Communication Without Concepts

Abstract

Summary: Communication has been taken over by the language of science and cybernetics, which have reduced it to the role of information-processing and put it firmly on the path of integral modelling. The developments in systemic pragmatics and the blossoming of the cognitive sciences appear to confirm the discrediting of the hermeneutical and ethical standpoints to which philosophers had been attached. It is, nevertheless, by reference to Kantianism that intersubjectivity is now imposing an approach to meaning through the efforts of Apel, Habermas and Grice. With the limits of conceptual ambitions exposed, conversation and, more generally, literature seem to promise a non-reductional elucidation of communicational exchanges.