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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 certain impressions 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? The problem is familiar. It seems impossible to draw a line between those situations that we conventionally term "communication" and those we do not, short of a purely arbitrary distinction. And the many and varied definitions of "communication" appearing in the literature of various fields of study often appear, at first glance at least, to compound the difficulty. We who are teaching speech must be concerned about defining communication. Certainly our concept of this process determines to no small degree our approach to speech training, how broadly or narrowly we view our subject, how we relate it to other areas of study. My purpose in this paper is to put the problem of defining "communication" in clearer perspective, thus assisting in the selection of a more consistent and pedagogically helpful concept of communication. To accomplish my purpose, I shall present a number of definitions of "communication" in a two-fold classification and examine the application of these definitions to a series of situations in which human responses and interactions occur. Such classification and application should give us some insights into the problem of definition, into the relationship among existing definitions, and provide us with the perspective necessary to select the most basic, consistent, and useful definition of "communication," and to see its relationship to the process of speech. Definitions of "communication" fall into two broad categories. In one category are those definitions which limit the process of communication to those stimulus-response situations in which one deliberately transmits stimuli to evoke response. In the other category are those definitions that include within the area of communication stimulus-response situations in which there need not be any intention of evoking response in the transmission of the stimuli. The second category obviously overlaps the first. The definitions below I have grouped into these two categories. In the first group there is no particular sequence; I include the various definitions to pro vide a broad view of the definitions in this category. In the second group I pre sent the definitions roughly in the order of their inclusiveness. CATEGORY ONE Our everyday usage of the word "communication" fits in here. Standard dictionary definitions reflect it. "Communicate" is defined as "lo impart, bestow, or convey. . . . To make known; give by way of information. . . . To have inter course, or to be the means of intercourse; to hold or afford communication; to converse. . . ." "Communication" is defined as "The act or fact of communicating. . . . Intercourse by words, letters or messages; interchange of thoughts or opinions, by conference or other means; converse; correspondence." 1 Wilbur Schramm gives what he terms the classical statement of the communication process as ". . . A communicates B through channel C to D with effect E. Each of these letters is to some extent an unknown, and the process can be solved for any one of them or any combination." 2 Similarly, Carl Hovland states that communication is ". . . the process by which an individual (the communicator) transmits stimuli (usually verbal symbols) to modify the behavior of other individuals (communicatees)." 3. 1. Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language (2d ed.) (Spring field, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1934), p. 541. 2. Wilbur Schramm, ed., Communications in Modern Society: Fifteen Studies of the Mass Media Prepared for the University of Illinois Institution of Communications Research (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1948), p. 24. (Italics in the original.) 3. Carl Hovland, "Social Communication," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, XCII ( 12 November, 1948), 371. 4. Mapheus Smith, "Communicative Behavior," Psychological Review, LIII (September, 1946), 294. 5. Charles Morris, Signs, Language and Behavior (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1946), p. 118. Elaborating the process of communication more fully, Mapheus Smith states, Communication behavior in its simplest reciprocal form is the use of some action by one person, whether or not accompanied by a material object, as a stimulus to another person in such a way that the second person can perceive the experience of the stimulating person. The overt action of the first person plays the role of a symbol whose reference or meaning is the same for the two participants, with the result that common experience is perceived by both participants.4 Smith uses the term "communicative behavior" because it focuses attention on the process of inter-behavior. Two other definitions are interesting additions to this category for the distinctions they draw between communication as interaction and other forms of interaction. Charles Morris writes, The term communication, when widely used, covers any instance of the establishment of a commonage, that is, the making common of some property to a number of things. In this sense a radiator "communicates" its heat to surrounding bodies, and whatever medium serves this process of making common is a means of communication (the air, a road, a tele graph system, a language). For our purposes "communication" will be limited to the use of signs to establish a commonage of signification; the establishment of a commonage other than that of signification--whether by signs or other means-will be called communization. 5 Thus, as Morris points out, the anger of one person may make another person angry, and signs may not have established the commonage. This sort of situation he calls "communization." On the other hand, someone may signify anger, and, without becoming angry himself cause someone else to signify anger. An incident of this type he calls "communication." ° George Lundberg puts his definition this way: We shall use the word communication, then, to designate interaction by means of signs and symbols. The symbols may be gestural, pictorial, plastic, verbal, or any other which operate as stimuli to behavior which would not be evoked by the symbol itself in the absence of special conditionings of the person who responds. Communication is, therefore, a sub category under interaction, namely, the form of interaction which takes place through symbols? Lundberg adds that this definition is subject to certain qualifications. It is important to distinguish between " ... communication and mere contact, or interaction whether on the verbal level or otherwise." 