Structuring Communicative Action
There is a great deal of excitement in the sociology of culture over the possibility of formal
analysis of systems of meaning and of integrating this analysis into investigations of social
structure. Existing studies have examined relatively simple meaning structures using relatively
simple data with fruitful results. But significantly less work has explored the benefits of formal
methods for understanding complex meaning structures such as those found in philosophical
texts. How can we analyze meaning structures as complex as philosophical concepts? And how
can we use these meaning structures to understand the formation of cultural communities like
philosophical schools? This paper proposes an analysis of semantic relations based on copresence in semantic neighborhoods. In the following, I employ this method to model the
conceptual structure of Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action. I then build on
this method to propose a systematic approach to analyzing similarity and difference among
conceptual structures created by different theorists—that is, authors’ cultural relations to one
another. Examining patterns of cultural relations alongside patterns of social relations, we can
analyze how cultural communities such as philosophical schools develop. I formalize texts by
Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Axel Honneth—the three
generations of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. The convergence of their meaning structures
reveals how the Frankfurt School’s “third generation” established the school by merging
previous generations’ disparate ideas in its own. Thus, combining natural language processing
and network analytic techniques, I introduce a powerful, yet flexible, tool for investigating
structures of shared culture.
Keywords: Computational Text Analysis, Formal Text Analysis, Culture & Networks, Sociology
of Philosophy, Intellectual Schools, Frankfurt School/Critical Theory
1. Introduction
Formal analysis has been one of the most fruitful approaches to studying the symbols,
meanings, and identities that comprise culture. Because meaning inheres in language, much of
this approach has focused on textual analysis. Pioneers in the field such as John Mohr have used
Galois lattices and blockmodeling to analyze texts’ latent conceptual structures, including the
duality between social identity categories and the provision of social welfare services (Mohr
1994; Mohr and Duquenne 1997) and the relational logic linking social identities and diversity
practices (Mohr and Lee 2000, Mohr, Bourgeois, and Duquenne 2004). Researchers like
Kathleen Carley have focused on the semantic properties of texts, exploiting the meaning that
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inheres in grammatical constructions and thus preserving in formal models texts’ richness (e.g.
Carley 1993). Despite their significant successes, these formal techniques may be improved in
two respects. First, they are useful primarily for examining texts with relatively simple meaning
structures, unable to capture meanings in complex texts. Second, extant formal methods are
amenable to analyzing relatively small text corpuses; they are not designed for use on larger
corpuses. Thus, there remains a challenge, on the one hand, to delve into more complex meaning
structures, and on the other hand, to scale up these studies.
The study of cultural institutions—social organizations founded on shared cultural ideas
and practices—could benefit greatly from confronting these challenges. Research in this area
attempts to integrate the study of cultural phenomena—often using formal models—into the
analysis of social structure (e.g. Mische, 2007). But a simplistic treatment of culture has been an
obstacle to understanding these cultural-structural entities. Current research does not integrate
into empirical analysis much of what we know about the complexity of cultural meaning. This
prevents us from studying the strength and quality of “cultural relations” within institutions as
well as important institutional processes like the evolution and negotiation of meanings.
How can we better understand the complexity of culture and the cultural processes
fundamental to institutions? Following John Mohr, I argue that the answer is—
counterintuitively—to code less. When analyzing cultural data, we should avoid arbitrary coding
schemes and find a way to “get the entire text into a computer” (Mohr 1998: 366). That is,
existing formal methods operate by sorting text objects into a predetermined structure of cultural
categories (e.g. Franzosi’s (2004) pathbreaking work with subject-verb-object triplets or Mohr &
Lee’s (2000) analysis of identities and institutional action). While our instinct may be that more
or different categories are the key to embracing the complexity of culture, this view is
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problematic. No matter how imaginative the categories, coding still limits the meaning of a text
to the analyst’s preconceived assumptions. To better embrace complexity, we should formalize
meaning structures without immediately confining them to an ontological framework. The
analysis of semantic relations based on semantic neighborhoods performed here takes up this
task. It creates reliable meaning structures out of complex texts without coding and it does so on
a large scale. These structures then form the foundation for an analysis of institutional processes.
In the following, I propose semantic relational analysis for the study of cultural meaning
and of socio-cultural processes in four steps. First, it will be necessary to define semantic
meaning—a type of meaning that is useful for and accessible to formal analysis. Second, the
idea of semantic relations based on co-presence in semantic neighborhoods will be introduced. I
perform over 300 robustness tests to determine the appropriate criteria for identifying semantic
relations—in other words, the best semantic neighborhood for analysis. The co-presence of
concepts in paragraphs appears to produce the most robust meaning structures. Third, the
paragraph co-presence method will be used to retrieve the semantic meaning of Habermas’s
Theory of Communicative Action. The meaning structure produced successfully captures the
text’s main argument and main interlocutors: Max Weber’s concept of instrumental rationality,
which pervades the contemporary (Parsonian) social system, has supplanted the lifeworld’s logic
of communicative action. The challenge for modern society is to break free from the system
through rational communication between human beings. Other general features of semantic
structures will be examined to uncover key argumentative moments in a text. Finally, I will
demonstrate how semantic meaning structures can be used to analyze the development of
cultural communities such as philosophical schools. Beyond examining individual texts by
themselves, semantic relational analysis’s most distinguishing feature is that it creates data that
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allows researchers to systematically analyze similarities and differences among multiple texts.
Texts formalized as networks can be intersected to reveal these cultural relations among their
authors. And examining these patterns of cultural relations alongside social relations can reveal
how cultural communities are formed. Analyzing the relations among multiple meaning
structures, I will reveal how Critical Theory was established as a philosophical school. It has
long been argued that the “three generations” of Frankfurt School Critical Theory were united by
a common interest in the human capacity for “reason” (Anderson 2000). A semantic relational
analysis of their three “reason” structures confirms intellectual historians’ hypothesis that the
third generation of the Frankfurt School (Axel Honneth) was responsible for forging the
philosophical unity underlying this tradition. He did this, I demonstrate, by bridging a “cultural
hole” (Pachuki & Breiger 2010) between his predecessors.
2. Semantic Meaning
The formal analysis of text does not imitate subjective reading and interpretation; rather,
it is a wholly different approach to textual analysis that accesses a distinct type of meaning.
Thus, as a first step in demonstrating semantic relational analysis, it important to define
provisionally the type of meaning that it uncovers. I propose that it uncovers the meaning that
inheres in words’ network of relations to other words and I will refer to this type of meaning as
semantic meaning.1 Semantic meaning relies chiefly on structuralist theories of meaning, such as
Saussure’s 1916 [1974] concept of syntagmatic meaning and Charles Morris’s (1938) syntactical
Saussure and Morris’s approaches are earnestly “syntactic,” focusing on how word order and grammatical rules
link words to construct the meaning of larger symbols like sentences. Because I am not similarly interested in
syntax but in words’ relationships to their semantic contexts more broadly, I will refer to the meaning rooted in the
relationship between signs by a more comprehensive term: semantic meaning. This is, however, still distinct from
Charles Morris’s (1938) own definition of “semantic meaning” as the relation of objects to signs. Rather, I deploy
the term “semantic” in its more general usage as many computer scientists do—as the study of how meaning arises
from the relations between linguistic symbols.
1
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meaning, that contend that a word cannot be understood apart from how it is used in conjunction
with other words. They imply that meaning does not reside in a single word but in the network of
relations between words. German Hermeneuticians expressed a similar idea as they proposed an
alternative way to explain accounts of historical causality. Following Schlegel (1808), Dilthey’s
(1883) concept of a “meaning nexus” (Sinnzusammenhang) is a constellation of nonindependence bound by meaningfulness. Humans understand historical objects and events by
situating them in broader contexts of meaning, assessing them in their relation to the other
objects and events that occur contemporaneously with them. These formulations suggest that we
may be able to reproduce such a meaningful constellation by graphing word co-occurrences.
The meaning of a given concept may be discovered by examining its network of relations with
other words.
Focusing on semantic meaning enables us to broaden the methodological possibilities for
cultural research, for semantic meaning can be retrieved from texts with computational
methodologies that have remained foreign to the analysis of complex meanings.. Computational
methods can identify and analyze the meaning relations upon which possible interpretations are
based, and generate from them structures of semantic meaning.
We may analyze how meanings converge in institutions like philosophical schools by
uniting diverse meaning structures into larger constellations that highlight their relation to one
another. Imagine two meaning structures, S and T, that represent the ideas of two different
individuals. S ∪ T is the constellation of meaning structures. Their intersection, S  T,
represents how the meanings are similar, and the elements left out of that intersection represent
how they diverge. Examining either S or T alone, we see the confluence of meaning from a
second perspective. Each singular expression of meaning (S or T) is itself a constellation—a
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unique intersection of diverse influences and ideas brought together by the thinker in question.
