Philosophy of Communication

Philosophy of Communication as Interpretive Inquiry

Just as philosophy has many branches (e.g., epistemology, ontology, ethics, aesthetics), the philosophy of communication represents a rich and diverse area of inquiry that explores language, community, culture, ethics, politics, technology, media, and numerous other areas. This diversity is readily apparent in John Durham Peters’ Speaking Into the Air, one of the best recent examples of philosophical communication research. A quick look at Peters’ book reveals just a few of the thinkers that philosophers of communication regularly encounter: ancient philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero; theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Soren Kierkegaard; American pragmatists like John Dewey and Richard Rorty; critical theorists like Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jurgen Habermas; literary theorists like Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida; and continental philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Levinas. And this list just scratches the surface: Phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, semioticians like Charles Peirce and Roland Barthes, and speech act theorists like J. L. Austin and John Searle, among countless others, are equally at home among philosophical communication scholars.

Although they emerged from different historical contexts and explored widely divergent areas of research, the writers from which philosophers of communication draw inspiration share a common bond:[Page 1233] They all asked fundamental questions that have enriched our understanding of what it means to live and communicate with other people. The extraordinary diversity of perspectives within philosophical communication research makes it difficult to think of it as following any single “methodology.” In fact, many philosophers of communication might view the entire idea of philosophy as a research “method” as a contradiction in terms. Gadamer, for instance, warned that once we decide upon the “method,” we have already to some extent predetermined the “truth” that we will find. Although not all philosophers of communication would agree with Gadamer on this point, his critique of methodology suggests that they often differ sharply from their peers in the social sciences regarding their understanding of the nature, purpose, and practice of communication research.

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