The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events

Abstract
»Public discourse« is a widely used expression to designate a very common practice. Despite the ubiquity of this term and the phenomenon it names, a precise definition—one that not only delineates the functional contours of this phenomenon, but also uncovers the fundamental conditions that make it possible—is yet to be articulated.
Jürgen Habermas came close to providing such a definition when he characterized public discourse as a form of what he called »communicative action,« which he conceived of as fundamentally opposed to what he termed »strategic action.« By the former, Habermas referred to that discursive activity in which participants try to reach mutual understanding about a given validity claim, their ultimate goal being the coordination of their actions through mutual agreement. By the latter, Habermas referred to that discursive activity in which participants involve themselves with the purpose of achieving their own individual success by influencing, when necessary, the opinions of others.
Habermas’s account is, in my view, valuable in that it points to the very nature of the relationship between the participants as the fundamental defining element of this conceptualization. However, the way in which he characterizes these relationships, particularly how he articulates the difference between them, is unconvincing. Indeed, Habermas’s choice of egocentrism as the key distinguishing element between communicative and strategic action is, as I will explain, problematic in several respects. Drawing on resources from social ontology, particularly the work of Margaret Gilbert and Raimo Tuomela, I propose to reinterpret the difference between strategic and communicative action as revolving not around the notion of egocentrism—an inadequate explanatory framework—but around the distinction between two different mental attitudes: that in »I-mode« and that in »we-mode.« The adoption of this alternative paradigm implies the reconceptualization of communicative action—or public discourse more generally—as an instance of we-mode collaboration; that is, a form of joint action where participants, recognizing themselves as constituting a plural subject, pursue the shared goal of mutual understanding.
I conclude the paper by exploring some of the social and political implications derived from this alternative account.

The speaker
Belén Pueyo-Ibáñez received her doctorate from Emory University in Atlanta in 2023 with a thesis on (Im)possible Communities: The Cooperative Structure of Moral Thinking. In 2023/24 she served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Frankfurt Justitia Center for Advanced Studies; in 2024/25 she is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of the research focus »Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World«

Participation
Closed event. Contact: Beate Sutterlüty; email: b.sutterluety@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de