COMMUNICATICS AND COMMUNICATIONISM AS KNOWLEDGE TOOLS FOR A SUSTAINABLE CIVILIZATION

摘要

Sustainability is not just an issue at the level of economic-ecological systems but an issue at the level of civilizations and the ways that different civilizations interact with each other. A global-wide sustainable civilization cannot be created if conciliation and mutual understanding among the Christian Civilization, the Islamic Civilization, and the Eastern Civilization are not reached. Furthermore, sustainable civilization cannot be achieved on "spaceship earth," if the difference in living conditions between the developing countries and the developed countries is not controlled within a sustainable threshold. In other words, an important issue for the survival of human civilization after the "cold war," among other issues, is the restructuration of the global system. At least two major dimensions of effort can be identified for such restructuration. The first is to seek new ways of interaction between different cultures and civilizations, i.e. more humanitarian ways that are different from colonialism, imperialism, hegemonism, radical nationalism, and terrorism. The second is to seek a new set of shared values that can overcome the current crisis of unsustainability and can help reform the current world into a fair and sustainable global village. New ideas and new knowledge tools need to be developed to facilitate these efforts. Among many elements which cause the unsustainability of the current world system, one element carrying a considerable weight is the failure and/or the difficulty of communication among different perspectives developed through different cultural-ideological-political systems. The theory of communicatics, with its consequent value of communicationism, is being developed as a knowledge tool which may be used to facilitate the transformation towards sustainability. Communicatics is defined as the science of coexistence through communication and understanding. It has four theoretical origins: Constructivist Cybernetics, Self-organization Theories, Paskian Conversation Theory, and Jaquesian Theory of Human Capacity. It consists of (1) five basic concepts (P-individual, constructedness of reality, eigen-mechanism, stability scale of constructed realities, and dual-phase evolution), (2) a model of cognition and communication which consists of a knowing-doing eigen-loop of a P-individual and five basic scopes constructed through the loop, (3) a new definition of communication and a new perspective to understand communication failure, and (4) principles and methods to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of communication. Generally, communicatics can be applied (1) to help build shared vision within a group or an organization, (2) to help reduce the probability of communication failure under conflicting situations at interpersonal, inter-organizational, and international levels.