Richard L. Lanigan

The paper is a paradigmatic presentation of what the new science of communicology represents: the semiotic and phenomenological study of humandiscourse and the critical study of discourse and practice both, an interaction of communication, mass communications, popular culture, public relations, advertising, marketing, linguistics, discourse analysis, political economy, institutional analysis, organization of urban and rural spaces, ergonomics, body culture, clinical practice, health care, constructions of disease, health, and rehabilitation, human factors, signage, and so forth. Communicology is the human science research result in which validity and reliability are logic constructs based in the necessary and sufficient conditions of discovered systems (codes), whether eidetic (based in consciousness) or empirical (based in experience).

This work presents the first systemic account of the author's innovative theory of semiotic phenomenology and its place in the philosophy of communication and language. The creative and compelling project presented here spans more than fifteen years of systematic eidetic and empirical research into questions of human communication. Using the thematics of Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology, the author explores the concepts and practices of the human sciences that are grounded in communication theory, information theory, language, logic, linguistics, and semiotics. The hermeneutic discussion ranges over contemporary theories that include Roman Jakobson's phenomenological structuralism, the semiotics of Umberto Eco, Charles Pierce, and Alfred Schutz, the theory of speech acts offered by Jurgen Habermas and John Searle, and Michel Foucault's phenomenological rhetoric of discourse. In general, this highly developed study offers the reader a fresh account of the problematic issues in the philosophy of communication. It is a work that any scholar in communication, philosophy, linguistics, or social theory would welcome for its scope and sustained research.

Edmund Husserl gave his famous London Lectures (in German) in June 1922 where he says his purpose is to explain “transcendental sociological [intersubjective] phenomenology having reference to a manifest multiplicity of conscious subjects communicating with one another”. This effective definitionof semiotic phenomenology as Communicology was reported in English (1923) by Charles K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in the first book on the topic titled The Meaning of Meaning. This groundwork was in full development by 1939 with the first detailed use of Husserl’s phenomenology to explicate human communication, i.e., the publication of Wilbur Marshal Urban’s Language and Reality. My paper addresses Urban’s use of Husserl’s philosophy toboth explicate the phenomenological method and to explore the constitutive elements of human communication and culture. Urban makes use of the workon language and culture by his famous colleagues at Yale University (USA): Edward Sapir (the linguist), Benjamin Lee Whorf (Sapir’s graduate student),and Ernst Cassirer. My own teacher at the University of New Mexico (USA) was Hubert Griggs Alexander, a doctoral student under Urban and a classmateof Whorf. The interdisciplinary focus on Culture and Communicology by Professors Cassirer, Sapir, Urban, and their doctoral students, Alexander and Whorf are collectively known as the “Yale School of Communicology.” Typical empirical examples of theoretical points are provided in the footnotes

Postmodern methodology in the human sciences and philosophy reverses the Aristotelian laws of thought such that (1) non-contradiction, (2) excluded middle, (3) contradiction, and (4) identity become the ground for analysis. The illustration of the postmodern logic is Peirce’s (1) interpretant, (2) symbol, (3) index, and (4) icon. The thesis is illustrated using the work of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault and the le même et l’autre discourse sign where the ratio [Self:Same :: Other:Different] explicates the communicology of Roman Jakobson in the conjunctions and disjunctions, appositions and oppositions of discours, parole, langue, and langage.

The paper is a paradigmatic presentation of what the new science of communicology represents: the semiotic and phenomenological study of humandiscourse and the critical study of discourse and practice both, an interaction of communication, mass communications, popular culture, public relations, advertising, marketing, linguistics, discourse analysis, political economy, institutional analysis, organization of urban and rural spaces, ergonomics, body culture, clinical practice, health care, constructions of disease, health, and rehabilitation, human factors, signage, and so forth. Communicology is the human science research result in which validity and reliability are logic constructs based in the necessary and sufficient conditions of discovered systems (codes), whether eidetic (based in consciousness) or empirical (based in experience).

The nature and function of language as Man's chief vehicle of communi cation occupies a focal position in the human sciences, particularly in philosophy. The concept of 'communication' is problematic because it suggests both 'meaning' (the nature of language) and the activity of speaking (the function of language). The philosophic theory of 'speech acts' is one attempt to clarify the ambiguities of 'speech' as both the use of language to describe states of affair and the process in which that description is generated as 'communication'. The present study, Speech Act Phenomenology, is in part an exam ination of speech act theory. The theory offers an explanation for speech performance, that is, the structure of speech acts as '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 seconda ry concern is the formulation of the theory as presented by Searle and Grice. The limitations of the 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'.