Each shared fragment (S  T) is an embolum (Peirce [1940] 1955), a sign thrown into another.
A portion of S is in T; a portion of T is in S. These embola have a sociological significance: they
represent cultural associations and divisions among individuals, forming the basis for what much
recent research refers to as “cultural ties” or “cultural relations” (e.g. Mische 2007; Pachuki &
Breiger 2010). S may be an embolum in T because T is engaging with S to either elaborate on or
oppose S. With the ability to investigate cultural relations we can investigate the patterns of
intellectual engagement underlying the formation of philosophical schools. For example, it is
possible to analyze how ideas are passed down from teachers to students or contested by
contemporaries. So while semantic meaning is not the type of meaning that philosophers and
linguistic pragmatists seek, I argue that it is a solid foundation for a sociological investigation of
meaning. It allows us to analyze cultural meaning as a distinct type of relation between
individuals and thus helps us uncover the social processes in which meaning is produced.
3. Testing Semantic Neighborhoods
Meaning relations are not computational text analysis’s usual object of study. Rather,
the classic computational approach is traditional content analysis (TCA), which tracks the
frequency of concepts within and between texts. TCA was introduced originally by Stone et al.’s
The General Inquirer (1966). It focuses primarily on counting the existence or frequency of a
word or words in a text corpus over time or between authors, often claiming that the words of
interest signify a larger cultural category (e.g. Fan 1988; Namenwirth and Weber 1987; Garson
1985; Sullivan 1973; Moretti 2005, 2009; Evans 2010). Recently, TCA has been brought to the
forefront of cultural research by the “big data” text mining movement, which seizes on the
expansive data offered by ongoing book digitization projects. Jean-Baptiste et al., for instance,
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studied the frequency of n-grams2 in 5.2 million books over the course of over 500 years to
expose linguistic changes and shifts in collective memory (2010). Lieberman et al. studied the
regularization of English verbs over 1,200 years in a 17.9 million word corpus (Lieberman et. al
2007). The benefits of TCA are substantial. First, its quantitative semantic approach generates
insights into meaning unconstrained by the subjective interpretation of only one person. Second,
because it is computer-assisted, it allows for research that embraces massive corpuses. But
developed in Computer Science rather than in the humanistic disciplines, TCA often lacks
sensitivity to the complexities of language. Its most significant weakness is its assumption that
words have a single stable definitional meaning. When a word is counted, TCA treats the word
as meaningful in itself, and by that logic, as having the same meaning every time it appears. But
these assumptions are incompatible with what we know about language. The same word can
mean various different things depending on its context. For instance, when we count the
frequency of the ambiguous term “culture” in a corpus of texts, we may be counting mentions of
the opera and theater, the laziness and anti-intellectuality of Americans, or the stuff growing in a
petri dish—some of what we want, some of what we do not. Counting “culture” is a flawed
method because “culture’s” meaning is neither stable nor contained in the word itself.3 Rather,
its meaning arises from the relationship between words, its meaning-rich semantic context of
which TCA takes no account.
This is the insight captured by formal analysts of text, who shift textual analysis from an
ontology of concepts to an ontology of relations. Texts are not simply “bags of words;” words
occur in a certain order; they are embedded in other words, and these semantic constellations are
2
An n-gram is a sequence of words with length n.
It is worth mentioning that some improvements have been made to enhance TCA’s reliability. For example,
Krippendorff (2004) has developed strategies to improve intercoder reliability, and Franzosi (2004) has worked to
to increase semantic coherence.
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more meaningful than the words in and of themselves. Classical structuralist theorists have long
taken this position. French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure provided perhaps the earliest
articulation. He argued (Saussure [1916] 1983) that meaning arises from the systematic
distinctions that differentiate words (as signs or sounds) from one another. The interpretation of
meaning is connected to the system of relations that link cultural objects. His thought was
further developed by Levi-Strauss (1963), who proposed deep structural principles that organize
the complex system of relational patterns. From a Levi-Straussian viewpoint, a woman “means,”
for instance, which families her marriage unites. Georg Simmel ([1907] 2004) shared this
perspective when he argued that the situational juxtaposition of objects in exchange is the source
of its value. $70 “means” the ability to exchange it for a sweater or for a pair of sneakers when
they are declared equivalent in an exchange relation.
Contemporary researchers have studied patterns of conceptual association in texts in
various ways. A first approach uncovers texts’ latent conceptual structures. John Mohr has been
a major figure here, using Galois Lattices and blockmodeling to discover the meaning inherent in
the dual association between identity categories and poverty relief services (Mohr 1994; Mohr
and Duquenne 1997). Ronald Breiger (2000) uses correspondence analysis and Galois Lattices to
cross-classify symbols and uncover Supreme Court justice’s control over and interest in areas of
legislation. John Levi Martin (2000) uses an entropy-based dispersion measure to match
occupational categories to animals in “What do Animals do All Day?” to uncover the system of
social stratification among species. Peter Bearman and Katherine Stovel (2000) model texts as
nodes and flows and use network techniques such as density, distance, and centrality, to contrast
the narrative structures of becoming and being a Nazi.
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A second major approach to formal text analysis focuses on a text’s grammatical
constructions. Researchers in this tradition examine words’ grammatical functions, contending
that their semantic-structural equivalence indicates that they occupy a common conceptual space
(e.g. Ignatow 2004, Cerulo 1998). Roberto Franzosi (2004), for instance, has written extensively
on semantic triplets of subject-action-object. A particularly promising method is map analysis
(Carley, 1993, 1994, 1997), which relates concepts in a text to each other through semantic
relations that vary in strength, sign, direction, and meaning. Kathleen Carley, for instance, has
used map analysis successfully to show how the cultural perception of robots has shifted from
dangerous to lovable since the 1950’s through a map analysis of 30 science fiction novels (1994).
These formal analyses, however, have been limited in two areas. First, formal analyses
have only been performed on relatively simple textual data; their ability to analyze complex texts
remains untested. The best known works analyze pre-sorted data (Mohr 1994: Breiger 2000) or
conceptually simple narratives (Martin 2000). But many texts contain ideas and meanings that
are far more nuanced and contested. Philosophical texts, for example, can rarely be analyzed in
terms of objects with simple attributes. Rather, each work of philosophy explores a set of main
concepts by continually embedding them in diverse conceptual contexts. Through considering
many such embeddings, we may finally come to a comprehensive understanding of a concept.
Second, extant formal methods lack the explanatory power of TCA because they tend to
rely on painstaking, meticulous hand-coding. The fine-grained analyses that have become
characteristic of this sub-field are time prohibitive for large text corpuses. However, there
appears a desire to scale up these studies to embrace larger text corpora (and draw macro-level
conclusions). Roberto Franzosi, for instance, makes textual data amenable to statistical analysis
by applying to his semantic grammars a set theoretical framework (2004). John Mohr (1994)
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uses automated n-gram searches to create categories of poor relief organizations and clients that
can be matched and analyzed with blockmodels. But even these approaches offer only the ability
to analyze qualitative data quantitatively; they do not alter or eliminate the lengthy coding
process.
In response to these challenges, I introduce a “big data” text mining approach that
espouses formal text analysis’s attention to semantic context. Computer-assisted, it has
enormous reach, allowing researchers to analyze large text corpuses. But by modeling texts
formally as semantic networks, it also focuses on the relations between words, preserving some
of texts’ complexity meaning. This method will be used to analyze Juergen Habermas’s Theory
of Communicative Action, whose extended length and high degree of analytical clarity make it an
excellent text for methodological testing. The remarkable ability of this analysis to
schematically reproduce the main argument of this text confirms the potential of formal methods
to capture complex meaning structures.
3.1 A semantic relation is defined as co-presence in a semantic neighborhood.
The method relies on the discovery and analysis of semantic relations embedded in
philosophical texts. While a semantic relation can be defined in many ways, I focus on one
possibility: the co-presence of words in a semantic neighborhood. A semantic neighborhood is a
more inclusive version of what Carley et. al’s (2013) AutoMap software calls a “stop unit.” It
connotes a unit of text that may be demarcated in various ways. Like a stop unit, a neighborhood
may be grammatically determined, such as a comma-separated clause, a sentence or a paragraph,
but it may also be determined by length without regard for grammar, such as a window of 3, 10,
or 15 words. Words are considered related when they are co-present in the same neighborhood.
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This semantic method therefore follows the logic of Ronald Breiger’s (1974) famous argument
that people can be thought of as related to each other when they share common group
memberships. Semantic relations may in fact be the example par excellence of the duality of
shared group membership and direct relation. Words that occupy the same lexical units
contextualize and define each other. Every utterance is a string of words, each of which would
have no meaning, had it not been given meaning by its position among others.4
But without a valid definition of “group,” this argument about words (as well as the
argument about people) holds little water. One could argue, for example, that every word in a
book is related to every other. This may be true in principle, but because a book can be so long,
many of the semantic relations within it may be so weak that they are practically meaningless.
