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Abstract
Two claims are at stake for a science of communication. This essay brings into focus the philosophical distinctions between the human science of communication and the social science of communication. Social science is argued to be the dominant paradigm in mainstream communication inquiry in the United States. Its underlying basis is information theory. Communicology is a human science that differs from social science in that it focuses not on the message but rather the cultural-semiotic constraints on embodied phenomenological experience. This is a unique human science approach. The grounds for comparison are located in the history of these contrasting views and in their problematic concerns. American pragmatism and social psychology are depicted as analogous to European philosophy and the Geisteswissenschaften. As this essay argues, the human science of embodied discourse is historically rooted in semiotics and phenomenology and lead to a synthesis in contemporary communicology. Communicology is distinguished from cultural studies, and a vision for the future discipline is advanced.
Notes
[1] This manuscript was awarded Top Paper in Philosophy by the National Communication Association and was presented at the 100th Convention of the NCA in Chicago, 21 November 2014.
[2] Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 353.
[3] Richard L. Lanigan's discussion of these and other essential technical terms of human science is quite helpful. See The Human Science of Communicology: A Phenomenology of Discourse in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1992), Appendix D 239–42.
[4] Paul Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and the Social Sciences,” The Annals of Phenomenological Sociology II (1977): 145–59. Also see Isaac E. Catt, “The Signifying World Between Ineffability and Intelligibility: Body as Sign in Communicology,” The Review of Communication 11, no. 2 (2011): 122–44 and Isaac E. Catt, “Culture in the Conscious Experience of Communication,” Listening/Journal of Communication Ethics, Religion, and Culture 48, no. 2 (2013, printed January 2014): 99–119.
[5] Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
[6] Deborah Eicher-Catt and Isaac E. Catt, eds., Communicology: The New Science of Embodied Discourse (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). In particular, Isaac E. Catt and Deborah Eicher-Catt provide a philosophical explanation in this text in “Communicology: A Reflexive Human Science,”15–29. For a further interpretation of what this means to communication instruction see Isaac E. Catt's chapter “Communication is Not a skill: Critique of Communication Pedagogy as Narcissistic Expression,” 131–50.
[7] Isaac E. Catt and Deborah Eicher-Catt, "Semiotics in Mainstream Communication Studies: A Review of Principal USA Journals in the Context of Communicology,” The Review of Communication 12, no. 3 (2012): 176–200.
[8] See Catt, “The Signifying World.”
[9] For an insightful communicological perspective on Gregory Bateson see Deborah Eicher-Catt, “Bateson, Peirce and the Sign of the Sacred,” in A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics, ed. Jespers Hoffmeyer (Springer, 2008), 229–76.
[10] See Brant Burleson, "Taking Communication Seriously. Communication Monographs 59 (1992): 79–86.
[11] Marurice Merleau-Ponty resuscitates this term originally employed by Edmund Husserl to describe phenomenological methodology in his “Preface” to Phenomenology of Perception, trans., Donald A. Landes [Originally published in 1945] (London: Routledge, 2012), 78.
[12] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 80–1.
[13] Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin and Don Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication (New York: Norton, 1967), 48–9.
[14] See Watzlawick's “Preface,” to the 1987 printing of Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1951), 8.
[15] John H. Powers, “On the Intellectual Structure of the Human Communication Discipline,” Communication Education 44 (1995): 191–222.
[16] Statement of Jon Hess, editor-elect of Communication Education in his call for manuscript submissions at http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/ah/rced-cfp (accessed August 20, 2014).
