This essay defends a conceptual interpretation of communication as a practical discipline: a distinct kind of intellectual discipline, the essential purpose of which is to cultivate a socioculturally constituted field of social practice—in our case, the social practice of communication—by contributing to the metadiscourse on normative and technical aspects of communicative praxis. Responding to possible objections from standpoints in communication science, critical theory, and applied communication, I argue that a counterfactual ideal of practical discipline reveals connective threads and a potentially unifying purpose that could be leveraged to make our currently fragmented field of study more intellectually coherent as well as more useful to society.
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