Communicology

Abstract The analysis takes up the conjunction of semiotics and cybernetics as a problem in theory construction in the human sciences. From a philosophical per- spective, this is also the ontological problem of communicology: the disciplinary study of human communication. My analysis suggests current conceptions of “semiotics” and “cybernetics” are misunderstood because “information” is assumed as synonymous with “communication” and that the axioms of “mathematics” are identical to those of “logics”. The evidence contained in the misunderstandings is a conflation of reductionist ecology ideas about the “environment” differentiation of (1) human beings [apperceptive organic life], (2) animals [perceptive organic life], and machines [inorganic and constructed mechanisms]. The communicological view argues that a correct understanding of these issues requires a competence in logics and linguistics to determine the metatheory criteria for choosing evidence among humans, animals, and machines. The domain thematic is the phenomenological synergism of human embodiment as expression and perception. In this context, my criterion for evidence is the structure or form of a pure concept of reason (choice making judgment) that is given a priori in consciousness, the notion demonstrated by Immanuel Kant: A notion is a rule that you know before you experience it as a result.

ABSTRACT
The foundation of disciplines is often associated with initial books and their authors. The discipline of speech–communication– communicology is no exception. Books by Albert Craig Baird, Lester Thonssen, and Franklin Hayward Knower serve as the definition of our early discipline. This article is about foresight— the anticipation of future developments for what was initially called “general speech,” whose practitioners have ever since been known as generalists. Departments and schools of communicology are now emerging worldwide as a synthesis of problematics and thematics that used to be called general speech. Knower suggested in 1962 that the beginning of theoretical and applied coherence must begin with a descriptive single-term name. Long overlooked, if known at all, and certainly never reprinted, is Knower’s candidate for a name and definition of a discipline he called communicology. This article is an edited

Abstract: The Human Science of Communicology culminates several disciplinary developments, largely viewed as singular constitutions and foundational to differential attitudes about the nature and function of philosophy and science in apposition (triadic relation) to human embodiment. In more familiar terms, the idea of Culture stands in contrast to the idea of Science, because there is a measured distinction between what human beings express and what they perceive. In Modernity, we know this apposition (Human–Culture–Science) as the emergence of (1) the distinct cultural disciplines (expression of human embodiment) over against the (2) the distinct scientific disciplines (perception of physical nature). Ernst Cassirer explores this problematic in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942) where he distinguishes Culture as the perception-of-expression and Science as the perception-of-objects. Cassirer’s thematic explication is to be found in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1996) where his semiotic phenomenology of human communication is articulated in detail such that Science is bracketed by Culture. In Cassirer’s terms of symbolic forms, we can distinguish the semiotic distinction among (1) the Perception of Expression (Culture) where (a) Myth (Langage) and (b) Knowledge (Parole) contrast with (2) the Perception of Objects (Science) in the form of (c) Speech (Langue) and (d) Art (Discours). Symbols are constitutive of social semiotics (sensuous expression) and the intersubjective phenomenology of human embodiment (intuitive expression) in the tradition of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl.

.....the double bind as constituting an entirely new, non-material, principle of evolution, major conceptual revisions may need to be made in our general understanding of evolution as contained within the “modern evolutionary synthesis”.

KEYWORDS:
behavior, communication, context, contradiction, deutero-learning, double bind, epistemology, evolution, incompleteness theorum, kinesics, learning, logical type theory, metacommunication, metamessages, metatheory, mystification, paradox, relationships, schismogenesis, schizophrenia,  scientific elegance, symmathesy, teleology, temporality, transcontextual, transdisciplinary, trauma

The present study, Speech Act Phenomenology, is in part a critique of the speech act theory as found in Analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition. The theory offers a description of speech performance, that is, the structure of speech act "relationships", and the content of speech acts as "meaning". The primary statement of the speech act theory that is examined is that presented by Austin. A secondary concern is the formation of the theory as presented by Searle and Grice. The limitations of the analytic speech act theory are specified by applying the theory as an explanation of "human communication". This conceptual examination of "communication" suggests that the philosophic method of "analysis" does not resolve the antinomy of "language , nature, and function". Basically, the conceptual distinctions of the speech act theory (i.e., locutions, illocutions, and perlocutions) are found to be empty as a comprehensive explanation of the concept "communication". The study includes an Appendix, "Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Communication", that provides the general reader with an introduction to the phenomenological theory construction that is utilized in the main text. The theory includes: (1) The recognition of the "presence", of phenomena by description, that is, a "primacy of perception"; (2) The reflective location of meaning by structural reduction, that is, a "primordial expression"; and, (3) The new cogito of intentionality or lived experience in which one recognizes the "I am able to", the "I can" [Husserl] rather than the Cartesian formula of the "I think", the "I feel". As humanistic approaches to the study of language behavior [Linguistics], the conceptual analytic viewof a "linguistic phenomenology"  (Austin, Searle, Grice)  is compared with the existential, semiotic view of a "phenomenology of speaking" (Merleau-Ponty-Ponty, Benveniste, Barthes). Thus, the present book offers for the first time a philosophic confrontation between the Anglo-American speech act theory ( a "grammatology" [Derrida]) and the European tradition of communication theory (a "new rhetoric" [Perelman]) as a human science of Discourse [Gusdorf].

