Philosophy of Communication

Everyone has a philosophy, and thus one must therefore have a philosophy of communication that takes into account all of the questions one may have and the answers to them regarding what one thinks and does when one communicates. Such thinking is silly and certainly not philosophical. It is true that we all have opinions about various problems we encounter in life, and that some of these—such as one's views on religion, on politics, on beauty, on morals, on truth, on the meaning of life—border on philosophy, but few have a clear conception of philosophy, and still fewer know what a philosophy of communication is or should look like.

Since its inception, philosophy has been defined as a specific mode of thinking that begins by questioning established opinions, by debunking the dogmas or doxas that float around in our collective or individual lives, and from that basis, proceeds to construct a general theory relative to the topic in question that withstands skeptical disputations. Philosophizing, as opposed to thinking in general, therefore requires not only taking a critical stance toward what is given by the past and is taken for granted at present, but also, more positively, advancing a kind of knowledge distinguished by the rigor and universal validity characteristic of reason. This is the case with various branches of philosophy, for example, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of art, philosophical logic, and metaphysics. Philosophy of communication, if there is such a thing, is no exception. As is true of various philosophies, a philosophy of communication would be nothing if did not afford a knowledge that bears on its subject matter reflectively, critically, and truthfully.

If, as just said, philosophy begins by questioning received knowledge, then philosophy of communication must take as its starting point the taken-for-granted ideas about communication. Now if a philosophy of communication must locate its point of departure amidst the received views on communication, then a proper understanding of what philosophy of communication is can be gained by identifying those received views against which this philosophy acquires the necessary traction to develop and declare its own critical truth claims. To identify these views, a bit of historical contextualizing is in order.

It should be noted right away that philosophy of communication did not exist as an independent discipline until the mid-20th century. It is true that what resembles the beginning of philosophy of communication can be found throughout the centuries. Even before the Hellenistic Age, Greek thinkers thought and wrote about communication by way of what they called rhetoric. During the Middle Ages, church fathers and scholars also theorized about communication in various modes. [Page 752]Since then, in both Anglo American and Continental traditions, thinkers ranging from René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, down to Soren Kierkeggard, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers, Karl-Otto Apel, and many others, have developed theories about mind, language, community, and human discourse that speak to concerns central to what we now call philosophy of communication. But none of these ideas begins by posing communication as the focus of their reflection, and consequently, they address communication only as ancillary or tangential to issues surrounding being, truth, mind-body, existence, and the like, which define the classical domain of philosophical thinking. So while it is easy to extract a philosophical view on communication from, say, Leibniz's theory of preestablished harmony, this view is inseparable and derivative from a specific theosophic background, out of which Leibniz's metaphysics emerges and for which the theory of preestablished harmony represents an earnest response to the pressing problem of evil. Properly reconstructed, this view would appear relevant to the project of developing a philosophy of communication, but it cannot be taken to be a philosophy of communication in the strict sense since it begins and ends within a problematic whose primary focus is on something other than communication per se.

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