Rojas, Rodolfo: The Category Error at the Foundation of Modern Communication Theory: Why the Industry Misclassified Symbolism as Syntax and Broke Its Own Architecture

Modern communication theory is built on a foundational category mistake: it treats symbolism—a meaning bearing medium—as if it were a syntactic object to be parsed. This paper argues that the entire communication industry, from Shannon theory to contemporary semantic AI research, inherited an ontological confusion that collapses meaning into signal structure. By assuming that meaning can be encoded, transmitted, and decoded like a physical signal, communication theory misclassifies symbolism as