requirements have to be fulfilled:

- 1 Communicative speech acts (open to critics)

- 2 Disclosure and critique of ‘prejudices’ (Vormeinungen)

- 3 Application of truthfulness

- 4 Use of regulative speech acts

Influence

Although Habermas himself does not write extensively about space or geography his ideas about speech act as well as concepts such as Husserl’s lifeworld and social action in society have been extensively used and further developed by geographers such as Benno Werlen and Wolfgang Zierhofer in their action theoretical approaches to human geography.

References

Werlen, B, (2009). Presentation on speech act.

Johnsten, R.T., Gregory, D., Pratt, G., & Watts, M. (2000). The dictionary of Human Geography (Electronic Version). Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.

Contributors

Published by Henk-Jan van Maanen & Ingram Smit

Links added by Aafke Brus --AafkeBrus 12:30, 31 October 2011 (CET)