Radford, G. P. (2005). On
the Philosophy of Communication. South Bank, Vic., Australia: Thomson
Wadsworth.
Chapter 5 – How
Information processing became more like communication: Communication, memory
and Subliminal Perception.
Memories are retrieved without following semantic highways
(hierarchal pathways).
People are exposed to two types of information about an
event.
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From he original event (perceptions).
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External information, supplied after the fact.
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Questions asked after an event can affect the reconstruction
of memory.
This suggests:
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Memory can work in error.
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Or errors from perception.
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That memory is malleable.
Co-existence hypothesis – The original perceptions of an
event coexist with external references.
Alteration Hypothesis – memories can be altered with new
information.
The Point:
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Memory is not categorically stored.
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It is subjective and prone to external
influences whether true or false.
Loftus approach suggests flaws in the human system. This is somewhat of an odd notion for
science.
New information is assimilated in a fashioin to cause people
to remember what meets their expectations.
Developing a process model of communication does not meet
the nature of the human mind.
Subliminal Perception:
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A premise – we only respond to what we observe
and sense.
Sub perception – an organsims can respond to stimulus not
fully realized.
The idea we process subliminal messages is not
controverisial, is more of a given.
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How we respond to them is controversial.
People do not like the idea they can be influenced by
invisibile messages.
Difference between man and machine:
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Machine operates with predefined relationships
to each other.
Radford is suggesting that communication is a manifestation
of behavior.
Psychology seems more a function of communication rather
than the other way around.
Chapter 6 – Learning and Speaking differently about Communication
We get to the point that we can’t describe communication
without using nebulous processes.
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What is communication.
Wittgenstein – Two parts:
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In organic: Physical handling of signs
production and transmission of signs from one place to the other.
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Organic – Interpretation, thinking and
meaning.
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Queer kind of mechanism of the mind.
Thought must be something.
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comes before the writing or the utterances.
People build or express a relationship between a mode of
thought and an activity.
Thought language precedes verbal language.
Prelinguistic language is inconceivable and indescribable.
The trap to understanding communication is language and
grammar.
The expression of belief is only a metaphor.
We expect a meaning beyond the word.
1984 – Winston realizes he has to get beyond words and
messages to the reality of ideas that produced them.
With communication – reality must lie deeper than appearences.
Words are used and defined in relation to one’s interests
and purposes.
Winston – Animal instinct and desire lie beyond the control
of others.
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Iincludes reality of deep feelings.
Winston can differentiate between real feeling and
linguistic expression.
Reality gets pushed further back with language.
It is the separation of thought from word.
The Cartesian whirlpool.
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Suppose thoughts and memories dont’ exist.
Reality exists in the human mind, not outside.
Feelings are prelinguistic:
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They are expressed directly and authentically
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They are beyond change.
O’brien didn’t brainwash Winston, he gave Winston a new
discourse that removed the mind from reality.
Chapter 7: A semiotic and a phenomenological discourse of
communication.
Intent is to view communication in text:
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Review it as text to reader, not to author to
reader.
It will refute the idea of minds transferring matching
ideas.
Umberto Eco: Cultural and literary theorist.
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How do you make sense of the book in front of
you.
Semiotics:
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Sign – something that represents something else
in a system of signs.
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Sign – Anything in a culture.
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Interpretation – Making sense of a sign.
The text will be read by many, and will have numerous
interpretations, but the text will remain the same.
Social treasury: Language and the culture that language
produces.
It is a system of knowledge comprised of:
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Knowledge of language as a vocabulary and
grammar.
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Encyclopedia of cultural knowledge and
conventions.
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History of Previous texts.
Meaning is derived by interaction and conjecture of the
text.
Eco is concerned with how a text interacts with thte readers
cultural encyclopedia.
Empirical Reader – You – Anyone reading the text.
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Read in many ways.
Model Reader: Has to play by the rules of the book.
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Interpreted as the author intended.
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Text stands on its own.
Signs and indications:
Husserl – objection to psychologism:
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The notion that laws of logic describe
regularities in the way we think.
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He challenges Radford’s theme that communication
is a reflection of individual thoughts or mental states.
Sign for Husserl: A mark to indicate the presence of
something else.
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References do not need to be self-evident and
they can have layered meaning.
Descriptive Unity: an act of judgment that implies the
existence of something else.
The acts are made by the logic of the syllogism.
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Certain things may or must exist, since other
things have been given.
An indication of existence is always a probability or a
contingency.
The existence of one thing infers the existence of another.
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An expression on a face infers an internal
emotional state, but one cannot directly know what the other is feline.
All expressions in communicative speech function as
indications.
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They serve the hearer as signs as thoughts of
the speaker.
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The hearer perceive the intuitively takes the
speaker as a person.
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A cat may express behaviors or actions, and this
may be considerd communication.
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However, it is the receiver that instills ideas
of affection or love.
So far, Husserl follows Locke’s ideas on transmission.
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Meaning is not in the sign.
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It is indicative of something else.
He will develop a theory not dependant on mental states to
form meaning.
We talk to ourselves
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indicates a listener does not need to be
present.
Why would we need transmission theory to talk to ourselves.
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why would we code and encode messages to
ourselves.
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There is no separation of thought and sign.
The point – meaning is different than empirical processes.
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Meaning is not dependent on your thoughts or
mental imagery.
