Defining, as Habermas, communicative rationality as ‘wanting to reach understanding to secure the participant speakers an intersubjectively shared lifeworld, thereby securing the horizon within which everyone can refer to one and the same objective world’; and defining the objective world as ‘the totality of entities concerning which true propositions are possible’ (thus, to avoid self-reference, not seeing propositions as part of the objective world); and seeing a speech act as ‘a speaker pursuing the aim of reaching understanding with a hearer about something’, we might ask:
How can a math teacher use communicative rationality to establish a non-patronizing power-free rational dialogue with grade one children about the objective fact Many, present in both the children and the teacher’s life-world; thus accepting four fingers held together two by two being rationalized as (as do the children) ‘the total I two twos’ and not just as ‘four’?