Theory is its own mirror: Self -reflexive coherence as a validative criterion in the metatheoretical appraisal of ideas about communication

Rather than constantly redefining the field to accommodate the latest pool of ideas or theories about communication, communication scholars continue to face the exclusivistic challenge of devising standards that fixedly and objectively demarcate the bounds of bona fide communication scholarship and distinguish it from its alternatives. This project makes the case for a logical criterion—the principle of self-reflexive coherence—apart from which, he contends, a successful definition of the field is unlikely to be formulated.;Unless it excludes from its purview ideas or theories about communication that are self-reflexively incoherent, a definition of bona fide communication scholarship promises only to deprive itself of the consistency that it must attain in order to be rightly deemed logically authoritative. A self-reflexively incoherent idea or theory about communication is one that proposes, without warrant, to stand as an exception its own implications when what it proposes to be true of communication is critically applied to itself as a communicative artifact.;Self-reflexively incoherent ideas or theories come, at least, in the self-referentially, self-assumptively, and self-performatively incoherent varieties that Roy Clouser exposits in The Myth of Religious Neutrality . A self-referentially incoherent idea or theory is one that presents itself as an exception to the implications of its explicit propositional content. A self-assumptively incoherent idea or theory is one that presumes to discredit any belief one would have to assume in order for the idea or theory to be meaningful or valid. A self-performatively incoherent idea or theory is one that presumes to discredit any state that would have to be true in order for the idea or theory to be formulated.;After proposing and defining self-reflexive coherence as a constitutive quality of bona fide communication scholarship, this project demonstrates the criterion's practical value by critically applying it to two prominent ideas about communication, the first representing radical objectivism—the behavioristic view that human conduct, including its communicative conduct, is an environmental construct that must be explicated solely on the basis of empirical, behavioral data, as this view is expressed in B.F. Skinner's works Verbal Behavior and About Behaviorism—and the second representing radical subjectivism—the Rortyan hermeneutical view that textual meaning is radically subjective and completely relative to its reader, as this view is applied to communication studies by two communication scholars—Janet Home and Mick Presnell.;The critical application discloses several significant self-reflexive incoherences in Skinner's theory. First, its radically materialistic assertion that everything, including verbal behavior, is physical and must be investigated as such is self-assumptively incoherent, for it fails to explain how a purely physical being could conceptualize the contrasting non-physicality to which he or she must appeal in order to give physicality its meaning. Second, its subjection of knowledge to an empirical validative rule is self-referentially incoherent, for the proposition that this rule should be the rule is not empirically warranted; thus, it falls short of the very standard it prescribes. Third, its portrayal of human verbal behavior (including, one assumes, Skinner's own verbal behavior) as a historically predetermined product of unique physical and social forces, if taken by its stater to be true, begs for expression in the relativistic language and tone that is the logical consequence of such a view, rather than in the absolutistic, prescriptive tone that Skinner utilizes to express the proposition. Fourth, the fatalistic view of the universe that Skinner advances in his writings is self-referentially incoherent, for Skinner implies through his various calls for change his contrary belief that humans somehow have the freedom to make choices in such a universe.;As well, the critical application discloses several significant self-reflexive incoherences in Rorty's project as it relates to communication studies. First, its rejection of the law of non-contradiction is self-assumptively and self-performatively incoherent, for in order to reject this properly basic rule of thinking, one must assume and practice it. Second, its assertion that knowledge is radically subjective and relativistic does not square with its asserters' attempts to communicate this ostensibly knowledgeable point to others, as if their subjectivity were not, in fact, the radical a barrier to communication that the assertion portrays it to be. Third, Rorty's contention that the ideal scholar is one who takes seriously the ideas of no one, including oneself, does not consist with his act of stating this point in a published, scholarly form that implies its creator's intention for readers to take his point seriously.;This project concludes that definers of communication studies rightly pause before including in their definitions fundamentally inconsistent theories like Skinner's and Rorty's. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).