Date: Tue, 9 May 1995 09:44:35 -0600
From: lennymo-AT-casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Lenny Moss)
Subject: Re: HAB: Communicative Action and Strategic Action



Yes, I meant parasitic just in the sense you suggest.  Now how empirically
adequate this is I'm not so sure.  I gather that a pure case of strategic
action from a rational choice perspective would have both actors playing
the same game, i.e. knowing that each one is out to achieve a certain end
using communication as only a means.  So perhaps strategic action doesn't
depend upon one of the interlocuters failing to understand what's going on.
Yet even here the sense in which the norms of communication are being
parasitized comes across.  Clearly everday interactions involve all kinds
of admixtures of illocutionary and perlocutionary intents and Habermas
wouldn't deny this.  I think his main concern in TCA was to establish that
the illocutionary/communicative basis of speech was fundamental and that
purely instrumental, i.e. strategic applications were in-principle
dependent upon the former.

Lenny