 TCA has also encountered rather heavy weather as a theory of meaning. In the analytic philosophy of language, one of the standard requirements is to account for the compositionality of language, the fact that a finite set of words can be used to form an indefinite number of sentences. From that perspective, Habermas's theory falls short (Heath 2001, chap. 3). But perhaps we would do better to assess Habermas's theory of meaning from a different perspective.  The compositionality requirement is important if one wants to explain grammatical competence. But early on Habermas (1976b) expressed a greater interest in explaining communicative, rather than grammatical, competence: the ability of speakers to use grammatically well-formed sentences in social contexts. Although Habermas often presents his pragmatics as a further development in analytic theories of meaning, his analysis focuses primarily on the context-sensitive acceptability of speech acts: acceptability conditions as a function of formal features that distinguish different speech situations. This suggests his theory of meaning involves a quite different sort of project: to articulate the “validity basis” of social order.