ON DEFINING COMMUNICATION

The meaning of the word "communication" is at once both clear and obscure. It is clear enough in conventional usage, but obscure when we seek to determine the limits of its application. To illustrate, if someone talks to another and common understanding results (indicated by mutually satisfactory action), we have no qualms about saying that communication has occurred. If, however, misunderstanding results (indicated by mutually unsatisfactory action), we are uncertain whether we should say that there has been poor, or no, communication. Further, if someone does not talk to another and the latter as a result gains certainimpressions of the former, has communication occurred? Would it make any difference whether the first person deliberately did not talk or unintentionally failed to talk? If someone eavesdrops on a conversation, is he receiving communication? If from the antics of my neighbor's children or from the condition of his house I draw certain conclusions about him, has there been a communication? If I classify a group of objects before me, say, several pieces of lumber, on the basis of certain characteristics, is there communication?

DIMENSIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF RHETORIC

During recent years a state of cold war has existed in the field of speech. Humanists who seek to understand rhetoric primarily through the use of historical scholarship and behavioral scientists who seek to develop a communication theory primarily through empirical description and experimental research have tended to see one another as threatening enemies. Yet members of these factions have the common objective of studying similar phenomena. The student of communication who conceives his study as focusing on pragmatic interaction of people and ideas is concerned with the rhetorical impulse within communicationevents.

INTRODUCTION: A FRAMEWORK FOR COMMUNICATION THEORY

The term "communication theory" has undergone substantial change in meaning in the scientific literature of the past two decades. In the years following the influential publication in 1949 of The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, scientists typically considered communication theory as strictly mathematical. Throughout the early 1950s, communication theory was regarded as synonymous with the narrowly defined and highly technical interests of information theory. In essence, the goal of the information theorists was to measure the amount of information that could be transmitted by messages over channels in systems like telephones or radios. Then came the many attempts to apply information theory to psychology, often under the rubric of "communication theory." As might have been anticipated, methods developed on unselective systems like telephones did not prove to be particularly fruitful in studying the highly selective nature of human information transmission and reception. Nonetheless, the application of notions from information theory to psychology did serve to underscore the need for a behaviorally oriented, synthetic theory of human communication. Consequently, numerous books and scientific journals, professional associations and academic curriculums now use the term "communication theory" to refer to a highly interdisciplinary, behaviorally oriented field of research dealing with the constituent processes of human communication. During the last decade, the outpouring of scientific research on human communication has increased at a staggering rate. This burst of research activity is due tothe ever-widening usage of the term "communication" and to a declaration of vested interest in communication research by numerous scientific disciplines. One review of developments in the field lists more than twenty academic disciplines which currently provide content and method for research on some phase of human interaction. The physical sciences contribute to the study of communication largely by way of technical subfields bearing the headings of cybernetics, information theory, and general systems theory. The social sciences embrace the inclusive interests of anthropologists, who define culture as communication, and the most specialized investigations of social psychologists, who define the relationships between individual and group activity as communication. At the end of the social science spectrum are the investigations of linguists, who describe their work on language structure as part of communication science. Still other approaches to the study of communication cross disciplinary lines of psychology.