Thus, the first task of this study is to examine the semantic relations implied by common
membership in various semantic neighborhoods and find the type of neighborhood that
constitutes a component of a text’s core conceptual structure. This will be the lexical unit in
which semantic co-presence identifies the most semantic relations (minimize false negatives)
that are all meaningful (minimize false positives).5
3.2. The paragraph is the most reliable semantic neighborhood.
I compare the semantic relations captured by 301 different semantic neighborhoods into
which Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action can be divided: clauses separated by
punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, and n-grams from size n=3 to n=300. The first three
analyses, then, are based on units provided by the grammar of the English language. These units
4
I do not analyze or discuss specific types of semantic relation in this study. Those types may include but are not
limited to synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, holonymy, and troponymy.
5
An analysis produces false negatives when all it fails to capture all meaningful semantic relations for a given
concept. It produces false positives when it identifies semantic relations that are not actually valid.
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are likely the most meaningful because each represents a single coherent expression. That is,
according to the rules of the English language, words co-present in such phrases receive
meaning from each other and define each other relationally. The next 298 analyses are for
moving windows of text—n-grams—of size 3 to 300. These tests allow greater insight into how
the mere size of the text-chunk affects the results of the analysis and helps me determine which
lexical unit appears most reliable.
The procedure for discovering the most appropriate semantic neighborhood is as follows.
First, I digitize the books by scanning them and running optical character recognition software
on them. Then, for each analysis, a computer program separates the text into the desired
semantic neighborhoods. A second program then drops all the stopwords (articles, many
prepositions) from the analysis6 and establishes a relation between words present in the same
units. The result is a relational matrix similar to any matrix a network analyst might examine.
Semantic relations are considered notable when they are “strong”—that is, when they occur
frequently in a text. By acknowledging only the relations occurring most often in the text, we can
filter out the “noise” that comes from offhand remarks, anecdotes, passages from other works
cited in the text, and focus on its core conceptual structure. Although focusing on only strong
relations might produce some false negatives, its ability to substantially reduce false positives
justifies the decision. More detailed discussion of clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, as well as
full results of these analyses, is presented in Appendix A.
I start with clauses, sentences, and paragraphs. The three methods produce surprisingly
similar results, but the variations that do occur between methods follow a discernible logic. With
6
Although stopwords such as prepositions may be important for producing meaning, removing stopwords is
advisable for this particular semantic relational analysis because I am searching for texts’ philosophical as opposed
to their grammatical meaning. That is, I am not interested in a deep linguistic analysis of a particular sentence or
phrase; I am interested in the way in which primary philosophical concepts are nested in and contextualize one
another over a longer text or set of texts.
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each move from a smaller to a larger unit—that is, from clause to sentence and from sentence to
paragraph—there are four patterns of note: 1) simple bigrams are replaced with semantic
relations bridging greater distance. 2) The graph produced becomes a more coherent structure;
semantic cliques previously separate from the main structure become integrated into it. 3)
Semantic “hubs”—central keywords—become increasingly evident. 4) The frequency of
relations increases substantially. These four patterns can be considered advantageous because
they move the structure toward greater coherence, reliability, and intricacy. But with these
advantages comes at least one drawback: dominant nodes become amplified, possibly obscuring
other structural patterns.
Despite this drawback, the test of grammatical units suggests that the paragraph method
appears to produce the most useful data for further analyses. Because the paragraph is the
grammatical unit that represents most accurately a complete and coherent thought, the paragraph
level yields semantic structures that are composed of reliably strong semantic relationships,
minimizing false positives. At the same time, its reach over a larger span of text minimizes false
negatives, producing semantic structures that are dense and complex enough to facilitate intricate
analyses.
The second set of analyses was the “n-gram test.” The purpose of the n-gram analysis is
to get an impression of how the mere size of the lexical unit affects the meaning structures
formed. An n-gram is simply a moving window of text without consideration for grammatical
units. If a 3-gram is my grammatical unit, any two words used in the same 3-word chunk (i.e.
words next to each other and within two words of each other) will be considered to have a
semantic relation. I examine the relations captured when the n-gram is of size 3-300, noting the
thirty that occur most frequently for each size.
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Because small n-grams tend to err on the side of false negatives while large ones tend to
err on the side of false positives, semantic relations that are textually closer are weighted more
heavily than those that bridge greater textual distance. Thus, more distant relations that are
potentially false positives must be extremely frequent to confirm their meaningfulness and enter
the results of the analysis. I start with the smallest size (3-gram) and examine the structure
composed by the semantic relations it implies; as I increase n-gram size, we should expect new
semantic relations that bridge greater textual distance to appear in the top-thirty semantic
structure, replacing ones that are textually closer but substantially less frequent. I seek the point
at which using a larger n-gram no longer introduces relations that bridge greater textual distance
but are so frequent that they must be reliable. This is, in other words, the point of equilibrium
where a tendency toward false negatives is replaced by a tendency toward false positives—where
false negatives and positives are both at their lowest levels. More detailed explanation of
weighting and full results of the N-gram tests (Figure. A.4) are presented in Appendix A.
I found that n = 104-146 is this critical moment in the analysis of Theory of
Communicative Action. This key n-gram is closest in size and results to a paragraph (the average
paragraph length is 108 words). This n-gram is also the most similar to a paragraph in terms of
its results, with only two low-ranking semantic relations differentiating the two structures. Thus,
we can conclude that that the paragraph size of analysis has relatively few false negatives and
false positives—it locates as many semantic relations as possible that are all meaningful and
thus, offers the greatest possibility for revealing the core conceptual structure of the text. The
following analyses will therefore employ the paragraph method. 7
7
It is important to note that Theory of Communicative Action, originally written in German, is analyzed here in
English translation. Discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of analyzing these texts in translation can be
found in Appendix B.
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4. The Structure of Communicative Action
Semantic relational analysis’s ability to reproduce schematically the core argumentative
structure of Habermas’s text is highly encouraging. Briefly, in the Theory of Communicative
Action Habermas employs a thorough critique of the individualism inherent in Weber’s theory of
purposive rationality and Parsons’s notion of the social system. Purposive-rational action
pervades the social system, which has supplanted the lifeworld, the domain of rational
communication among human beings. The challenge for modern society, then, is to break free
from the modern social system by means of rational communication. Figure 1 is a graphic
representation of the Theory of Communicative Action. Semantic relations displayed in the graph
occur at least 400 times in the text. The most central concepts are exactly that—the main topics
addressed the text. The most important is clearly action, followed by social, theory, and system.
I will proceed by examining the graph intuitively and reading it against my own understanding of
Habermas’s text to show how it captures the text’s main philosophical ideas.
Figure 1. The Structure of Communicative Action8
---------------------Figure 1 about here
---------------------Notice first of all Habermas’s main interlocutors in the graph—Weber and Parsons. In
the upper right hand quadrant of the graph, Weber’s theory of rationality is intimately linked to
Parsons’s theory of the system. That is, Weber’s rationality pervades the type of social system
described by Parsons. To this cluster’s immediate left, the concepts of the social world and
8
In all graphs, nodes are positioned manually to make edges and nodes more clearly visible. In this first graph of
Theory of Communicative Action, the strength threshold for edges has been dropped to >400 co-occurrences.
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society bridge discussions of Weber, Parsons, and the system, with the communicative action in
the lifeworld. That is, our social world or society can be conceived of simultaneously as a system
and as a lifeworld. We can tell which side Habermas takes in this opposition; he critiques Weber
and Parsons in favor of communicative action in the lifeworld. While the discussion of Weber
and Parsons occupies a small and isolated portion of the structure, the majority of the graph falls
in favor of communicative action in the social lifeworld, particularly the ideas of speech acts and
validity claims as forms of action. The position and centrality of the concept system and the
majority of the concepts in the structure therefore elucidate the main problem of society as
Habermas sees it: we are trapped in this Weberian-Parsonian system, and we must break free
from it through communication between human beings—the activity of the lifeworld.9
We can go beyond this general overview and examine the book’s argument more deeply
by disaggregating it into its constituent chapters. Semantic structural features reveal the
argument’s construction. I examine the exploration and integration of main concepts as well as a
text’s style of interlocution—how the author engages with the ideas of others. I focus on a few
chapters, which I chose because they illustrate these semantic structural features particularly
well.
4.1 Lower density between points of high betweenness indicates a weaker integration of ideas
The first and simplest thing these structures expose is the exploration and integration of
main concepts. Rhetorical features are represented by structural “hubs” and the connections
9
I do not claim that one can achieve this theoretical interpretation by merely looking at the semantic structure. This
fluid interpretation, while conforming well to the structure, comes from my own knowledge of the text. The
automated analysis cannot produce coherent articulations because the existence of semantic relations in the graph
provides no clues as to the type of semantic relation it represents. That is, there is no way to tell whether concept A
is concept B, concept A opposes concept B, concept A is a type of concept B, or concept A modifies concept B, etc.
