ABSTRACT
A metacommunicational axiom of the pragmatics of communication can be postulated: One cannot not communicate. The report aspect of a message conveys information and is, therefore, synonymous in human communication with the content of the message. It may be about anything that is communicable regardless of whether the particular information is true or false, valid, invalid, or undecidable. This chapter summarizes another axiom of tentative calculus: Every communication has a content and a relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommunication. The stimulus-response psychologist typically confines his attention to sequences of interchange so short that it is possible to label one item of input as "stimulus" and another item as "reinforcement" while labelling what the subject does between these two events as "response." Within the short sequence so excised, it is possible to talk about "psychology" of the subject.
