The primary human activity, according to Habermas, Jürgen, who argues that philosophy should be focused on language and its capacities rather than consciousness (the focus of much of continental philosophy prior to Habermas, e.g. genre and actant). Habermas’s assumption is that language was at its origin communicative, that its purpose was to relay information and convey instructions. That is to say, at its origin language was transactional, its purpose was to achieve socially necessary goals. Communicative action is an extension of pragmatics beyond the realm of one-on-one interaction to the level of the social.