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between hubs. When words are in a position of high betweenness10, it means that they are
central concepts being explored in the philosophical text. A text can be understood as the
nuanced linking of these central concepts. Density11 of linkages between hubs reveals the
strength of the text’s conceptual integration. When concepts are densely integrated in a text, it
means that the argument is coherent and well developed; the author successfully makes a new
idea out of existing ones.12 When concepts are loosely integrated, it means that the argument is
less developed. It is fragmented into sub-arguments, where a new idea is hardly produced out of
existing fragments.
The first chapter, “Introduction: Approaches to the Problem of Rationality,” exemplifies
weak conceptual integration. The central concepts are action and world, which are linked
through topics of communicative rationality, understanding, and validity claims. Habermas
strives to merge a theory of rational action with man’s understanding of the world. In the history
of philosophy, he argues, reason and a certain conception of the world have been analytically
inseparable. Man has always employed his reason to find a conception that unifies the world’s
multiple appearances. Habermas wishes in this text, however, to reject notions of transcendental
reason and holistic worldviews. He proposes instead to destabilize these traditional concepts and
to redraw the linkages between historically evolving rationality structures and the various ways
of understanding the world that provide rationality’s conditions of possibility.
Figure 2. Chapter 1: Introduction: Approaches to the Problem of Rationality
----------------------
10
Betweenness centrality of a given vertex is the number of shortest paths from all vertices to all others that pass
through that vertex. In short, it is the tendency for that vertex to connect or serve as a go-between between two
others.
11
Density is the proportion of all possible dyadic ties that are actually present, how “well-connected” a network is.
12
When maximized, density between two hubs leads to those hubs’ erasure; they merge into one dense cluster
representing a new ideational synthesis.
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Figure 2 about here
---------------------As an introduction that merely raises the question of how one might merge these ideas, actual
conceptual integration is remarkably weak. The “spokes of a wheel” structures are obvious,
indicating that both action and world are main concepts, but their relation to each other is thinly
elaborated. We know the integration will have something to do with rationality as
communicative action that emerges as validity claims, establishing understanding between
individuals, but a coherent theory of the linkages between rational action and various
understandings of the world has not yet been formulated.
4.2 Higher density between points of high betweenness indicates a stronger integration of ideas
By contrast, main concepts are better integrated into a coherent argument in chapter six,
“Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld.” Here, Habermas introduces and integrates
two of his primary concepts—competing conceptualizations of society as a lifeworld and as a
social system. The lifeworld is the realm of lived experience and social practice, characterized by
communicative action and mutual understanding among interacting individuals. Knowledge is
the binding force of a lifeworld; it is the shared stock of background convictions that enable
shared understanding among its members. At the same time society can be conceived of as a
social system—an economy composed of market forces and a state administration governed by
instrumental rationality. Interaction as communication and shared meaning do not take place
here; rather, this social system undergoes processes of system integration and system
differentiation.
Figure 3. Chapter 6: Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld
18
---------------------Figure 3 about here
---------------------Habermas elaborates these two fundamental ways of conceptualizing the social order in
themselves, but more importantly, their interdependence. Strong integration of these two
conceptions shows in the perfect social-system-society-lifeworld-action pentagram clique. That
is, a potential “two-wheel” pattern has been integrated to the point where it melds into a single
cluster of perfect density. So although Habermas discusses at length the system and lifeworld’s
historical decoupling, his analytical emphasis falls on their important interchange—the way the
system’s instrumental rationality imperatives “make their way into the lifeworld from the
outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation
upon it” (Habermas 1981: 355).
4.3 Betweenness of interlocutors in meaning structures exposes styles of interlocution
A second rhetorical feature that semantic relational analysis can highlight is the styles of
interlocution in a text. This is the way an author engages with the work of others. As a first
attempt, we can decipher whether interlocution is shallow or deep—the extent to which
interlocutors are well-discussed and well-integrated into the text. We detect this in the
betweenness of an interlocutor’s node, as well as the density of connections between the
interlocutor’s cluster and the rest of the semantic relational structure. Chapter five, “The
Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity to Communicative Action,”
exemplifies instances of both deep and shallow interlocution. Here, Habermas engages with
George Herbert Mead and Emile Durkheim to explain how communicative social action is at
19
once symbolically mediated and normatively regulated. The depth of his engagements with the
two differs remarkably. Habermas’s engagement with Mead is deep. In fact, Mead begins the
synthesis that Habermas pursues; symbolically mediated interaction through an exchange of
gestures between a first and second organism must adhere to rules that guide behavior and
interpretation of meaning. But Mead’s ideas alone do not complete Habermas’s philosophical
synthesis; Durkheim provides an important piece. Only through appeal to Durkheim’s theory of
the sacred and moral norms can we understand how systems of linguistic meaning delineate
communities—how linguistic norms can serve as the morality that binds and distinguishes
between social worlds. Habermas’s engagement with Durkheim, however, is perfunctory and
shallow. This is evidenced by the “chain” of Durkheim stretching away from the rest of the
graph. To be sure, the reference to Durkheim allows him to think about the moral as the sacred,
but its elaboration is set apart from the other fundamental components of Habermas’s theory; it
has little use otherwise.
Figure 4. Chapter 5: The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity
to Communicative Action
---------------------Figure 4 about here
---------------------Habermas is borrowing and cherry-picking from Durkheim, not truly engaging. By contrast, the
engagement with Mead is well embedded into the larger meaning structure. Mead is the high
betweenness node that allows Habermas to integrate symbolically mediated interaction with
communication, attitudes, action, behavior, communicative, theory and meaning. Semantic
relational analysis shows that this is a much more fruitful engagement, one that is undeniably
crucial to the core of Habermas’s theory.
20
5. Structuring the “Reason” Problematic: Cultural Ties and the Formation of Schools
In the analysis above, we have captured and analyzed a text’s semantic meaning. The
ultimate goal of this study, however, is to use this textual data to contribute to sociological
knowledge. The next task is to consider how semantic meaning is part and parcel to social
relations and social organization, and relatedly, how semantic structures help us investigate
socio-cultural processes like the establishment of cultural institutions such as philosophical
schools. This starts by analyzing multiple semantic meaning structures. Such analysis produces
data on “cultural relations” that can be integrated easily with social structural data. When we
analyze the relation between sets of cultural and sets of social relations, we can effectively
theorize cultural processes.
5.1 Relating culture to social structure
The way in which cultural meaning relates to social structure is a core concern for the
Sociology of Culture. Although classic studies in network analysis treat culture and structure as
entirely distinct (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Coleman, Katz, and Mendel 1957; Burt 1987; Kim
and Bearman 1997), the emerging consensus is that social structure and culture are “dual”—
inseparable and co-constitutive. That is, individuals’ social relationships to one another indicate
as well as foster shared beliefs, tastes, and identities. A first approach demonstrates how social
structure fosters shared cultural beliefs. Ann Mische’s work exemplifies this perspective,
describing networks as bound by loyalties, solidarities and identities (2007). Common ideas,
identities, and beliefs are forged within networks as understandings emerge from interactions
among people. Dense, strong-tie networks breed intense commitments and ideals (Della Porta
21
1988). And when these networks overlap, ideals and beliefs can be transferred from one domain
to another and strengthened in the process (Mische 2003, 2007, Baldassari & Diani 2007). At
the same time, however, strong divergent social pressures on individuals can impede the creation
of broad cultural consensus (McAdam and Paulson 1993).
Recent scholarship has broadened the duality argument, showing how common tastes and
beliefs influence social organization; culture can also forge social relationships. Omar Lizardo
(2006), for example, argues that shared “high brow” cultural tastes are more easily “converted”
into strong tie networks, while tastes for popular culture tend to form weak ties. Stephen Vaisey
and Omar Lizardo (2009) then extend this logic into the realm of moral values, arguing that
shared moral worldviews are the basis of friendship relations and the effort (or lack thereof) to
sustain those friendships over time. In distinguishing between and comparing the interpersonal
and the cultural dimensions of social relationships, such research suggests that it may be
analytically useful to treat shared culture as a type of relationship in itself.
Mark Pachucki and
Ronald Breiger (2010) take this step as they discuss the cultural ties that bridge “cultural holes,”
as do Schultz and Breiger as they explore “The Strength of Weak Culture” (2010).
An analysis of multiple semantic meaning structures builds on this line of inquiry by
emphasizing the intricacies of cultural phenomena. It is essentially an investigation of cultural
ties—like many approaches, a relationship between cultural objects is used to index a cultural
relationship between their creators. But by analyzing cultural objects in their complexity, we can
examine cultural ties in their complexity. The multiple fine-grained cultural convergences that
comprise a cultural tie between individuals represent how and how much individuals are in
cultural agreement (in much the same way as Carley & Palmquist’s (1992) comparison of
cognitive maps). This is valuable for sociological analysis because finer-grained changes in
22
degree and type of cultural relations can better illustrate cultural processes like influence,
imitation, or the establishment of institutions, than can coarse binary measures of cultural
relatedness.
