Communication and Knowledge: A Proof of Completeness

Overcoming the dualism between knowledge and communication should be considered one of the major advancements that has followed from pragmatism. This chapter tries to explain the reasons for this and to advance some proposals that would make this pragmatist achievement better known. After a quick review of the relationship between knowledge and communication, I propose an attentive analysis of Peirce’s semiotics to help understand that all kinds of knowledge always exhibit a dialoguing semiotic structure, namely, a semiotic structure that is intrinsically open to others’ intervention. The second part of the chapter proposes to complete the overcoming of dualism by reading communication as a form of synthetic knowledge within a conception of synthesis as action, in which we recognize an identity through changes.