Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Communicology and human conduct: An essay dedicated to Max

  • Isaac E. Catt (b. 1946) is a visiting scholar at Duquesne University <icatt309@comcast.net>. His research interests include communicology, semiotics, phenomenology, and European philosophy. His publications include “The signifying world between ineffability and intelligibility: Body as sign in communicology” (2011); “Korzybski and Peirce” (2012); “Semiotics in mainstream communication studies: A review of principal USA journals in the context of communicology” (with Deborah Eicher-Catt, 2012); and “Communicology and the ethics of selfhood under the regime of antidepressant medicine” (2013).

     EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: March 27, 2015
Semiotica
From the journal Semiotica Volume 2015 Issue 204

Abstract

This paper examines habits, and particularly habitus as the locus of semiotic constraints and artful practices comprising human conduct. The disciplinary contexts of communication in semiotics and semiotics in communication are contrasted. Winfried Nöth's recent take on C. S. Peirce and habits is interpreted from the perspective of semiotic phenomenology. Culture is argued to be the threshold of the human world, and habits are a key to understanding human conduct in that distinctive Umwelt. John Dewey's rendering of Peirce on habits is further extended with Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical construction of the habitus. Habitus accounts for the mediation of culture and person in the communication matrix. The argument is for a new disciplinary habit in communicology, the science of embodied discourse, which bridges semiotics and communication with focus on the experience of communication.

Keywords: habit/habitus; communicology; semiotic phenomenology; Peirce; Dewey; Bourdieu

About the author

Isaac E. Catt

Isaac E. Catt (b. 1946) is a visiting scholar at Duquesne University <icatt309@comcast.net>. His research interests include communicology, semiotics, phenomenology, and European philosophy. His publications include “The signifying world between ineffability and intelligibility: Body as sign in communicology” (2011); “Korzybski and Peirce” (2012); “Semiotics in mainstream communication studies: A review of principal USA journals in the context of communicology” (with Deborah Eicher-Catt, 2012); and “Communicology and the ethics of selfhood under the regime of antidepressant medicine” (2013).

Published Online: 2015-3-27
Published in Print: 2015-4-1

©2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Gender equality in Swedish child health centers: An analysis of their physical environments and parental behaviors
  3. The semiotics of emotion and narrative therapy in the case of Montaigne
  4. On the concept of translation: A perspective based on Greimassian semiotics
  5. Burqa and the human umwelt
  6. A memorable thirteen-word sentence
  7. On the characteristics of verbal irony
  8. Tying in comment sections: The production of meaning and sense on Facebook
  9. Multimodality in Canadian print advertising: Different functional connections between headlines and visual texts of advertisements in English and French consumer magazines
  10. Language, communication, and speech: Human signs in global semiosis
  11. The calligram and the title card
  12. Harnessing the unconscious mind of the consumer: How implicit attitudes predict pre-conscious visual attention to carbon footprint information on products
  13. Otherness as a paradigm in anthropology
  14. Chasing the myth: A Harley-Davidson story(telling)
  15. Communicology and human conduct: An essay dedicated to Max
  16. Saussure's équivalence sémiologique in the case study of Czech sonants
  17. A semiotic study on modality in Chinese Criminal Law and its English version
  18. Color, shape, and sound: A proposed system of music notation
  19. Reading Deleuze through the lens of Hermeticism
https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2014-0088
Keywords for this article
habit/habitus; communicology; semiotic phenomenology; Peirce; Dewey; Bourdieu

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Gender equality in Swedish child health centers: An analysis of their physical environments and parental behaviors
  3. The semiotics of emotion and narrative therapy in the case of Montaigne
  4. On the concept of translation: A perspective based on Greimassian semiotics
  5. Burqa and the human umwelt
  6. A memorable thirteen-word sentence
  7. On the characteristics of verbal irony
  8. Tying in comment sections: The production of meaning and sense on Facebook
  9. Multimodality in Canadian print advertising: Different functional connections between headlines and visual texts of advertisements in English and French consumer magazines
  10. Language, communication, and speech: Human signs in global semiosis
  11. The calligram and the title card
  12. Harnessing the unconscious mind of the consumer: How implicit attitudes predict pre-conscious visual attention to carbon footprint information on products
  13. Otherness as a paradigm in anthropology
  14. Chasing the myth: A Harley-Davidson story(telling)
  15. Communicology and human conduct: An essay dedicated to Max
  16. Saussure's équivalence sémiologique in the case study of Czech sonants
  17. A semiotic study on modality in Chinese Criminal Law and its English version
  18. Color, shape, and sound: A proposed system of music notation
  19. Reading Deleuze through the lens of Hermeticism
Downloaded on 10.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2014-0088/html
Scroll to top button