5.2 “Reason” through three generations of Critical Theory
An analysis of semantic relations helps us examine the cultural ties among Max
Horkheimer/Theodor Adorno, Juergen Habermas, and Axel Honneth, leaders of the so-called
three generations of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. I ask whether the conceptualization of
the school as unfolding over three generations is justified by the actual patterns of intellectual
continuity these authors exhibit. Historians of the Frankfurt School have long debated whether
the school should be understood as developing in “generations,” and if so, how many generations
there are. Many scholars accept the thesis that there are three generations. Anderson (2000), for
instance, argues that there are three generations as he situates Axel Honneth’s work among his
predecessors.’ And Honneth (2007), the purported leader of the third generation, has been
explicit about his attempt to continue the school’s tradition. But other scholars have opposed this
characterization. Some suggest that the school ended with Habermas; only the first and second
generations are truly part of the school. Postone (2009), for example, acknowledges only the
first generation and Jürgen Habermas as he analyzes the historical trajectory of Critical Theory.
Still others emphasize Habermas’s break with the first generation, implying that there are no
generations at all; the school began and ended with Horkheimer and Adorno’s circle. Habermas
(1985: 209) himself denied that he ever attempted to continue the tradition of the school.
Likewise, some of Habermas’s critics such as Gerhard Bolte’s circle (1989) and Heinz Steinert
(2007) emphasize the theoretical discontinuities between the first generation and Habermas.
23
Here, I test the hypothesis that there is theoretical continuity between these supposed
three generations of the Frankfurt School. I focus my analysis on the three generations’
similarity in their respective theories on a single concept—the human capacity for reason. It has
often been claimed that the tradition of Critical Theory is united by a concern for the concept of
reason (e.g. Honneth 2007). Critical theorists argue that societal critique and social liberation
depend on the ability to employ reason in a society entrenched in the irrationality of the capitalist
economy and the modern state. Thus, the great task of Critical Theory is to develop greater
understanding of the conditions under which the human capacity for reason can be exercised. If
there is theoretical continuity among these three generations, I propose, it would be uncovered by
an analysis of each generation’s development of the concept of “reason.” Through intersecting
semantic meaning structures, I show how the “reason” problematic united three generations of
Critical Theory. The analysis shows that a unified theory of “reason” and thus the school was
forged through the third generation’s bridging of cultural holes.13
Because I am interested in these authors’ converging understandings of a specific concept
(“reason”) rather than the three books in general, I do not analyze here the general conceptual
structure of each text, as I did previously with Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action.
Instead, I form ego-centered semantic networks around the concept of “reason.” That is,
meaning structures will feature “reason” and the 16 concepts most often associated with “reason”
over the course of each text. For this last analysis, I apply semantic relational analysis to
Horkheimer/Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of
13
Pachucki & Breiger (2010) have also described the process of “bridging cultural holes.” They argue that because
structure and culture are “dual” facets of social networks, bridging structural holes as in Burt (1992) is culturally
contingent. That is, one may often bridge a structural hole through a cultural tie. I define the term “cultural
holes” differently. Having analyzed the Frankfurt School as a distinct set of social and distinct set of cultural ties, a
“cultural hole” is a discontinuity in the structure of cultural relationships. These cultural holes are especially
interesting, I argue, when there is a cultural hole where a social relationship exists—an instance in which two
persons have an interpersonal relationship with one another, but differ substantially in beliefs and interests.
24
Communicative Action (1981), and Axel Honneth’s Critique of Power (1991). I locate the
commonalities in these meaning structures by intersecting semantic networks. A graph of the
constellation of meaning structures notes their convergences. This cultural data will then be
considered in light of the authors’ social relationships to one other: they form a perfect teacherstudent-chain where Habermas was Adorno’s assistant and Honneth was Habermas’s assistant.
A lineage in Eviatar Zerubavel’s (2012) sense, there are direct ties between successive
generations, as well as an understood ancestral tie between Horkheimer/Adorno and Honneth,
despite the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno died before Honneth had the chance to learn from
them directly.
5.3 Honneth’s third generation of Critical Theory bridges a hole and establishes the “school.”
The problem of “reason” is redefined by each generation of Critical Theory. Briefly, the
“reason” problematic was initially understood by Max Horkheimer/Theodor Adorno as a project
for the individual consciousness. It was then recasted as inhering in communication by
Habermas, their student. And in the end Habermas’s junior colleague, Axel Honneth, unites
these opposing strains of thought by offering a third, hybrid theory of “reason”—as a process
with both individual-reflective and communicative facets. Results from these analyses are
summarized as adjacency matrices in Figures C.1, C.2, C.3, and C.4 in Appendix C, and in
Figures 5 and 6 below.
Figure 5. “Reason” through Three Generations of Critical Theory
---------------------Figure 5 about here
----------------------
25
Figure 6. Reduced to only the shared ways of describing “Reason”
---------------------Figure 6 about here
---------------------If we look at the center of Figure 5, we might be surprised to see that these “three
generations” do not share all that much. Indeed, they share the important triad of reason, social,
and nature. The exact argument varies from author to author, but Frankfurt philosophers have
long found it impossible to analyze the concept of reason without referencing its intimate
connection to ideas of nature and the social. For example, Horkheimer and Adorno (1947)
discussed society’s power over nature and nature’s power over the mind. An individual’s reason,
they argue, is exercised in the service of his natural interest; nature gives reason its “ends.”
Human beings, however, become mere material as the whole of nature is subordinated to society;
thus, those natural interests are actually socially determined. Habermas (1981) explained social
action by contrasting it to non-social action: the use of instrumental reason to act upon and
achieve goals with regard to nature. Social action, he argued, should not be instrumental but
communicative and oriented toward reaching mutual understanding.
More interesting, however, is how this triad of authors works dyadically. By examining
the dyadic relations among authors, we might elucidate a process underlying Critical Theory’s
establishment as an intellectual school: the bridging of cultural holes. Notice first of all a
surprising finding: Horkheimer and Adorno and Habermas have nothing in common besides the
basic reason-social-nature triad. Their cultural relation is—while arguably present—surprisingly
weak. Indeed, Habermas expresses quite explicitly his debt to Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory
of reason. They are, after all, two of the primary concepts in which he embeds his own ideas on
26
the topic. However, he does not accept Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding of reason as
inhering in the individual human self’s thought. He develops instead the idea of a
communicative reason that constitutes action and goes on to contrast this reformulated concept
with Weber’s notions of rationality and societal rationalization. The apparent ambiguity toward
Horkheimer/Adorno may suggest that Habermas knows he is expected to engage with them
when theorizing about reason—for an Adorno student, professor at Frankfurt, and recent
recipient of the Adorno Prize in Philosophy, this was an obvious citation—but fundamental
theoretical differences prevent specifics of their theories from converging. So although there is
desire to connect with Horkheimer and Adorno, this does not come to fruition. There is
essentially a cultural hole between these two generations. There is a social relationship as well
as many other reasons to believe there should be a cultural relationship, but there is none.
Instead, there is a moment of cultural discontinuity.
By contrast, Honneth is heavily indebted to his predecessors, sharing considerable
linkages with both. Like Habermas, his debt to Horkheimer and Adorno is explicit—they are
also key concepts in which his discussion of reason is embedded. But unlike Habermas, this is
justified by a strong theoretical connection. Honneth holds firmly to Horkheimer/Adorno’s
original understanding of reason as inhering in human thought, and its situatedness in questions
of power. And even the semantic relations that Honneth and Horkheimer/Adorno do not
explicitly share demonstrate a common orientation toward understanding reason as a correlate of
the capitalist economy. For Horkheimer/Adorno, it is intimately bound with bourgeois
tendencies, for Honneth with questions of labor. Honneth has a likewise strong cultural
relationship with Habermas. Both share an intellectual debt to Horkheimer/Adorno’s theory of
reason. And their critiques are of specifically instrumental reason, a shared reference to Max
27
Weber. In addition, their works tend toward metacritique—more interested in examining the
history of social philosophy and criticism, than critiquing the state of society as such. Where
there was a gulf between Horkheimer/Adorno and Habermas, Honneth serves as a bridge. His
work forges post hoc the theoretical unity that makes Critical Theory coherent.
