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Can Field Theory be Applied to the Semiotics of Communication?

The title of this study is adapted from the title of the dissertation that Robert S. Hartman submitted at the end of 1946 to the Graduate School of Northwestern University "in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy" (Can Field Theory be Applied to Ethics?). Although the path I shall follow is quite different, references to Hartman's unpublished thesis will appear. This shows that trying to answer such a question means to elaborate on the epistemological level of the subject matter, in this case communication. The attempt presented below should not be understood as yet another in the series of the so-called scientization of the humanities, since communication theories never really lacked a scientific foundation of one sort (information theory) or another (linguistic, structuralistic, logical, etc.). Actually, the question posed in the title involves the obligation of setting communication into its proper framework. Field, as we shall see, means interaction, or action at distance, geometry, or frame of reference. The latter meaning is of particular importance in this preliminary stage, communication having its proper frame of reference within semiotics. This is a strong affirmation, one which might better have been postponed until a certain methodology was set up. I choose to introduce it in the preliminaries because it is commonplace in today's semiotics, and I shall come back to it at least because I know that sometimes such commonplace notions turn out to be false friends. Originally, Field was applied in describing concretely observable bi-polar physical phenomena. Dewey suggested the comparison of situations to physical fields, considering that scientific inquiry is problems-solving in situations, and introduced the dual model of the field. "Situations of inquiry are states of energy, tension existing between two poles," Hartman "later affirms (1946 p. 4), a limitation which this study will not accept for reasons clear enough to those familiar with Peirce's sign definition. (I will return to this, too.) The framework of semiotics, i.e., the framework in which sign processes are to be discerned, is what we traditionally call culture. Situating sign processes into the frame in which their meaning is made evident means to relate them to the conceptual aspect of the field on the one hand, and to its practical aspect on the other. Consequently, the field has an ideal and a real pole; the need for their assembling in a consistent structure represents the third term. Peirce, whose semiotics is built on the foundation of his philosophy, noticed that the correct