Communicology is a tradition in the human sciences studying  discourse in all of its semiotic and phenomenological manifestations of embodied consciousness and of practice in the world of other people and their environment. Since the foundational work during the 1950s by Jürgen Ruesch in Semiotic approaches to human relations (1972), and by Ruesch and Gregory Bateson in Communication (1968), a widely accepted understanding of the networks of human discourse includes: (1) the intrapersonal level (or psychiatric/aesthetic domain), (2) the interpersonal level (or social domain), (3) the group level (or cultural domain), and (4) the intergroup level (or transcultural domain). These interconnected network levels contain the process outlined by Roman Jakobson's theory of human communication (1971, 1972). In homage to the phenomenological work in →semiotics and normative logics by Charles S. Peirce and Edmund Husserl (Phenomenology), Jakobson explicated the relationship between an Addresser who expresses (emotive function) and an Addressee who perceives (conative function) a commonly shared Message (poetic function), Code (meta-linguistic function), Contact (phatic function), and Context (referential function) (Models of Communication). Operating on at least one of the four levels of discourse, these functions jointly constitute a semiotic world of phenomenological experience, what Yuri M. Lotman (1994) termed the semiosphere. Communicology is the critical study of discourse and practice, especially the expressive body as mediated by the perception of cultural signs and codes. It uses the methodology of semiotic phenomenology in which the expressive body discloses cultural codes, and cultural codes shape the perceptive body – an ongoing, dialectical, complex helix of twists and turns constituting the reflectivity, reversibility, and reflexivity of consciousness and experience. Communicology theoretically and practically engages in the description, reduction, and interpretation of cultural phenomena as part of a transdisciplinary understanding. The scientific research result is description (rather than prediction) in which validity and reliability are logical constructs based in the necessary and sufficient conditions of discovered systems (codes), both eidetic (based in consciousness) and empirical (based in experience).

FOREWARD by Calvin O. Schrag
AFTERWARD by Thomas J. Pace
PETER  LANG  PUBLISHERS, INC.
www.peterlang.com
© 2018
HARDBACK Edition—ISBN 978-1-4331-4374-8 ; 
Paperback Edition—ISBN 978-1-4331-4115-7; 
EBOOK  PDF—ISBN 978-1-4331-4114-0 ; 
DOI  10.3726/b10835;
Pages  514;
Appendix——Richard L. Lanigan  BIBLIOGRAPHY and VITA

AMAZON PRICE RANGES;  ORIGINAL PRICE WAS US$ 65

BOOK  AWARD  –– OUTSTANDING EDITED BOOK FOR 2018,
PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNICATION DIVISION, 
NATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION (USA)

First comprehensive explication of the Philosophy of Communication in two parts as (1) Communicology and (2) Semiology within the methodological context of Phenomenology as Applied Research.  Each Part contains two sections: (1) Eidetic Studies based in Logic and (2) Empirical Studies based in Experimentation as Lived-Experience. Thus, a unique Discourse comparison of both the Philosophy Approach (eidetic studies grounded in logic) and the Human Science Approach (empirical studies grounded in linguistics).

Among the philosophers who undertook the task of thinking about the status of culture and the key advents of the twentieth century, Vilém Flusser deserves prominent recognition.
A multifaceted thinker, Flusser produced sophisticated theories about a reality in which man advances towards the game, endorsed by the emergence of a kind of technical device that is dedicated, mainly, to the calculation of possibilities and to the projection of these possibilities on reality, generating a veil that conceals the natural reality and creates layers of cultural and artificial realities.
This technical device, designated by Flusser as “apparatus”, being the index of a civilisatory stage where societies are characterised by the fact that they are programmed from discourses that point to a highly abstract shared language exposed through “technical images” which, just like Indian screens, are calculated and projected on the natural reality of the world, hiding and recreating it.
During this brief introduction, we can note the convergence between the main principles exposed by Flusser and that of the field which studies the theories concerned with video games, including the concept of gasification.
Although such connections have yet to be formally established and, in some points, the philosopher himself reaches different and opposing conclusions, the categories created by Flusser, such as apparatuses, technical images, and “projection systems”, can be found, analogously, within the field of video game studies.
To conduct part of this process, of reflecting on Flusserian theories ap-plied to video games, is one of the objectives of this text. My current research intends to verify whether the hybrid codes of video games and their syntac-tical strategies, in which the concept of gamification can be positioned, are suitable for the production of scientific knowledge in a reality that I concep-tualise, via Flusser, as post-historical.