The pattern of semantic structural convergence we see here conforms to Honneth’s
philosophical mission: to infuse the basic framework of Horkheimer/Adorno’s vision of a
capitalist society that dominates nature and the individual with Habermas’s possibility for
liberation through interpersonal communication and social action. This infusion could solve
problems raised by the quasi-functionalist element of Horkheimer/Adorno’s theory that
drastically limits the scope of individual creativity and curtails the possibility of liberation
(Honneth 1995: 75). Honneth would eventually complete this first/second generation synthesis
with his theory of recognition, for which he sows the seeds here in Critique of Power. An
elaboration on the “reason” theme, the theory of recognition draws on Hegel’s dialectic of selfconsciousness to unite in a process the individual-reflective elements of Horkheimer/Adorno’s
theory with Habermas’s understanding of reason inhering in communication. According to
Honneth, the very possibility of communicative action depends on actors mutually recognizing
each other as moral beings who are worthy of respect and capable of reason. I can only
recognize my own reason when I recognize the reason in the other; the other can only recognize
his own reason when he recognizes mine. Liberation depends on reflection and communication
reinforcing one another.
We might conclude, then, that the third generation brought this tradition together. And it
did so by bridging the cultural hole formed by its predecessors. Thus, my argument supports two
existing arguments about the Frankfurt School’s generational structure that seem to oppose one
28
another, showing how they are in fact compatible., There is a clear break between the first and
second generations. It seems that in terms of the primary problem of “reason,” the second
generation wanted to distance itself from the first—at least at the time the Theory of
Communicative Action was written. But the school also develops in three cohesive generations
because the third generation redrew these connections, unifying these philosophers as a school, a
tradition that shows coherence through three generations. We had reason to expect this finding.
Scholars within the Critical Theory tradition have long known that Habermas had a difficult
relationship and little philosophically in common with his mentors. At the height of his career,
he embraced currents of thought such as pragmatism and linguistic analysis to which
Horkheimer and Adorno were hostile, building new approaches that seriously challenged
Horkheimer and Adorno’s formulations (Honneth 1995: 86). And Honneth has been candid
about his attempt to unite the disparate first and second generations in his third.14 This semantic
relational method confirms this hypothesis, demonstrating its potential to approach questions in
the future for which we have no ready answer. We can go on to ask whether cultural ties
strengthen, weaken, or change in theoretical focus over time, or whether the school in general
goes through periods of greater and lesser intellectual unity. The possibilities for discovering
through an examination of multiple semantic meanings the longitudinal evolution of cultural ties,
and with it processes of influence and institutional establishment, are endless.
6. Conclusion: Structures of Culture and Cultural Holes
Semantic relational analysis offers exciting new possibilities for examining processes of
cultural production. Because processes are complex and unfold over time, they are particularly
demanding of sociological methods. Methods for studying them must contend at least somewhat
14
Honneth in fact explained to me his attempt to do so in person at his Frankfurt office.
29
with the inherent complexity of cultural phenomena; they must be capable of incorporating the
large amount of data necessary for longitudinal analysis; finally, they must generate cultural data
that can be integrated fluidly with sociological data. These are precisely semantic relational
analysis’s strengths. Here, it was first shown to accomplish a rigorous and detailed structural
treatment of cultural phenomena. Computer-assisted formal semantic analysis was able to
schematize the semantic meaning of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action. It captured
how Habermas constructed his main argument through engagement with various interlocutors.
The schematization produced resonates with accepted general interpretations of the text,
successfully identifying the main themes that most readers would understand as central to it.
Thomas McCarthy’s introduction to Theory of Communicative Action (1984) and David
Ingram’s Habermas: Introduction and Analysis (1989) are two of the most authoritative general
discussions of the text’s themes. And consonant with my formalization, both authors emphasize
Habermas’s attempt to construct a theory of society that includes the lifeworld and system
paradigms (McCarthy, 1984: xxvii; Ingram, 1989: 115), to critique of how life is penetrated by
formal systems (1984: xxviii; 1989: 55), to critique of the instrumental rationality that pervades
life rationalized by these formal systems (1984: xxxii, 1989: 64), to elucidate a different type of
rationality in communication (McCarthy, 1984: ix-x; Ingram, 1989: 20), and to locate the
potential for liberation through such rational communication (1984: xxxvii, 1989: 180). Thus,
semantic relational analysis appears a reliable technique that may be applied to texts for which
we do not have existing interpretations.
In highlighting the similarities between the results of formal analysis and theoretical
exegeses, however, it is important to note that comparing the two is of limited use. Semantic
analysis and theoretical exegeses have entirely different goals. So while a comparison can
30
confirm the internal validity of a semantic method, semantic analysis does not otherwise attempt
to intervene into philosophical discourse. Formal semantic analysis is singularly devoted to a
text, creating a summary of it in the form of a concept map. It unites and structures key
concepts, regardless of how difficult it might be to incorporate them into a single coherent
theoretical synthesis. By contrast, most theoretical exegeses are singular and interested. Their
goal is not to summarize fully what an author wrote but to engage with a portion of the text to
construct a new synthesis—a new idea—to further philosophical scholarship. As a result, they
are partial by design; text not relevant to the construction of the new idea is excluded. Thus,
when developing a formal semantic method, it may be useful to check its results against a few
exegeses that are entirely or mostly devoted to identifying the main themes of the text, but the
results are not meant to engage meaningfully with most other interpretations.
Still, semantic analysis can make important contributions to philosophical discourse by
allowing researchers to compare texts’ main themes in a disinterested way. This lends fresh
perspective to questions like how authors fit together as a school. Most researchers who analyze
the development and continuity of a philosophical school find at least some of its core ideas
personally compelling; thus something is at stake when they define that school. The fact that
their analyses are perhaps necessarily tendentious in no way means that they are necessarily
unsound, but we must recognize that, at an extreme, such analyses may turn out to be selffulfilling prophecies (think of Alexander’s (1990) successful construction of a Durkheimian
sociology that included him as the current representative, contrasted to Collins’s (1986)
unsuccessful and temporary attempt to make a Weberian sociology that emphasized geopolitical
concerns). Secondary literature on the Frankfurt School (e.g. Jay 1973, Kellner 1975,
Wiggershaus 1995, Türcke & Bolte 1994, Honneth 2007, Bonner 2011, Held 1980, Wheatland
31
2009) is no exception. There may be a tendency to define the school first in a way that reflects
one’s interests, and deduce from that definition how authors’ ideas converge to form that school.
For example, Jay (1973), having defined the school as a certain form of Left Hegelian neoMarxism, includes in the school members of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung only after
their emigration to the United States. Honneth (2007) defines the school as three cohesive
generations with himself at its helm. We may, however, want the option of handling questions
regarding the convergence of different thinkers’ conceptual schemes that are divorced, or at least
divorceable, from the arguments about how a school should be defined. Semantic relational
analysis offers this alternative approach. It looks empirically at how authors’ ideas overlap.
Then we may or may not choose to induce from that pattern of convergence a definition of the
school.
Here, the similarities and differences in semantic patterns among three authors—
Horkheimer/Adorno, Habermas, and Honneth—were analyzed, revealing strong, weak, and
qualitatively different cultural ties between these school members. These patterns, when
analyzed in tandem with social structural data, demonstrate how the Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory was forged by the school’s third generation. It united the tradition by bridging the
cultural hole formed by its predecessors with a particular conception of “reason.” Analyses like
this can be scaled up easily. Incorporating works by other authors within the same time frame or
by the same authors in an extended time frame could add even more insight into the development
of philosophical schools.
Semantic relational analysis provides a strong empirical foundation for studying cultural
relations in general and may therefore help us understand other processes at work in cultural
institutions. Influence, for example, might be represented by existing social relationships
32
accompanied by cultural attributes converging over time. The convergence can be measured as
strong or weak, sudden or gradual, unidirectional or bidirectional. We can raise sociological
hypotheses about whether certain types of social relations tend to correlate with certain types of
influence. Perhaps authority relationships tend to yield strong unidirectional influence; perhaps
close friendships tend to exhibit strong, bidirectional influence. The tendency of people to
become attracted to culturally similar others might be represented by cultural ties preceding the
formation of social ties. From there, we can answer questions as to the types of cultural ties that
have certain social structural repercussions. Maybe there are limits to the structuring potential of
similarity, where cultural convergence that is too strong becomes socially repulsive instead of
attractive. Perhaps strong friendships correlate to a wide array of weakly converging tastes and
beliefs, whereas acquaintanceships correlate to a very small set of strong convergences. Perhaps
having too many common beliefs ends up—counterintuitively—tearing close relationships apart
over time. These are issues at the core of understanding social relationships, as well as
understanding the role of culture in social life. While it has long remained a challenge to study
them systematically, the semantic relational approach presents some exciting new possibilities.
