Translator's Introduction vii

Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology: The Christian Gauss Lecture (Princeton University, February-March 1971) 1

I Objectivist and Subjectivist Approaches to Theory Formation in the Social Sciences 3

II The Phenomenological Constitutive Theory of Society: The Fundamental Role of Claims to Validity and the Monadological Foundations of Intersubjectivity 23

III From a Constitutive Theory to a Communicative Theory of Society (Sellars and Wittgenstein): Communicative and Cognitive Uses of Language 45

IV Universal Pragmatics: Reflections on a Theory of Communicative Competence 67

V Truth and Society: The Discursive Redemption of Factual Claims to Validity 85

Intentions, Conventions, and Linguistic Interactions (1976) 105

Reflections on Communicative Pathology (1974) 129

Notes 171

Index 183

Two additional essays elaborating the themes of the lectures are also included in this volume. 'Intentions, Conventions, and Linguistic Interactions' is an essay in the philosophy of action that focuses on the validity of social norms and examines the conceptual connections between rules, conventions, norm-governed action, and intentionality. 'Reflections on Communicative Pathology' addresses the question of deviant processes of socialization and contains an analysis of the formal conditions of systematically distorted communication.

This book was designed as a companion to On the Pragmatics of Communication (1998), which took pieces from Habermas's later work to create a systematic introduction to his theory of formal pragmatics.