[17] Some examples include the following: Jacqueline Martinez, Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity: Communication and Transformation in Praxis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Richard L. Lanigan, “Paradigm Shifts: Recalling the Early ICA and the Later PHILCOM,” The Communication Review 8 (2005): 377–82; Gary Radford, On Philosophy of Communication (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2005); Deborah Eicher-Catt, “The Authenticity in Ambiguity: Appreciating Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Abductive Logic as Communicative Praxis,” The Atlantic Journal of Communication 13, no. 2 (2005): 113–34; Deborah Eicher-Catt, “Advancing Family Communication Scholarship: Toward a Communicology of the Family,” The Journal of Family Communication 5, no. 2 (2005): 103–21; Igor Klyukanov, A Communication Universe: Manifestations of Meaning, Stages of Significance (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010); Frank J. Macke, The Experience of Communication: Body, Flesh and Relationship (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, in press); Isaac E. Catt, “For a Communicology of Precarity: A Paradigm for Interrogating the Confluence of Social Structures and Human Experience” in Prekarisierung und Flexibilisierung, ed. Rolf Dieter Hepp (Munster, DE: Verlag Westfalisches Dampfboot, 2012a), 260–74; Isaac E. Catt, “Korzybski and Charles Sanders Peirce,” in Korzybski and…, ed. Corey Anton and Lance Strate (New York: Institute of General Semantics, 2012b), 69–99; Isaac E. Catt, “Communicology and Human Conduct (An Essay Dedicated to Max),” Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies/Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique [Originally presented as the President's Address to the Semiotic Society of America, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 2012], forthcoming.
[18] Richard L. Lanigan, Phenomenology of Communication: Merleau-Ponty's Thematics in Communicology and Semiology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988); Richard L.Lanigan, The Human Science of Communicology: A Phenomenology of Discourse in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1992); Isaac E. Catt, “The Institution of Communitarianism and the Communicology of Pierre Bourdieu,” The American Journal of Semiotics 15–6, nos. 1–4 (2000): 187–206; Isaac E. Catt, “Pierre Bourdieu's Semiotic Legacy: A Theory of Communicative Agency,” The American Journal of Semiotics 22, nos. 1–4 (2006): 27–54. Also see Isaac E. Catt, “The Signifying World.”
[19] Carol Wilder, Rigor and imagination (New York: Praeger, 1981).
[20] Klaus Krippendorff, “The Past of Communication's Hoped-for Future,” Journal of Communication 43 (1993): 34–44.
[21] National Communication Association, https://www.natcom.org/discipline (accessed March 23, 2014).
[22] Richard L. Lanigan, “The Self in Semiotic Phenomenology: Consciousness as the Conjunction of Perception and Expression in the Science of Communicology,” The American Journal of Semiotics 15–6, nos. 1–4 (2000): 91–111.
[23] William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique (Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978).
[24] Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1951).
[25] Charles W. Morris, “Foundations of the Theory of Signs” in International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science, ed. Otto Neurath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 1, 2.
[26] Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin and Don Jackson, Pragmatics.
[27] Bourdieu's explication of the communication matrix (habitus and hexis) utilizing semiotic phenomenology is available in a number of works. For those yet to be initiated into his prolific scholarship good places to start are: Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Narcissistic experience is an object of phenomenological critique in cultural communicology. See Isaac E. Catt, “Rhetoric and Narcissism: A Critique of Ideological Selfism,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 50, no. 3 (1986): 242–53. Isaac E. Catt, “Narcissism as Interpersonal Communication: Theoretical Implications,” Journal of Communication Therapy 4, no. 2 (1988): 151–68; Isaac E. Catt, “Im Namen des Pragmatismus Oder Philosophische Reflexion ist Keine Untugend” [“In the Name of Pragmatism, or Philosophic Reflection is no Vice”], Sprache und Sprechen (Frankfurt: Scriptor Press, 1988), 153–61; Isaac E. Catt, “Kommunikation als das Werk der Kunst: Eine Interpretation zu Martin Heidegger” [“Communication as the Work of Art: An Interpretation of Martin Heidegger”], Positionen und Prozesse Asthetischer Kommunikation, Sprache und Sprechen (Frankfurt: Scriptor Press, 1990), 37–53; Isaac E. Catt, “Communicology and Narcissism: Disciplines of the Heart,” Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 4 (2002): 389–411; W. Marc Porter and Isaac E. Catt, “The Narcissistic Reflection of Communicative Power: Delusions of Progress Against Organizational Discrimination,” in Narrative and Social Control: Critical Perspectives, ed. Dennis Mumby (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993), 164–85.
[28] Wolfgang Donsbach, “The Identity of Communication Research,” Journal of Communication 56, no. 3 (2006): 437–48.
