ISMAEL DE OLIVEIRA GEROLAMO

The research aims to shed light on a philosophical confrontation: José A. Giannotti's critique of J. Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action. The critique specifically focuses on what appears to constitute the foundations of a formal pragmatics as developed by Habermas in this work. By outlining the main points of Habermas's theory and Giannotti's objections, the goal is to elucidate fundamental differences between the authors—pertaining to distinct philosophical conceptions and far-reaching logical disagreements. In order to rationally reconstruct certain universal conditions of communicative actions, Habermas employs a language analysis that distinguishes between propositional content and illocutionary act, hence projecting an agreement, an ideal of understanding, which provides the occasion to recover a rational core always within the horizon of communicative interactions. Both the anticipation of "universal" discursive conditions and the division of the proposition are challenged by Giannotti, who sees therein an unwarranted anticipation of effective discursive practice that fails to account for the impossibility of outlining a transparent horizon of understanding in language