The Validity of Validity Claims: An Inquiry into Communication Rationality

The communicative action theory of Habermas has been discussed and used within the research community of Language Action Perspective. The concept of validity claim is considered to be an important contribution. In his theory, Habermas has formulated three validity claims to be universal in communication: The claims for truth, rightness and truthfulness. A theoretical inquiry into the validity claim concept and the three validity claims is performed in the paper. A critical analysis is pursued based on communication examples from Habermas. The concept of universal validity claims is transformed to general communication claims. The truth claim is rejected as universal. Besides the claims emanating from Habermas several other general communication claims are formulated: Descriptive correctness, addressee relevance, respectfulness, deliberation, dialogical adequacy and argumentativeness.