[29] Richard West, President's Address, National Communication Association 2012, http://www.natcom.org/pastpresidents/ (accessed August 26, 2014).
[30] Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986).
[31] Ronald C. Arnett, Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Rhetoric of Warning and Hope (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013).
[32] Pat Arneson, Communicative Engagement and Social Liberation: Justice Will be Made (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014).
[33] I have attempted to situate semiotic phenomenology in contrast with phenomenological-hermeneutic and semiotic approaches that do not employ this synthesis. For example, see Isaac E. Catt, “The Institution of Communitarianism and the Communicology of Pierre Bourdieu,” The American Journal of Semiotics 15–6, nos. 1–4 (2000): 187–206; Isaac E. Catt, “Signs of Disembodiment in Racial Profiliing: Semiotic Determinism versus Carlo Sini's Phenomenological Semiotics,” The American Journal of Semiotics 17, no. 4 (2001): 291–317.
[34] Lanigan, Human Science, 59–60; Richard L. Lanigan, “Communicology: The French Tradition in Human Science,” in Perspectives on Philosophy of Communication, ed. Pat Arneson (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007), 168–92.
[35] Deborah Eicher-Catt and Isaac E. Catt, “Peirce and Cassirer, ‘Life’ and ‘Spirit’: A Communicology of Religion,” Journal of Communication and Religion 36, no. 2 (2013): 77–106.
[36] Jon Stewart, Language as Articulate Contact: Toward a Post-semiotic Philosophy of Communication (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1995).
[37] Kenneth Gergen, Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community (New York: Oxford, 2009), 21–25. See particularly the introduction in which Gergen situates his work by dismissing the relevance of phenomenological philosophy to intersubjectivity.
[38] Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld, In Praise of Doubt (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Also see Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966).
[39] See Catt, “Culture in the Conscious Experience of Communication” and Catt, “Communicology and Human Conduct.”
[40] Anthony Wilden, The Rules are No Game (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 67.
[41] Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction.
[42] Lawrence Hass, Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 7.
[43] Deborah Eicher-Catt, “A Communicology of Female/feminine Embodiment: The Case of Non-custodial Motherhood,” The American Journal of Semiotics 17, no. 4 (2001): 93–130.
[44] There are two important works worth citing here. Jakobson is interpreting the semiotic phenomenology (phaneroscopy) of communication explicit in Charles S. Peirce's pragmatist (pragmaticist) philosophy. Roman Jakobson, “The Speech Event and the Functions of Language” in On Language: Roman Jakobson, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 69–79. [This essay was Jakobson's presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America, later published in Scientific American in 1976]. The second essay in the same 1990 volume is “Langue and Parole: Code and Message,” 80–109. [This essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes (attached to the New School in New York) in 1942.]
[45] Jakobson, “Langue and Parole,” 96.
[46] Jeffrey Andrew Barash, ed., The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
[47] Eicher-Catt and Catt, “Peirce and Cassirer.”
[48] Lanigan, Phenomenology, 203–22.
[49] Jurgen Ruesch, Semiotics and Human Relations (The Hague: Mouton), 81.
[50] Macke, Experience.
[51] I have explored this issue many times and many places. For example, see Isaac E. Catt, “Gregory Bateson's ‘New Science’ in the Context of Communicology,” The American Journal of Semiotics 19, nos. 1–4 (2003): 153–72; Isaac E. Catt, “Philosophical Grounds for Cultural Dialogue,” International Journal of Communication 18, nos. 1–2 (2008): 97–116.
[52] Lanigan, “Paradigm Shifts.”
[53] Brant Burleson, "Taking Communication Seriously, Communication Monographs 59 (1992): 79–86.
[54] Catt and Eicher-Catt, “Semiotics in Mainstream.”
[55] Michael M. Burgoon, “Instruction About Communication: On Divorcing Dame Speech,” Communication Education 38, no. 4 (1989): 303–8.
[56] Burgoon, “Instruction,” 303.
[57] John H. Powers, “On the Intellectual Structure.”
[58] Wilden, Rules, 126.
[59] Wilden, Rules, 193–5.
