Critical Analysis of Existential-Epistemological Premises of John Locke's Theory of Communication: A Transcendental Approach

‘Failure in communication’, selfishness, and conflict are three properties of communication in our modern sociopolitical everyday life. War and threat are the first options of modern human for confronting others. The British philosopher, John Locke, theorized the empirical model of communications, according to which he discovered failure in communication. In his work An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, he changed the meaning of communication to something personal and individual. The question of this study is how Locke defined the ontological, epistemological, anthropological, and methodological foundations of communications so that it would lead to failure in communications. Here after we elaborated on his definition of communication and demonstrated how his transitive impression has converted to a dominant impression, we uncovered epistemological premises of Locke’s communicative linguistic theory through a fundamental methodology. Upon a short introduction of the philosophical theory of communications, we criticized Locke’s communicative theory from the viewpoint of transcendental philosophy. MullaSadra criticizes the idea of man being passive and blank (static soul) because it negates the ‘creative’ and ‘executive’ characteristic of soul; human has an absolutely active function in communication. Man and his perceptions evolve in an internal move in which he moves towards others and creation. In his move, neither is he apart from others (mubāyin) nor he is blended into them (mamzūj).