Communication

Communication is a concept that is largely based on the principle of compositionality:

The meaning of an expression is a function of the meaning of its parts and the ways that they are put together.

There are two models of communication in consideration that express in different ways how meaning is derived from an utterance:

1. The first model is the code model, discovered by Shannon and Wearer in 1949.

a. According the code model, successful communication involves largely the decoding and encoding of messages.

b. The code model assumes that communication is a linear process, where:

i. A message starts at an information source, and is converted into a signal or a code (thus encoder).

ii. The signal then travels to the recipient, who uses his decoding mechanism to extract the information from the signal.

iii. The information is then processed and stored by the recipient, and he can begin to encode his own signal to transmit as a response.

However, as much as this concept is a applied in many mechanical and mathematical platforms of communication, it is insufficient to be considered as the basis of a comprehensive theory of human communication, because it fails to consider three very real aspects of human communication:

c. Ambiguity in language use:

i. Lexical ambiguity due to polysemy (e.g. he walked into a bank)

ii. Semantic Structural ambiguity (e.g. he saw the boy with the telescope)

iii. Syntactic Structural ambiguity (e.g. every man loves a woman)

d. Vagueness in language use:

i. Contextually determined referents (e.g. all dogs must be carried up the escalator)

ii. Inherently vague terms (e.g. a big butterfly vs. a big elephant)

iii. Fuzzy propositions (e.g. Frace is hexagonal)

e. Nonliteral language use:

i. Hyperbole (e.g. I can eat a whole camel)

ii. Sarcasm (e.g. this genius shot himself)

iii. Metaphor (e.g. she’s a force of nature)

The code model, as such, is insufficient it takes the signal in isolation. If we do that, we cannot reliably encode the intended message. To get the full, intended message from the signal, we need to disambiguate and sharpen the meaning, in order to figure out if it is intended literally or non-literally.

If we use the code model, there will be much error-prone guessing involved, which will only lead to more breaking down of communication. Even if we do decode the signal perfectly, communication breaks down all the time.

2. As such, the second model, the inferential model, is more suited in the consideration of realistic human communication.

a. The inferential model asserts that communication is successful when the hearer recognises the communicative intentions of the speaker.

This is done by reverse-engineering the communicative event to try and figure out what sort of communicative intentions a speaker might have had that had led him to produce that utterance.

We are able to do this against a common ground or backdrop of share beliefs.

b. Advantages of the inferential model:

i. It is more flexible than the core model, because

ii. It allows for ambiguous and vague language use, as long as the hearer has the ability to figure out how the speaker meant for it to be ambiguous

iii. It allows non-literal use of language, as long as the hearer has the ability to figure out how the speaker meant for the language to be used non-literally.

c. By caring more about the intentions rather than the message, we have no problem with performativity.

d. The inferential model can be performed in four steps:

i. Decode the utterance