[60] In addition to my work on narcissism cited above, the application of communicology to problems of mental illness and its treatment remains an important topic. See Isaac E. Catt, “Communicology and the Worldview of Antidepressant Medicine,” The American Journal of Semiotics 28, nos. 1–2, (2012c): 81–103; Isaac E. Catt, “Communicology and the Ethics of Selfhood Under the Regime of Antidepressant Medicine” in The Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Alterity and the Other, ed. Ron Arnett and Pat Arneson (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 285–304; Isaac E. Catt, "Communicology, Antidepressants and Employability: A Critique of the Pathologization of Precarity” in Hyperprecarity, Rolf Dieter Hepp, and Robert Reisenger ed (Europäischer Hochschulverlag, Bremen: Oxford, forthcoming; and Macke, Experience).
[61] Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson, Pragmatics, 48–9.
[62] Peter Harries-Jones, A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 25–28. Also see original letters of Bateson to Watzlawick in the Bateson Archives, University of California, Santa Cruz.
[63] Ruesch and Bateson, Communication, 4.
[64] Ruesch, Semiotics, 68.
[65] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 80.
[66] Arnett, Communication Ethics.
[67] Klyukanov, Communication Universe.
[68] Jacqueline Martinez, Communicative Sexualities: A Communicology of Sexual Experience (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2011).
[69] Arneson, Communicative.
[70] Macke, Experience.
[71] Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (Boston: MIT, 1948), 2.
[72] See Burleson, “Taking Communication Seriously.”
[73] It is important to recognize that Ruesch and Bateson's seminal 1951 book Communication is the first in a trilogy. The other two volumes are applications of communicology. The latter works cannot be adequately understood without first reading the theory of culture and communication that is being applied. At risk is the observation of semiotic behavior sans the theory of phenomenological experience on which it is founded. Volumes two and three are by Ruesch: Jurgen Ruesch, Disturbed Behavior: The Clinical Assessment of Normal and Pathological Communicative Behavior (New York: Norton, 1957) and Jurgen Ruesch, Therapeutic Communication (New York: Norton, 1961). As a whole, these books build on the history of pragmatism as an influence on social psychiatry from Peirce to Dewey to Sapir to Sullivan as well as existential and social psychiatry inherited from Europe. The blend of semiotics and phenomenology has a long history.
[74] Ruesch, Semiotics 11–2.
[75] Wilbur Marshall Urban, The Intelligible World (New York: George Allen and Unwin, 1929); Wilbur Marshall Urban, Language and Reality (New York: George Allen and Unwin, 1939).
[76] Richard L. Lanigan, “Husserl's Phenomenology in America (USA): The Human Science Legacy of Wilbur Marshall Urban and the Yale School of Communicology,” Schutzian Research 3 (2011): 203–17.
[77] Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Nathan Houser and Christian Klosel ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 109–23 and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in the same volume, 124–41.
[78] Menand, Metaphysical, 354.
[79] Gerard Deledalle, Charles S. Peirce's Philosophy of Signs: Essays in Comparative Semiotics. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
[80] Morris equated Peirce's “interpretant,” the signifying effect of symbolicity, with an interpreter. Dewey understands the sign or, better, signifying, within its dynamic communicative context and cannot accept Morris' behaviorist turn with its empiricist implications. See John Dewey, “Peirce's Theory of Linguistic Signs, Thought, and Meaning,” Journal of Philosophy 43, no. 4 (February 4, 1946), 85–95. Also, see John Dewey and Arthur Bentley, Knowing and the Known (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948): 233–69. [This particular essay is actually written by Bentley, but is based in Dewey's understanding of his one time teacher C. S. Peirce]
[81] Catt, “Pierre Bourdieu's Semiotic Legacy.”
[82] Helen Swick Parry, “Introduction,” in Harry Stack Sullivan, The Fusion of Psychiatry and Social Science [Originally published by the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, 1964] (New York: Norton, 1971), 23–32.