Oddajemy do rąk Czytelników tom pt. Komunikologia. Teoria i praktyka komunikacji poświęcony jednej z najbardziej dynamicznie rozwijających się dziedzin nauk społecznych i humanistycznych, jaką jest komunikologia. Jest to już trzeci tom serii wydawniczej Wydawnictwa Naukowego Instytutu Filozofii UAM–„Biblioteka Komunikacji Społecznej”. Zebraliśmy w nim prace kilkunastu czołowych polskich teoretyków komunikacji reprezentujących najważniejsze rodzime ośrodki badawcze. Istnieje wiele różnych ...

Human discourse is one of several interactive, communicative mediums individuals wittingly and unwittingly manipulate in their effort to configure organizational power dynamics, relationships and identities. As an active, vital force in the social construction of reality, discursive processes constellate performative, negotiable social realities that join social agents in a variety of discursive entanglements, the patterns and sequences of which one may learn, imitate, internalize, produce and reproduce ad infinitum. Accordingly, social constructs of reality are read, intuited, adopted, and played out across multiple social domains and categories, such as gender. Like the organizational reality of which it is a participatory constituent, gender is produced and iterated by means of discursive communicative processes that transform human gestures, utterances, and other symbolic displays into the sociocultural normative lineaments of individual and collective identity. 

With this idea of gender as a socially constructed phenomenon in mind, I propose to examine theories of the gendered organization in the production and reproduction of gendered organizational realities and identities, paying special regard to the role of discourse as a gendered process; i.e., as a modus of doing gender.

Presentation paper on "The Philosophy of Communication: Centennial Symposium" at the National Communication Association (USA) annual conference. Focus on the origin of the discipline of "Philosophy of Communication" internationally and in the USA. EXTENDS: "Paradigm Shifts: Recalling the Early ICA and the Later PHILCOM" (2005).

Lewis Gordon responds to discussions of his work in the Special issue: Beyond Disciplinary Decadence: Communicology in the Thought of Lewis Gordon, edited by Michael Paradiso-Michau, Atlantic Journal of Communication 19, no. 1 (2011): 54–63.

Abstract The analysis takes up the conjunction of semiotics and cybernetics as a problem in theory construction in the human sciences. From a philosophical per- spective, this is also the ontological problem of communicology: the disciplinary study of human communication. My analysis suggests current conceptions of “semiotics” and “cybernetics” are misunderstood because “information” is assumed as synonymous with “communication” and that the axioms of “mathematics” are identical to those of “logics”. The evidence contained in the misunderstandings is a conflation of reductionist ecology ideas about the “environment” differentiation of (1) human beings [apperceptive organic life], (2) animals [perceptive organic life], and machines [inorganic and constructed mechanisms]. The communicological view argues that a correct understanding of these issues requires a competence in logics and linguistics to determine the metatheory criteria for choosing evidence among humans, animals, and machines. The domain thematic is the phenomenological synergism of human embodiment as expression and perception. In this context, my criterion for evidence is the structure or form of a pure concept of reason (choice making judgment) that is given a priori in consciousness, the notion demonstrated by Immanuel Kant: A notion is a rule that you know before you experience it as a result.

TEN NONVERBAL SEMIOTIC SYSTEMS ARE DISCUSSED: EIDETIC (Linguistics, Mathematics, Logics) AND EMPIRICAL (Proxemics, Chronemics, Ocularics, Kinesics, Haptics, Vocalics, and Olfactorics).
Emotion displays on your face are an iconic sign of comportment—your disposition to act in a particular way. Most importantly, these nonverbal kinemes suggest the semiotic system (Peirce’s tone, token, type) that will contextually code the action impact of your verbal message. In short, how your face looks (tone) when you speak (token) will set the meaning frame (type) for what your listener hears you say (a translation with value significations). These phenomenological facts are most obvious to persons who engage in transcultural communication. At this level of interaction, the full dynamic system of (1) intra-personal, (2) inter-personal, (3) intra-group, and (4) inter-group communication is on visual display. The analysis uses the basic model of space (proxemics) and kinesics (human body motion). Communicology includes research and application on the emotion cycle of face displays (Happiness  >  Surprise  >  Fear  >  Anger  >  Disgust  >  Sadness  >  [Happiness] ). I review the cross-cultural research on the technology of “face recognition software” now current as a growing ethical and political concern for communication policy where there is a cultural perception preference. The analysis compares and contrasts Egocentric (US America) and Sociocentric (PR China) cultures of communication.