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.
About the author
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).
©2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