[83] Charles Sanders Peirce, “Sundry Logical Conceptions” in The Essential Peirce ed., The Peirce Edition Project 2 (1998): 269. [Originally published in 1903]
[84] For a discussion of Sapir's relevance to semiotic phenomenology see Deborah Eicher-Catt, “Recovering the Voice of Embodied Dialogue: Edward Sapir's Contribution to Communicology,” International Journal of Communication 20, nos. 1–2 (2010): 9–33.
[85] See Lanigan, Human Science 1992, 56–58.
[86] Stephen A. Schwartz, “Everyman an Ubermensch: The Culture of Cultural Studies,” SubStance 29 (2000): 2.
[87] Schwartz, “Everyman,” 2.
[88] Isaac E. Catt, “Signs of Disembodiment in Racial Profiliing: Semiotic Determinism Versus Carlo Sini's Phenomenological Semiotics,” The American Journal of Semiotics 17, no. 4 (2001): 291–317.
[89] See Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words. Of note here is his Inaugural “Lecture on the Lecture” delivered to the College de France on 23 April 1982, 177–98. Bourdieu argues that, “sociologists must expect to encounter the social science of the past concretized in the object of their study” (182). In parallel fashion, I have argued that the new human science discipline of communicology ends the many equivocations of the discipline that has heretofore gone by the name communication and which subsequently does not adequately separate its object of investigation from the science of it. In my view, this is precisely why there is a disincentive in the social science of communication to truly problematize communication and, instead, a tendency to presuppose communication as an accomplished message. See Burleson, “Taking Communication Seriously,” 1992.
[90] For recent examples see Richard L. Lanigan, “Charles S. Peirce on Phenomenology: Communicology, Codes, and Messages; or Phenomenology, Synechism, and Fallibilism,” The American Journal of Semiotics 30, nos. 1–2 (2014): 139–58 and Garnet Buthcart, “Haunting Past Images: On the 2006 Documentary Film “Deception of a Memory” in the Context of Communicology,” The American Journal of Semiotics 30, nos. 1–2 (2014): 27–52.
[91] Schwartz, “Everyman,” 12.
[92] W. Marc Porter and Isaac E. Catt, “Delusions,” 1993.
[93] Jurgen Ruesch, Knowledge in Action (New York: Norton, 1975).
[94] Isaac E. Catt, “The'Cash Value’ of Communication: An Interpretation of William James,” in Recovering Pragmatism's Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication, Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith ed. (Albany: SUNY, 1995), 97–114. Also, see Isaac E. Catt, “Communication is Not a Skill.”
[95] See Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986). Also see Ruesch, 1975, Chapter 18 where he summarizes requirements for action. Schrag's analysis of explanation, understanding and interpretation is a modern rendition of the classical categories of data, capta and acta, though Schrag does not appear to see the symbolicity at work in this tripartite semiotic logic. Ruesch's discussion of hindsight, insight and foresight is a modern version of Peirce's understanding of time, space and embodiment as Peirce is understood by Deledalle and by me. Merleau-Ponty's semiotic phenomenology is analogous as he explicates the methodology of description, reduction and interpretation--a philosophy for “perpetual beginners.”
[96] Richard L. Lanigan, “The Postmodern Ground of Communicology: Subverting the Forgetfulness of Rationality in Language,” The American Journal of Semiotics 11, nos. 1–4 (1994): 5–21. [Originally delivered as the President's Address to the Semiotic Society of America 1993]. Also see Lanigan, “The Self in Semiotic Phenomenology.”
[97] See two of my discussions of Peirce, Bourdieu and Dewey: Catt, “Pierre Bourdieu's Semiotic Legacy,” and “Communicology and Human Conduct.”
[98] I offer this definition of ethos as a phenomenological alternative to the un-reflexive concept derived from Aristotle and commonly taught in American rhetoric. Ethos is decidedly not a mere mode of proof in persuasion.
[99] Isaac E. Catt, “Gregory Bateson's ‘New Science’ in the Context of Communicology,” The American Journal of Semiotics 19, nos. 1–4 (2003): 153–72.
[100] See Merleau-Ponty's “Preface” to Phenomenology of Perception.
[101] See Catt, “The Signifying World” and “Culture in the Conscious Experience.”
[102] John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” The Psychological Review III, no. 4 (1896): 358–70.