ABSTRACT
The twentieth century may well take its place in history as that century in which an understanding of communicational process began to be the cen tral topic of intellectual interest. The unbelievable expansion of computer technology, the revolutionary approaches to teaching of mathematical tech niques, the automation of information-retrieval are those matters most in focus-but less conspicuously there is the perhaps more important acceleration in understanding the “human condition" as a function of hu man means of communication. The pioneer researches of such men as Sapir and Cassirer have taught us that the human condition is a matter of relat edness to others on the basis of an artificial system of communication. The most radical developments in the twentieth century involve an expanded understanding of communicational processes in relation to knowing and thinking. Where traditionally in the past the ideal has been that of so cor recting language and thought as to allow a clear view of an unchanging “reality," modem consensus in many fields increasingly assumes that the processes of communication are inevitably participants in the eventual con*
elusion. This central understanding means that certainty becomes illegiti mate in principle. The mathematical background of this idea has been es tablished by Godel; the physical theory by Heisenberg; the philosophical statement by Peirce. Comments illuminating the whole approach are to be found in the discussions by Bentley (1950), Bohr (1950), and Conant (1952)-
The background of this movement involves a greater appreciation of the processes of development. From the relatively recent theoretical be ginning in the New Science of Giambattista Vico in the mid-eighteenth cen tury (Bergin and Fisch, 1961), the significance of developmental process is reaffirmed in the biological sphere by Darwin and comes to clear exposition in an unexpected way in the title of the book by Einstein and Inf eld, The Evolution of Physics (1938). In modem cosmologies, as well as in modern theories of knowledge, we learn that the universe, instead of being a static system, may be one capable of indefinite expansion. But in the effort to manage this idea, we have to turn from the study of a presumably “objec tive reality" to the study of the communicational process which inevitably both reveals to and conceals from us what we investigate. The statement can be made that we have evolved to the point at which we learn to investi gate communication as such, with the “to what" and the “of what" under stood as secondary. The new view of communication differs from any previ ous view in that the field has no substantive content; we are concerned only with the act of making common to more than one participant, as implied by the etymological derivation of the term (from cum, “with," and munis, “bound" or “under obligation"—i.e., communicants are under similar obli gations).