33
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APPENDIX
Appendix A: Testing Semantic Neighborhoods
A.1 Clause, Sentence, Paragraph
The first grammatical unit examined is the clause. These are strings of text set apart with
commas, semicolons, and periods.15 Averaging 11 words in length in Theory of Communicative
Action, the clause is the smallest grammatical unit examined here. One could argue that each
clause represents an idea. For example, in delineating the following clauses “In the analytic
dialogue the roles are asymmetrically distributed; the analyst and the patient do not behave like
proponent and opponent” (Habermas 1981: 21), the semicolon serves the desired purpose. It
separates a statement about analytic dialogue from a statement about an analyst and a patient,
both of which are coherent expressions. But the method will also make “mistakes,” eliminating
words from clauses because they are in comma-separated lists. For instance, commas break up
the single coherent expression “Someone who explains his libidinous reaction to rotten apples by
referring to the ‘infatuating,’ ‘unfathomable,’ ‘vertiginous” smell, or who explains his panicked
reaction to open spaces by their ‘crippling,’ ‘leaden,’ ‘sucking’ emptiness, will scarcely meet
with understanding in the everyday contexts of most cultures” (Habermas 1981: 17) into seven
different clauses. False negatives—semantic relations that should be identified but are not—
abound. On the other hand, we can be fairly certain that words often co-present in these small
lexical units (>100 times in Theory of Communicative Action) are truly “related” in a text. So
while clauses will produce many false negatives, they will produce very few false positives.
Co-presence in sentences has been suggested by Genevieve Teil and Bruno Latour (1995)
as the best means for semantic-associational analysis. They argue that the simple co-presence of
15
These lexical units are simply strings of text set apart from each other with punctuation; As such, not every string
is a true grammatical clause. However, the punctuation-split operation closely resembles breaking up the text into
grammatical clauses, so I will refer to these units as “clauses” for shorthand.
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concepts in sentences provides surprisingly rich meaning. With an average length of 28 words,
the sentence is the mid-sized unit examined here. While false positives should remain relatively
low, the potential for false negatives remains. One can imagine that in texts, especially ones that
discuss complex ideas, a coherent idea requires more than a single sentence to express. For
instance, the sentence cited above about the dialogue between an analyst and a patient certainly
expresses a coherent thought, but it does not capture the entire larger idea that helps Habermas
build his fundamental argument. The sentence is actually embedded in a statement about selfdeception and irrationality that takes place over a few sentences.
The last grammatical unit examined is the paragraph. The paragraph is the largest unit
examined here, averaging around 108 words. The paragraph level offers great advantages when
a text is long. Even more than sentences, we can imagine paragraphs as the building blocks for a
complex system of meaning. In fact, this is how we are taught to use the English language.
Each paragraph represents a main idea. If one reads through the topic sentences of a wellconstructed text, one should get the skeletal structure of its conceptual arc. Of course,
paragraphs are still not perfect. Semantic relations according to paragraph co-presence bridge
greater distance. Thus, these larger units tend toward true negatives, but false positives. A
complete idea may require more than one sentence to express—and a paragraph method will
capture that—but a poor writer might still express several unrelated ideas in a single paragraph.
I have tested these suspicions by analyzing Habermas’s text these three different ways.
The 30 strongest semantic relations for each approach are listed in Table A.1; network
visualizations are provided in Figures A.1, A.2, & A.3.
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Table A.1: 30 top relations—clause, sentence, paragraph
-------------------------Table A.1 about here
-------------------------Figure A.1: Habermas by Clauses
-------------------------Figure A.1 about here
-------------------------Figure A.2: Habermas by Sentences
-------------------------Figure A.2 about here
-------------------------If we first compare the results for the clause analysis with those of the sentence analysis,
we see that from clause to sentence seven out of thirty relations— mutual-understanding,
understanding oriented, societal-rationalization, theory-parsons, everyday-practice, modernsocieties, and system-integration—have been replaced with action-cultural, world-action, lawlegal, action-way, action-weber, action-parsons, action-knowledge. The move from clause to
sentence exhibits four patterns of note: 1) In almost every case a simple bigram has been
replaced with a semantic relation bridging greater distance. 2) The graph produced becomes a
more coherent structure; semantic cliques previously separate from the main structure become
integrated into it. 3) Semantic “hubs” such as action become increasingly evident. 4) The
frequency of relations increases substantially. These four patterns can be considered
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advantageous because they move the structure toward greater coherence, reliability, and
intricacy. But with these advantages comes at least one drawback: dominant nodes become
amplified, possibly obscuring other structural patterns. Here, action dominates, swamping the
other nodes. Connections to action compose the primary—if not only—important structural
feature, making the graph somewhat less informative.
Figure A.3: Habermas by Paragraphs
-------------------------Figure A.3 about here
--------------------------When we move from sentence to paragraph, the same patterns persist. Everything
“gained” by moving from clause to sentence has been retained in the paragraph analysis. On top
of that, seven other relations—understanding-reaching, social-integration, action-oriented,
world-objective, understanding-world, action-knowledge, and systems-theory are replaced with
social-lifeworld, validity-action, action-means, actor-action, action-society, social-society, and
action-oriented. Again, bigrams are replaced by relations of greater distance, the graph has
become more coherent, semantic hubs become clearer, and the sheer frequency of relations
increases substantially, but action swamps the structure. Still, because of the connectivity and
frequency of relations in the relational matrix produced—if not the slightly sounder logic
underlying it—the paragraph method appears at present to produce the most useful data for
further analyses.
A.2 Analysis of N-Grams
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A window of size n-words moves over the entire text, tallying the number of times words
are co-present with one another. N-gram weighting is done by allowing a relation to count in
every text window in which it is present, rather than only once in each analysis. For example,
analyzing 3-grams in the sentence “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” brown-fox
would count twice in the analysis, whereas brown-jumps would count once. Analyzing 4-grams,
brown-fox would count three times, brown-jumps would count twice, and brown-over would
count once. Thus, relations that bridge greater textual distance must be substantially more
frequent than ones that are textually close to prove their validity and outweigh close ones in the
analysis.
The results of the n-gram analysis are summarized below in Figure A.4. On the left is a
list of semantic relations; on the top is a listing of n-gram sizes. Presence of the bar indicates
that the semantic relation is identified by the n-gram.
Figure A.4. N-grams of Size 3-300
-------------------------Figure A.3 about here
--------------------------This crucial point is at n = 104-146. We can see relations disappear above, and appear
below power-labor as n300. From n of size 3-40, the results of the analysis change rapidly.
Bigrams like speech act and symbolically mediated are replaced by semantic relations that bridge
greater textual distance, but are substantially more frequent. But as the n-gram grows, changes
to it become scarcer and scarcer. When it gets larger than n = 104, the relational matrix largely
stabilizes. From n = 104-146 until n = 300, the set of relations remains essentially the same, with
only the 30th (weakest) relation replaced at n = 147 (social-integration  social-society), n = 161
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(social-society validity-action), and n = 211 (validity-action  system-parsons). Nothing that
enters the relational matrix after n = 104 moves above the lowest (30th) position. This means that
the weighting of “closer” relations begins to win out. After n = 104, no new semantic relations
are frequent enough to outweigh the closer ones already included in the relational matrix. It is
therefore evident that n = 104-146 is the critical moment in the analysis; it is the point where
group size is maximized, but the semantic relations remain meaningful. Figure A.5 is the graph
of the semantic network at n = 104-146.
Figure A.5: Habermas Semantic Network at n = 104-146
-------------------------Figure A.5 about here
--------------------------This key n-gram is closest in size and results to a paragraph (recall that the average paragraph
length is 108 words). This n-gram is also the most similar to a paragraph in terms of its results,
with only two low-ranking semantic relations differentiating the two matrices: validity-action
and actor-action in the paragraph matrix turn into social-integration and reaching-understanding
in the 104-gram. This is likely the result of the weighting mechanism used in the n-gram
analysis, as social-integration and reaching-understanding are textually close relations (one a
bigram, the other practically a bigram) that are used fairly often.
Appendix B: Analyzing Texts in Translation
It is tempting to assume it is always preferable to perform semantic analyses in a text’s
original language, but this will not always yield the most reliable results. Whether it does or not
depends on characteristics of both languages as they bear on the type of semantic analysis to be
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performed. A semantic relational analysis based on co-presence in semantic neighborhoods is
most reliable when each concept’s symbolic representation is consistent throughout a text; that
is, a concept is expressed in as few forms as possible—concept A is represented by only A, not
by A as well as Ar, An, and As. Due to its conjugation and declension rules, as well as the
tendency to create compounds, concepts are relatively inconsistent in German. We are therefore
likely to achieve more reliable results when analyzing texts in English, given that the text was
translated with reasonable care.
Semantic analysis in German is symbolically inconsistent because words can take various
different “forms” depending on grammatical context. German verbs are conjugated with great
variability and adjectives are declined according to case, number, and gender, whereas these
words seldom morph in English. Verbs vary more in German than in English. For example, in
English, I consider, you consider, they consider, we consider, and he/she considers.
