COMMUNICATION THEORY

Communication Theory

Communication Theory

Introduction

Communication, conceptualized as the 'social matrix of psychiatry' by Ruesch and Bateson (1951), becomes an entity which can be studied as a general system for the modelling of human relationships and as the focus of therapeutic intervention. The theoretical field involved in the thinking on communication, and its own field of application, may be represented graphically by two cones joined at their apices (isomorphic with the figure proposed by Thom, 1980b; see Costa de Beauregard, 1980, p. 66). The 'neck' of the hourglass represents the particular quality of the figure in question, and is occupied by the calculations of Weaver and Shannon (1949) relating to the quantity of information contained in a message.

The retrospective of these calculations reveals the work of Maxwell and Boltzmann as their closest neighbours, then, by levels, all Western knowledge and reflections upon knowing, including both Claude Bernard and Pascal, E. Gallois and Heraclitus. The question of the nature of this explanatory principle which attempts a 'total explanation of the world' by defining itself as the epistemological keystone will be echoed by its field of application.

Appearing first in cybernetics, then in biology and in systemic psychological approaches, it opens up ever wider to the point where it implodes. Now, that keystone, that unique point where multiple traditions and multiple objects of study meet, is in itself ambiguous.

n its transitive form, to communicate means to transmit, i.e. to assist a linear displacement or change. In the intransitive sense, by contrast, it means to be in relation; not in this case to send elsewhere, but to keep here, to introduce circularity. Weaver and Shannon's (1949) mathematical model, which has come to be viewed as the central element of the new paradigm, is linear in nature. The essence of that model, as von Foerster (1960) has pointed out, is that the message in question is to be sent from a point A (the sender) to a point B (the receiver) like a commodity or substance circulating in a tube which can be fed out in slices or 'bits'. The channel or link is, for its part, of a minor 'ontological nature'. It is a vade mecum with no autonomous existence.

In no way, however, can the basic exclusion of the intermediary figure, the channel, the transducer, be justified from a heuristic point of view. It was indeed on this reified element, the channel, that the study of communication and its quantification was to bear initially, in the form of information theory.

Discussion

The semiotic conception of communication (see semiology) makes the distinction, within the frame-work of a general theory of language (Carnap, 1942, 1956, 1964; Morris, 1946), between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Syntax can be seen as leaving out of account meaning and the users of meaning, in order to study the structures of the relations between expression (grammars). Semantics leaves these structures and their users out of account, to focus its attention on meaning effects, i.e. the significations of the concepts which result from ...