Abstract

This dissertation is an explication of the relationship between communication and philosophy. A communication philosophy is made explicit in a philosophy of communication. The discipline that unites philosophy and communication in this way is communicology, which studies the discourse of human communication. The themes of communication, philosophy, and communicology are explored through an explication of the will-to-communicate in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers. ;Jaspers' philosophy of communication is translated into a theory of communication by way of semiotic phenomenology. Jaspers' methodology implies a phenomenology which would be at the same time hermeneutic, semiotic, and existential in quality. This methodology entails the historicality of all phenomena through their communicative character. Expressivity and communicability are explicated as boundary conditions for communication in modernity. Philosophy becomes a way of communicating which functions as a critique of these boundary conditions and, thereby, of discourse. This means that philosophy joins with rhetoric where communication is self-reflexive. Communicology is an appropriate avenue for this way of communicating, since in communicology one encounters the many boundaries governing human discourse. ;Communicology studies the systemic generation of discursive practices and the modification of practical discourse in human communication. Jaspers' philosophy of communication entails that reality is a matrix of relationships established through discursive judgments which are rhetorical in practice through their dependence upon certain master tropes, or ultimate boundary conditions, governing discourse and practice within certain historical epochs. The concept of rhetorical judgment is described as a poesis through which the relational, or communicative, quality of human reality is explicated