Bill Mann on Communication using Language
Dictionary definitions of "language" often call it a medium of communication. Yet our entire cluster of sciences and allied fields seems to bypass the subject, or large parts of it, and there is no consensus on the nature or limits of communication using language.
I see this as a serious gap. It is not as though the phenomena which constitute communication could not be the subjects of careful scientific accounts, but rather it appears that other, narrower interests have kept people from doing those accounts.
Other explanations of this neglect of the idea are abundant, and probably many of them are sound. Our ways of defining and maintaining various academic disciplines can be blamed. They create boundaries that cut across the individual and the social, the mental and the overtly symbolic, the abstract and the direct experience, and so forth. Whether we agree to forever hold academic field boundaries as they are now or not, the complexity of making any accounting of communication at all could be intimidating.
Chess Research
Imagine a situation in which the object of study is chess games rather than language, in which the rules are not provided but must be identified by study of game transcripts, and the study addresses not only the rules but why particular sorts of moves tend to be chosen. The rules might be fairly easy to discover, but the reasons for choices of moves, and the constraints on choices, might not.
Then imagine the effect of replacing the notion "Here is where they stopped" with clear notions of "Checkmate" and "This player wins" and "Each player wants to win." These are stronger notions of the outcomes of chess games, and of the basis on which players select moves. Making such information available would revolutionize the study.
There are analogies from this fictional exercise to the present. Study of language use is frequently without clear and satisfactory notions either of the outcomes or the status of language use as communication. Although linguistics is actively studying "meaning," the inseparable notion of "communication" is seldom the focus. The disciplines that are labeled as "linguistics" are collectively perhaps the only ones of the "communication sciences" that have the wide array of conceptual power tools necessary to take on a detailed scientific account of human communication. If linguistics does not produce a strong and credible account, perhaps no other discipline will.
This interest has been a long time coming. During the early years of working with language and computers, I wanted to enrich my understanding of how communication works. I was privileged to be allowed to regularly visit the Communication Disorders group at Harbor General Hospital in the Los Angeles area. They were treating brain-damaged adults, people whose disabilities involved language. They were aphasics -- victims of strokes, accidents, war wounds, alcoholic degeneration and other causes. I read on aphasiology and aphasiology testing in the literature. But more importantly, I had direct access to patients, access unmediated by assessments, classifications, reports or explanations.
Inspired in part by the books of A. R. Luria, I expected to find a richness of detail in the difficulties of individuals, and that was indeed the case. The details were explainable in an unexpected way, but that is another story.
The biggest surprise, given the naive way that I approached the subject, was in the state of the science of aphasiology. It was a theory of communication disorders , but without an underlying theory of communication. Communication was simply taken for granted as a shared, unexamined notion.
So there was no basis for saying what other disorders were possible, whether people's communication capabilities were organized in certain ways, whether all people communicate in the same way and so forth. On the applicational side, questions of whether certain therapies were theoretically sound, whether new varieties of testing would be more reliable -- such questions could not be approached. All of these would have required some explicit theory of communication, which was (and still is) absent.
Having a theory of communication would seem to be a structural necessity for building a theory of communication disorders, but for compelling practical reasons it has not arisen in this medical field, nor elsewhere.
The social sciences are also in need of a theory of communication. To pick just a single example among many, the study in linguistics of what language changes are possible, and which ones are retained, would be greatly informed by a clear understanding of the communication consequences of language changes.
The most commonly used model, often called the code model , is being widely criticized for its lack of credibility and explanatory power. However for most research purposes there is not another clear alternative. Criticism of the code model will not diminish its use, since it organizes the work in the disciplines that actively (often tacitly) use it. To improve on it, it must be replaced by a more credible set of starting assumptions, along with a more thoughtful choice of what we take "communication" to be.
It is a challenging goal. I think that the most useful and approachable next step will be to create a wider recognition of the problem and the magnitude of the opportunity for improvement that is represented by having a credible view of the nature of communication.
Some of the memos that appear here are not suitable for any of the journals that I have in mind publishing in. They include some "idea memos" that say, in effect, "Here is a way of thinking about this topic. It is not a descriptive account of particular data, nor an explanatory model (worth testing) of how something actually works, but rather a way of thinking about the topic. Most or all of them come from my concern with communication. The general stance, which (will be) is played out in them, is that there are fundamental assumptions in research about the nature of communication, assumptions that effectively determine a starting point for research on human communication using language, There is a common view, found in the literatures of the communication sciences and also in non-scientific western culture since Aristotle, that communication is essentially exchange of ideas. This view has in recent years come under scrutiny and attack, and is no longer universally respected in the sciences. It is rejected by some, and others are strenuously working to stretch it and patch it.
There is no consensus as to what other view is a major competitor to the exchange of ideas (EI) view.
Most of the failures of the EI view have something to do with the impacts of social realities on language use. Phenomena with linguistic links, including taboos, honorifics, evidentials, terms of address, greetings, vocatives, curses, kin language, Thai royal language, irony, familiar vs formal address, along with more frequent items such as personal pronouns, imperatives and promises, all have an inseparable social element. (The linguistic subfield of Pragmatics deals with some of these, and with many others not listed.) All of them present difficulties when they are seen through the filter of the EI model.
Also, after the language interaction is over, the EI view fails to identify communication aspects, e.g. after various ideas are exchanged, which ones are retained as a kind of outcome of communicating.
For all of its failings, the EI view will never fall out of favor until there is a credible alternative to replace it.
It is therefore of immense strategic interest for the communication sciences to seek to construct one or more credible alternatives to the EI view. (The EI view of communication is in this aspect comparable to the Code Model of language.) This reconsideration of communication is what several of the memos are about.
After writing some of the above paragraphs, I wrote the little survey paper available below entitled What is Communication? -- a survey . The survey showed that many of the fields that have been collected under the title "Communication Theory" are defining themselves as dialectical opposites of EI. Furthermore, in the neighborhood of linguistics, it is VERY hard to find a credible alternative view of the nature (not the process) of communication. See the paper linked below.
I hope that I am wrong about all of this, that somehow I have gone to the mine and found the sand but not the gold. If you read the memo, and you know of something that I should read, so that I may change my mind, please send me a message. bill_mann@sil.org
What is Communication? -- the Literature My interest in the topic of communication led to my submitting an inquiry about what assumptions (on the nature of communication) have been made in the field to an email discussion list that I am subscribed to. I got several interesting replies, most with references, and I followed up on all of them. I sent a summary of what I found in the literature, and it can be accessed below.
There is a paper entitled What is Communication? -- a survey. It was presented at the BiDialog conference (Fifth Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue.) To download it in Word97 format, click here: Nature of Communication - DOC. The PDF version is Nature of Communication - PDF.