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In the "Call for Papers" for this issue of the Journal of Communication the editors wrote, "Communication scholarship lacks disciplinary status because it has no core of knowledge. Thus institutional and scholarly legitimacy remains a chimera for the field."For a variety of reasons, I find the premise and consequent of this proposition-that the field "lacks disciplinary status" and thus lacks a certain "legitimacy"-to be self-evident. What seems less obvious is the cause of our undisciplined and illegitimate status. The posed proposition suggests that our disciplinary troubles are the result of having "no core of knowledge." This essay will argue, however, that disciplines are defined not by cores of knowledge (i.e., epistemologies) but by views of Being (i.e., ontologies). Disciplinary status for a field rests on the ontological status of that field's "idea"-disciplines represent various foundational ideas. Understanding the lack of disciplinary status accorded communication requires an understanding of the lack of ontological status granted the idea of communication in modernity-understanding how the foundationalist sense of a discipline is antithetical to the nonfoundational, modern sense o f communication. The Nature of DisciplinesAn etymological consideration of the word discipline suggests it to be a character of ontology and characteristic of modernity's faith in foundations. Discipline is derived from the Latin disciplina: instruction of disciples. Disciples, in turn, are instructed in a doctrine (and by "doctors")-they are "indoctrinated." Thus, Berkeley could write that to be "undisciplined" is to be "nurtured to no doctrine" (Oxford English Dictionary, 1971, pp. 741, 3496).Doctrines provide disciples with foundations for beliefs and action, but those foundations are views of Being more than cores of knowledge. The religious connotation that accompanies the word disciple is illuminating: Gregory J. Shepherd is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the LJniversity of Kansas, Lawrence.

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