UNCERTAINTY AND THE COMMUNICATION OF TIME

Prigogine and Stengers (1988)[47] have pointed to the centrality of th e concepts of ''time and eternity'' for the cosmology contained in New tonian physics, but they have not addressed this issue beyond the doma in of physics. The construction of ''time'' in the cosmology dates bac k to debates among Huygens, Newton, and Leibniz. The deconstruction of this cosmology in terms of the philosophical questions of the 17th ce ntury suggests an uncertainty in the time dimension. While order has b een conceived as an ''harmonie preetablie'', it is considered as emerg ent from an evolutionary perspective. In a ''chaology'', one should fu lly appreciate that different systems may use different clocks. Commun ication systems can be considered as contingent in space and time: sub stances contain force or action, and they communicate not only in (obs ervable) extension, but also over time. While each communication syste m can be considered as a system of reference for a special theory of c ommunication, the addition of an evolutionary perspective to the mathe matical theory of communication opens up the possibility of a general theory of communication.