This book deals with the foundations of philosophy of language which form the basis of the theory of rationality, the theory of truth and, finally, the moral theory developed by Jürgen Habermas. After analyzing the motives which led the German sociologist to develop a clearly philosophical programme of linguistic foundations, the author focuses on Habermas’s formal pragmatics and his theory of meaning in order to test their solidity as a basis for the whole Habermasian theoretical construction; a construction that aims -from start to finish- to defend a cognitivist position in matters of practical reason
(ethics, law and politics).

Formal pragmatics was meant to help Habermas to ground a theory of rationality upon which to construct his theory of communicative action, in order to develop a conception of ethics, law and democracy in terms of a theory of discourse. The book traces the structure and the presuppositions of this philosophical-linguistic scheme and shows how the tension present in Habermas’s theory of meaning is echoed in his theory of the validity claims and, in particular, in the analogy between truth and normative correctness that form the basis of his defence of cognitivism. By providing a re-reading of the fundamental concepts of the theory of communicative action and combining it with elements borrowed from the normative pragmatics formulated by Robert Brandom and other contributors in the contemporary field of the philosophy of language, the author postulates a possible reformulation of the Habermasian proposal that would allow the cognitivist project to be defended from more solid philosophical bases.