COMMUNICATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY. TWO CASE STUDIES
COMMUNICATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY. TWO CASE STUDIES

Summary/Abstract: In today’s world, in which all real challenges underwent a modernization process, we are growingly urged by the need of a new form of responsibility: the communicational responsibility. This need is felt at all levels of human life – from day-to-day life to international life; from interpersonal relations, to interstate relations; from communication between generations to communication between different cultures and opposable ideologies. Not until recently responsibility referred, as a moral value, only to our actions from which the acts of communication were excluded. People’s indifference toward the consequences of their acts of communication stems from the ancestral creed that speaking is different from doing. However, the specialists in communication sciences have changed this perspective after Roman Jakobson talked of the “acts of communications”, after John Langshaw Austin launched the ‘speech acts theory”, theory developed by John Roger Searle and by other philosophers of language. It became obvious that “communication” means “action”, that the effects of the communication acts – verbal or non-verbal – are as important for man’s life as the effects of other human acts. Today we know: the consequences of communication are as natural as those of any other act – briefly, “communication” means “doing”. The episode of “Mohammed cartoons” (2006) and the speech of Pope Benedict XVI, “On faith and reason in Christianity and Islam” (2006) – these are two case studies that show the absence of communicational responsibility.

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