The American Journal of Semiotics

Volume 19, Issue 1/4, 2003

Special Issue on Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson’s ‘New Science’ in the Context of Communicology

Jakobson’s well-known model of communication includes implicit time and space message-to-code and contact-to-context relations. The symbolic displacement of humans from nature and the possible discovery of human nature occur in the embodied reversibility of these relations. Bateson’s view of the meta function in communication supports this postmodern turn, as does Peirce’s phenomenological conception of semiosis. In this abductive context, Bateson’s ideas are used to augment Peirce specifically on embodiment in semiosis. Communicology is nominated the “new science” and semiotic phenomenology the “new paradigm” envisioned by Bateson.