Conjugation varies the verb “to consider” only modestly, and to automatically code a verb as
including its third person singular form (original form + “s”) is computationally simple. By
contrast, in German, I überlege, you überlegst, he/she überlegt, we überlegen, and they
überlegen—and these are only the present and regular forms of the verb; other tenses and
constructions require further conjugations. Adjectives are declined according to case, number,
and gender. Something that is “loud” and written only as loud in English may appear in German
as laut, laute, lauter, laute, lautes depending on its grammatical case, whether or not a definite
article is used, and characteristics of the modified noun. Indeed, natural language processing can
solve these problems through an automated identification of verbs or adjectives, and a
programmed grouping of verbs and adjectives with common stems, regardless of their endings.
However, each manual “fix” of this sort in the code is both time consuming and a potential
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source of error for an automated analysis. Algorithms for part of speech identification are
imperfect and will almost certainly fail to identify some verbs or adjectives, making the results of
even an adjusted German analysis at least somewhat less reliable than those of an English
analysis.
An even more difficult source of symbolic inconsistency in the German language is its
tendency to compound words. There is a tendency to both combine two or more words (usually
nouns) into a single one, as well as to separate verbs’ prefixes from their bases in certain
grammatical constructions. First, two individual nouns may be combined into a single
compound noun. We can take for example the concept of Produktion (production, as in
manufacturing), which as a cornerstone of Marxist thought, is discussed often in Critical Theory.
Nouns that contextualize or modify Produktion are sometimes united with it to create a
compound noun. For example, “forms of production” is normally expressed as
Produktionsformen, “process of production” as Produktionsprozess, “relations of production” as
Produktionsverhältnisse. Now, if nouns and their modifiers were always compounded, the
analysis could adjust for this pattern. But unfortunately, compounding is not always the norm.
For example, “cessation of production” is normally expressed as Einstellung der Produktion,
“modernization of production” as Modernisierung der Produktion. Also, only nouns compound;
other modifiers such as adjectives are rarely, if ever, compounded with a base noun. For
instance, “limited production” and “efficient production” are expressed as begrenzte Produktion
and effiziente Produktion, respectively. What is more, regardless of whether compounding a
phrase is the norm, it remains optional; the writer or speaker does it largely according to her own
preference. Altogether, this tendency to compound nouns makes for significant noise in any
semantic analysis because some instances of a noun and its modifiers would be expressed as
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single compound words, whereas other instances as various unique words. Second, verbs are
often “separable” (trennbare) compounds that are divided into prefixes and bases upon
conjugation. This creates the same problem as creating compound nouns: sometimes two words
will be attached, sometimes detached, so a computational analysis will treat these two forms
differently even though they represent the same concept. Still more problematic is that with
verbs, the prefix and the base together as one word can have a meaning that is quite distinct from
its two elements as independent words. For example, we can think of the word unterbringen,
which as a compound means “to house or accommodate” a guest. In many grammatical
constructions, the verb is separated: “I house the guest” is expressed as ich bringe den Gast
unter. But the two fragments, unter and bringen are words in themselves with independent
meanings, literally “under” and “to bring.” If analyzed computationally many instances of
accommodation would be read erroneously as “bringing somebody under,” indicating something
that sounds more like an act of murder than an act of hospitality. And adjusting a computer
program to deal with compounding may be much more difficult than to deal with conjugation
and declension, since it is relatively unregulated. The symbolic stability of English would
therefore facilitate a more reliable semantic analysis.
Analyzing texts in English is, however, only advantageous if the text’s translation is high
quality. Indeed, there is no such thing as a perfect translation since words in different languages
cannot be exchanged in a 1:1 relationship, but philosophical translations may be some of the best
available. They are often accomplished as the result of intense contestation among scholars in
the philosophy being translated (as opposed to being the work of professional translators) and
must withstand a long process of painstaking review and criticism before publication.
Significant difficulties in translation are normally noted in the translator’s note of a volume,
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alerting a semantic analyst to adjust for them. Most importantly, concepts of philosophical
import are normally understood as “technical terms;” they are therefore treated with the utmost
care and usually kept consistent between the original text and the translation. There is, however,
one common translation practice that is problematic for an analysis of semantic relations based
on co-presence in semantic neighborhoods: English translations often add paragraph breaks not
present in original German texts. This is because German paragraphs can be unseemly in length,
cobbling together several distinct thoughts (although this is more the case for pre-20th centrury
texts than for contemporary ones). Depending on how often paragraphs are broken up in a given
text (and prevalence will vary widely), there may be a significant tension between the results of
an English and a German analysis. But even in this case, the argument may fall in favor of using
the English version. Paragraphs are broken up in translation to better organize the text, to make
it more understandable when the original writing style is unsystematic. If a translation makes for
qualitatively better semantic neighborhoods—paragraphs that truly represent a single idea—by
re-applying the rules of paragraph breaks, the translation may prove better for semantic relational
analysis. Again, whether this is at all a concern for a study depends on the text in question, but it
is important to consider paragraph beaks when analyzing translations. Altogether, we still have
reason to believe that the distribution of philosophical concepts is largely the same over the
course of both versions. Performing semantic relational analysis on the translation therefore
seems reasonable (although this may not hold for other approaches to semantic analysis). Even
though a small portion of a text’s semantic structure may be altered by translation, the costs of
remaining in German outweigh the benefits.
Still, although analyzing in English is generally simpler and more reliable, analyzing in
German reliably is a worthy goal—if not only because not all German texts are translated into
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English well. The first steps toward doing so are to adjust the programmed analysis for verb
conjugation and adjective declension, as well as commonly compounded/separated words. This
should improve the reliability of German language analyses.
Appendix C: Binarized Semantic-Relational Matrices to Discover Convergence in Meaning
Structures
Figure C.1: Horkheimer/Adorno on “Reason” Matrix
-------------------------Figure C.1 about here
--------------------------Figure C.2: Habermas on “Reason” Matrix
-------------------------Figure C.2 about here
--------------------------Figure C.3: Honneth on “Reason” Matrix
-------------------------Figure C.3 about here
--------------------------Figure C.4: Semantic Relational Convergences (Marked on Honneth Matrix)
-------------------------Figure C.4 about here
---------------------------
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FIGURES
Figure 1. The Structure of Communicative Action
Figure 2. Chapter 1: Introduction: Approaches to the Problem of Rationality
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Figure 3. Chapter 6: Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld
Figure 4. Chapter 5: The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity
to Communicative Action
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Figure 5. “Reason” through Three Generations of Critical Theory
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Figure 6. Reduced to only the shared ways of describing “Reason”
52
Table A.1: 30 top relations—clause, sentence, paragraph
Clause Relations
Times
occurred
Sentence Relations
Times
occurred
Paragraph Relations
Times
occurred
communicative-action*
validity-claims*
action-theory
speech-acts*
understanding-reaching
social-integration*
action-systems
action-orientations
action-system
understanding-action
social-action
social-system*
action-oriented
action-concept
system-lifeworld
social-theory*
social-world
systems-theory*
rationalization-weber
world-objective
mutual-understanding*
rationality-action
understanding-oriented
action-lifeworld
understanding-world
societal-rationalization*
theory-parsons
everyday-practice*
modern-societies*
system-integration*
340
269
234
230
221
209
176
174
170
169
168
158
152
147
142
131
123
123
121
121
118
118
117
116
105
101
90
89
88
88
communicative-action*
social-action
action-theory
speech-acts*
validity-claims*
action-system
understanding-action
action-lifeworld
action-orientations*
social-system*
understanding-reaching
action-systems
social-integration*
action-oriented
action-concept
system-lifeworld
social-world
rationality-action
social-theory*
world-objective
rationalization-weber
action-cultural
understanding-world
world-action
law-legal
action-way
action-weber
action-parsons
action-knowledge
systems-theory*
466
378
362
344
334
314
302
273
268
268
256
255
252
245
233
226
225
212
206
203
199
188
182
175
173
170
167
166
160
159
social-action
action-system
action-theory
communicative-action*
social-system*
understanding-action
action-lifeworld
action-concept
law-legal
action-weber
action-parsons
social-theory*
social-lifeworld
rationality-action
action-cultural
action-systems
social-world
system-lifeworld
world-action
validity-claims*
rationalization-weber
action-way
validity-action
speech-acts*
action-means
action-orientations
actor-action
action-society
social-society
action-oriented
1730
1229
1210
1209
1011
1006
961
917
836
788
784
777
753
723
703
698
670
668
667
659
657
636
628
623
600
588
581
560
555
538
*indicates that the relation may be considered a bigram
53
Figure A.1: Habermas by Clauses
Figure A.2: Habermas by Sentences
54
Figure A.3: Habermas by Paragraphs
55
Figure A.4. N-grams of Size 3-300
56
Figure A.5: Habermas Semantic Network at n = 104-146
Figure C.1: Horkheimer/Adorno on “Reason” Matrix
57
Figure C.2: Habermas on “Reason” Matrix
Figure C.3: Honneth on “Reason” Matrix
58
Figure C.4: Semantic Relational Convergences (Marked on Honneth Matrix)
59