 This social theory advances the goals of human emancipation, while maintaining an inclusive universalist moral framework.This framework rests on the argument called universal pragmatics—that all speech acts have an inherent telos (the Greek word for "purpose")—the goal of mutual understanding, and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding.Habermas built the framework out of the speech-act philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin and John Searle, the sociological theory of the interactional constitution of mind and self of George Herbert Mead, the theories of moral development of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, and the discourse ethics of his Frankfurt colleague and fellow student Karl-Otto Apel.