The articulation of culture as an intersubjective yet historical phenomenon that exerts influence over the subject’s actions and activities raises two fundamental questions. First, what is the relationship between the subject and culture? Second, why and how do historical transformations and changes in culture occur?
With regard to the first question, discussions emerge concerning the relationship between the individual and society, and subsequently between agency and structure. With respect to the second question, issues pertaining to the relationship between culture and other social phenomena—such as the economy, politics, and society—are brought to the fore. In debates concerning the individual and society, or agency and structure, three main approaches can be identified: micro-level approaches that grant primacy to the subject, the knowing agent, and the actor; macro-level approaches that take social structures as fundamental; and approaches that move back and forth between agency and structure, attributing identity and essentiality to each while refraining from reducing one to the other.
In discussions concerning the relationship between culture and other social domains, a wide range of diverse and plural perspectives exists. Classical Marxists reduce culture to the economy and analyze all values and forms of knowledge in relation to the economic system and structure. From their perspective, the rise of the bourgeoisie leads to the dissolution and evaporation of all values and forms of knowledge that had emerged within the framework of previous relations of production. Others, such as Michel Foucault, interpret and explain knowledge, consciousness, and culture in terms of structures of power and politics, regarding transformations in the domain of authority as the driving force behind cultural change. Still others analyze cultural structures as possessing a relative or effective autonomy with respect to economic, political, and social structures. Communicative rationality is articulated by those who, with attention to the interaction between agency and structure, seek cultural structures within the very fabric of human actions, interactions, and communications.
Communicative rationality has neither its roots in a transcendent realm nor does it possess a transcendental identity. Rather, communicative rationality, as an intersubjective construct, is produced within the context of the everyday agreements of human beings. Communicative rationality relocates autonomous identity, culture, and shared social understanding to the sphere of interactions and communications among subjects and actors who, in order to pursue their aims, are inevitably compelled to interact and act with one another. The epistemic value of communicative rationality lies in the understanding and interpretation of the speech and language of interlocutors within their lifeworld and shared existence.
Despite certain similarities to inferential rationality, this level of rationality is not the human intellect’s attempt to comprehend transmitted knowledge derived from intuition, divine revelation, or reports based on sensory perception or other sources. Nor is communicative rationality an effort of reason to understand discourses that merely reflect the intentions of actors. It is also not the enlightening endeavor of conceptual human reason to grasp phenomena that come into being through human conventions under the names of language or speech; that is, communicative rationality is not the work of human reason aimed at understanding constructs that have emerged solely through its own will. Rather, communicative rationality is itself a human construct—that is, a dimension of human volition that has taken form as language, discourse, and a medium of communication among individuals.
A passage from the book “Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences”