Rather than deriving meaning,
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Husserl is suggesting structures of meaning and
sense making.
Meaning is not dependent on the physical part of
communication.
A book changes physically over time, but it remains a book.
The point
-
The essence of words exist as meaning in the
mind.
-
Husserl doesn’t go further, just enough to point
out the mind isn’t decoding, coding or constructing. It is merely brining forth of ideas.
Experience, Essence and Communication
Communication is not the mechanics of signs:
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It is not a memory
Communication is:
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The experience of essence that can be reduced to
empirical phenomena.
Chapter 8 – The Engagements of Communication
Jurgen Habermas on Discourse, Critial Reason and
Controversy.
Communication
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Language associated with the conduit theory will
be replaced with
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- Interpretation, understanding and
conversation.
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Mutual creation of meaning in the flow of
genuine conversation.
Hermeneutics: New way to consider communication through
understanding and the mutual creation of meaning.
Hermes – Messenger of the gods.
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Had to understand the god’s messages.
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And translate it to the mortals.
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Transmission theory concerns itself with what
happens in the minds of the senders and receivers.
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Hermeneutics is concerned with understanding a
message and creating mutual understanding in another.
Hermeneutics is concerned with the effort brought by the
reader to establish meaning to something considered alien and strange.
A way to take the new and unknown and create meaning.
The hermeneutical has to do with bridging the gap between
the familiar world in which we stand and the strange meaning that resists
assimilation into the horizons of our world.
There is a fusion between the time of the text and the
present.
Model reader – agrees to the rules of the book and suspends
personal biases and beliefs.
Hermeneutics: The model reader must give up that
communication is a function of the brain bound to objective processing
routines.
A role for ideas and mental states.
Wilhelm Dilthey: German Philosopher
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Considered psychology the foundation of all
other disciplines.
-
He wasn’t concerned with the inward workings of
the mind.
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He was concerned with the products of the mind.
o
Social organization, culture, art and
literature.
-
The mind is reflexive
o
It is shaped by and shapes cultural context.
o
The mind is shaped by cultural context it
creates.
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We write a history, and are then bound to live
in it.
Ideas come from the environment as responses.
They are formed and shaped by cultural context through
discourse.
Communication
Communication is the product of our mental lives living
relative to their reality.
Time and autobiography:
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Mental states are not objects located in space.
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Mental states are processes that take place over
time.
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Mental states are a progression.
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An emotion, decision, idea or thought has no
intrinsic value.
o
They are a consideration of those acts which
caused them to come into being, and those acts they will cause to happen in the
future.
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There is a constant progression of the present
slipping into the past.
Experiences are not of the present:
-
They are memories of the experience of life as
they occur in a temporal flow.
For Dilthey: It’s not the thoughts, but how the thoughts are
related in time through a temporal flow.
Auto biography: the Understanding of a life.
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About understanding one’s self and the meaning
of events in one’s life.
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There is an life-history that makes things
appropriate to do.
Any particular action or event derives its significance and
meaning from its relationship to the totality of the person’s life and his
place between past and future.
Things aren’t known in isolation, but only with respect to
other things.
Implications for understanding communication:
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We construct the inner source of others through
signs.
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We don’t need to understand ideas as much as how
words are placed in context of a life story.
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We fill in the gaps by projecting our own life
story
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We relate words together.
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In a play, the mind is focused on understanding
the plot and characters, not the ideas of the author.
Schopenhauer: World as Will and representation.
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Read text’s twice
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Meaning at the beginning is given new meaning
because of understanding at the end.
Essence of communication is the interpretation and
evaluation of communicative acts with respect to conversation and biographical
streams.
Met Narratives: Discourse that affirms meaning.
Discourse that knows the end.
Private thought should not presume an end, only an inference
relative to time.
Discussion on communication that:
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Does not require reference to the individual
mind.
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Does not require communication to be spoken in
terms of control.
Radford:
-Students are led to believe communication can:
- Help them control their behavior, and Be able to control
behavior in others.
Hans-Georg Gadamer:
-
Gadamer’s model was based on the spontaneous
conversation.
Genuine conversation:
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When we fall into a conversation without a lead
or structured narrative.
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It is experienced as an event
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Has no structure, it flows.
We must free ourselves from the customary mode of thinking
that considers the nature of game from the point of view of the consciousness
of the player.
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The game creates its own place and its own
movement.
Gadamer:
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Understanding is not based on transposing
oneself into another person.
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- To understand someone is to understand the
subject matter.
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Nothing that is said is a truth in and of
itself, but refers backwards and forwards to what is unsaid.
We communicate in context with our environments and
conversations.
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Questions open the spaces to respond.
Conversations structures outside themselves rather than
inside.
Speaking does not belong in the sphere of I, but the sphere
of we.
Responses are co-created by sequences of the conversations.
Understanding (the text) is not about guessing the author’s
intention, or the state of mind.
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It is about understanding yourself and relation
to the text.
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You create meaning as you engage with the text.
Chapter 9 – A New Way of Speaking About Communication
To understand communication, we must understand the language
of communication.
We can speak to communication without terms such as idea,
thought or information processing.
Thought doesn’t mean it refers to an actual process.
Language forms the framework of reality.
Reality is an expression from a particular point of view.
Language acts more like an environment rather than a tool.
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