Japanese Sociological Review
Online ISSN : 1884-2755
Print ISSN : 0021-5414
ISSN-L : 0021-5414
About Infinite and Finite
An essay about Habermas' concept of “communicative action”
Yukio Ishii
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1992 Volume 43 Issue 3 Pages 304-318,373

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Abstract
In this century, the theories of action as the foundations of sociology have set the concept of “meaning” as their basis, and tried to elucidate how action is unified meaningfully. And for such theories of action, the knowledge that latter Wittgenstein, L. presented about meaning/action was the very important one which opened the new problematic sphere. In very short, it is that there is a kind of 'infinite' in the center of the possibility of meaning/action. Though all the experience is characterized by finite and meaning/action appears in it, the reason why the appearance is possible is that meaning/action has the possibility that it can't be reduced to the finite of experience. Here, the new problem the theory of action should elucidate rises. How is that the finite can be by reason of the infinite ? It is the basic subject of today's sociology and Habermas, J. to explain the self-evidence of meaning/action appears to us, without bringing to naught its infinite which reject the finite totality. Habermas' theory of action, that is, the theory of “communicative action (kommunikatives Handeln)”, certainly at one phase, is the one try to bridge between infinite and finite. In this paper, we try to elucidate what is infinite of meaning/action, and next, to reconstruct the concept of “communicative action” as the device bridging between infinite and finite.
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