Communicative Action and Rational Choice by Joseph Heath (review)

340 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Joseph Heath. Communicative Action and Rational Choice MIT Press. xii, 364. US $39.95 Joseph Heath sets out to develop a dialogue >between Habermas=s theory of action and the theory of rational choice.= Heath describes Habermas=s theory as >the best attempt that has been made so far to produce a general theory of social action= (original emphasis) linking >the instrumental dimension of human action= considered as >the way that practical deliberation is concerned with discovering the most efficient ends to the realization of given ends= emphasized by economists, with >the argument of sociologists that social norms or shared rules of conduct play an important role in social action by directly motivating agents to conform to specific institutional patterns.= Habermas has achieved this, according to Heath, by applying >a nonfoundationist concept of rationality to the task of understanding the logic of social action,= in particular by incorporating speech act theory into his model of social action. The most exciting feature of Habermas=s work is that he presents >a concrete alternative= to the instrumental view, a >communicative= conception of practical rationality. Heath has some friendly criticisms of the details of Habermas=s argument, and addresses these in the first half of his book, while building on his revised version of Habermas in the second part. We will focus on the former rather than the latter with a few criticisms of Habermas of our own, and then consider Heath=s. Habermas explicitly bases his >speech act theory= and notion of >linguistic action= upon an interpretation of the work of George Herbert Mead. However, Habermas differs from Mead in important ways. For example, Mead describes his theory as one of communicative interaction. Habermas, however, refers to Mead=s theory of communicative action. There is a great difference between the two. Anthony Giddens writes, >first, it is wrong to treat interaction as equivalent, or reducible, to action: Second it is wrong to treat action as equivalent, or reducible to communicative action; and third, it is an error to suppose that communicative interaction can be examined solely on the level of norms. I doubt that Habermas would accept that he makes these reductions when they are thus bluntly stated. But I do not think it difficult to demonstrate that he constantly makes these elisions when he writes about interaction.= Furthermore in terms of rationality, Habermas collapses the >rationale= for interaction to the >rational,= overemphasizing the need for claims for validity in action. By accepting Habermas=s basic approach to >norms= and >social integration ,= Heath basically accepts both Habermas=s revisions to Mead, and lumps the >classical sociological analysis= and perhaps all sociologists (and possibly other social >scientists=) with Durkheim and Parsons. However, in Heath=s conclusions, he is more critical of the foundations of Habermas=s theory than he may admit. humanities 341 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Heath shows that he has weakened Habermas=s theory at several points, and cites three (heavily edited here for brevity). First, >I have argued that the accountability of social action cannot be explained as the consequence of the fact that it is linguistically coordinated, because speech acts do not generate the type of extradiscursive commitments that Habermas claims. Because the compositional component of the speech act provides it with essentially descriptive content, the only inferential consequences of the speech act that the speaker and the hearer must know are those that would be needed to demonstrate that the relevant state of affairs obtains.= Second, >I also argued that there is no such thing as a specifically Apractical@ form of discourse governed by its own distinct rules. ... Practical discourse should be determined simply by its topic not its structure.= Third, >I argued that there is no reason to think that moral argumentation must exhibit convergence Ain principle.@= These criticisms seem to strip more than the façade from Habermas=s argument, since they may allow for alternative interpretations of the >speech act= in communication and thus may implicitly allow interaction as well as action, rationale as well as >practical rationality= in Habermas=s terms...