Social action and Systems

Abstract

All reflection on the social poses the following fundamental question, what is society? Or, what is the social? Much of the tradition holds that society is made up of individuals. In order to answer this question, in the first part of this work we will discuss, based on the contributions of Tugendhat, Apel and Habermas, the philosophical foundations of a theory of action that saves a central place for propositional language; in the second part, we will dedicate ourselves to the analysis of a tradition that constitutes itself in denying the theory of action and its foundations, we refer to the theory of autopoietic systems proposed by Luhmann. Human beings within this tradition do not have a central role but are instead located in the system’s environment. Finally, as an excursus, we will refer to the most complex level of communication according to Luhmann: the symbolically generalized communication media.