8 "True societal communication consists of temporarily identifying oneself symbolically with the other as regards the particular situation involved in the communication." True communication, he says, is the kind of interaction through signs and symbols that leads to tension reduction or understanding. Similar interaction that leads to increasing tension is also communication, but of a different degree. It involves a different degree of symbolic identification.'" In the last two definitions above there is recognition of processes or areas of behavior very closely related to communication-the "communization" of Morris and the "interaction without the use of signs and symbols" of Lundberg-but which, however, they carefully mark off from what is strictly called "communication." The excluded areas of behavior, in the present classification, would be included among the definitions in category two. 6. Loc. cit. 7. George Lundberg, Foundations of Sociology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939), p. 253. Ibid., p. 283. 9. Ibid., p. 274. ro Loc. Cit. CATEGORY TWO In this group are the definitions that include as communication situations those situations in which there is no intentional transmission of stimuli to evoke response. Two concepts of communication in this category are suggestive of the Morris and Lundberg definitions, but instead of excluding the closely related areas of behavior they include them as special kinds of communication. Edward Sapir, in defining communication, wrote of "explicit" and "implicit" communication. The former is communication in the conventional sense, the use of language to establish common understanding among people (a Category One definition) ; the latter is the "intuitive interpretation" of the "relatively unconscious symbolisms of gesture, and the unconscious assimilation of the ideas and behavior of one's culture," " ( which definition finds its place in Category Two). Baker Brownell used the terms "direct" and "indirect" communication. The latter is a ". . . process wherein something converted into symbols is carried over from one person to another." 12 This is conventional usage (Category One again). The former, direct communication, is a function of the ". . . identification of people with one another." This is communication without a symbolic medium; it is an identification of experience.'3 Theodore Newcomb states that when someone gains certain impressions of someone else the latter is communicating something to the former. To use his ex ample, the man who allows junk to accumulate in his front yard communicates something to his neighbor whether he knows it or not." An almost identical point of view is that of Jurgen Ruesch, who states that ". . . as used in our sense the concept of communication would include all those processes by which people influence one another." And in slightly different wording, Henry Lindgren expresses it, "Communication, viewed psychologically, is a process which is concerned with all situations involving meaning." 16 Several years earlier Charles H. Cooley had foreshadowed this broad concept of communication: 11. Edward Sapir, "Communication," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), Vol. IV, p. 79. 12. Baker Brownell, The Human Community: Its Philosophy and Practice for a Time of Crisis (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), p. 240. ix Ibid., p. 241. Brownell adds that this sort of event may, in less well developed situations, occur among animals or between people and animals. 14. Theodore M. Newcomb, Social Psychology (New York: The Dryden Press, 1950), p. 269. 15. Jurgen Ruesch, "Values, Communication, and Culture," in Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1951), pp. 5-6. " 16. Henry C. Lindgren, The Art of Human Relations (New York: Hermitage House, 1953), p. 135. 17. Charles H. Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924), p. 61. By communication is here meant the mechanism through which human relations exist and develop-all the symbols of the mind, together with the means of conveying them through space and preserving them in time. . . . There is no sharp line between the means of communication and the rest of the external world. In a sense all objects and actions are symbols of the mind, and nearly any thing may be used as a sign- Some writers conceive of the term "communication" broadly enough to include non-human interactions. S. S. Stevens, for instance, gives what he describes as a "... broad, operational, and behavioristic" definition of communication. He states: Communication is the discriminatory response of an organism to a stimulus. . . . This definition says that communication occurs when some environmental disturbance (the stimulus) impinges on an organism and the organism does something about it (makes a discriminatory response). If the stimulus is ignored by the organism, there has been no communication. The test is differential reaction of some sort. The message that gets no response is not a communication." Stevens adds that his definition includes the clucking of a mother hen that brings her chicks, as well as a treatise on the information theory of communication. In Warren Weaver's definition the ultimate step is taken, to include the interaction of machines: The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another.... In some connection it may be desirable to use a still broader definition of communication, namely, one which would include the procedures by means of which one mechanism (say automatic equipment to track an airplane and to compute its probable future positions) affects another mechanism (say a guided missile chasing this airplane)." With the above classification of definitions in mind, let us turn to an application of these definitions. 18. S. S. Stevens, "Introduction: A Definition of Communication," The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, XXII (November, 1950), 689. 19. Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 95. II Let us picture an office in which several men are working at their desks. At midmorning the boss emerges from his private office and briefly talks with an employee. Let us assume that he gives the employee instructions to prepare a re port, which the latter does, to the complete satisfaction of the boss. We can, with out quibbling, say that in this case communication between the employer and the employee has occurred. We can also say that in this case communication has been successful. If the report had not been correct in every detail, because of some misunderstanding of the instructions, we would still say that communication had occurred, though not so successfully. Now suppose the boss had stepped into the room, briefly looked around, and then returned to his office without having said a word or made a gesture de- signed to evoke a response. It seems reasonable to suppose that some of the employees would nevertheless respond. They might have wondered, for instance, if the employer were checking to see that everyone was busy. It seems apparent, moreover, that the responses of the employees might have been the same whether the boss had in fact been observing their work or not thinking about them at all. And yet again, if the employees had expected the boss to appear and had he not done so, his nonappearance would undoubtedly have evoked certain responses. Let us imagine, to carry the hypothetical incident further, that one of the employees is working on a large chart. His desk is inconveniently small for his work; lack of space reduces his efficiency and makes his job appreciably more difficult. The employee might respond by feeling frustrated and angry. He might further begin to consider his small desk a threat to his prestige, and an indication of the small value the company places on his services. Still another employee might be finding his chair uncomfortable, and besides squirming around for an optimum adjustment to it, could well be thinking that the boss feels little concern for the welfare and dignity of his employees. These commonplace office situations, a moment's reflection will show, correspond to most, if not all, of the communication situations defined in the section above. There was transmission of stimuli to evoke response; there was an inter change of ideas; the use of signs established a commonage of signification; people interacted through the use of signs and symbols; and impressions of certain people-intended or unintended-were evoked in the minds of others. These doubtless were, in Sapir's terms, intuitive interpretations of gesture and unconscious assimilation of office culture. Also there may have been direct communication in Brownell's sense of the identification of people with one another, which perhaps could be illustrated by the common feelings toward the company. All were situations involving meaning. Moreover, we could class all as discriminatory responses to environmental stimuli. If we apply our definitions by categories, we find that in terms of the definitions in Category One, only the first of the office situations described has the characteristics of a communication situation, that is, the one in which the boss instructed an employee to make a report. In none of the others was there a de liberate use of signs or symbols to influence behavior. All of these situations could, however, with the addition of the element of purpose, involve communication in the sense of Category One. Had the boss when he made his wordless appearance done so intentionally to evoke response, or had he intentionally not appeared when he knew his employees expected him to (the absence of a stimulus object in a certain context can be as meaningful as its presence), the definitions would apply. If the too-small desk and the inadequate chair had been purposely given to the men in question (to let them know, for instance, that they were not so important as they might have felt themselves to be) these would have been communication situations in terms of definitions in Category One. If we apply Category Two definitions, on the other hand, we find that all the office situations described involve communication. The definitions of Newcomb, Ruesch, Cooley, Lindgren, Stevens, and Weaver would quite plainly make of each of the office incidents a communication situation. The "split" definitions of Sapir and Brownell are more difficult to apply, but it seems apparent that their "implicit" and "explicit" concepts would include those situations that had meaning for the individuals involved although they were not intentionally structured to have such meaning. III What insights can we derive from the above definitions, the relationships among them, and their relationships to the situations described? In the first place, the classification itself gives us a perspective on the problem of defining "communication" by revealing various attempts to conceptualize the process. The classification reveals attempts to delineate certain types of interaction as communication to the exclusion of other types; it reveals attempts to include as a special kind of communication certain interactional behavior that does not fit the conventional concept of communication, and further, a disregard of such distinctions and the inclusion of all forms of human interaction, direct or indirect, as communication. And still further, it reveals definitions so broad that certain animal responses, and even mechanical interactions, fall into the category of communication. Secondly, the importance and value of viewing communication as response become apparent. It is evident from the classification and application of the definitions that in the first category the concept of the process of communication is from the point of view of the transmitter of stimuli, and in the second category, from the point of view of the person responding. Looking at the process of communication from the transmitter's point of view provides the most obvious method of delimiting the area of behavior to be treated as communication, and consequently simplifies the problem of definition. If someone is transmitting stimuli for the purpose of evoking response there is communication; otherwise there is none. This is certainly one basis for definition, but it leaves a large area of behavior-often indistinguishable from "communication" by the responder or an observer-inadequately related to it, and in a sense unaccounted for. Only the transmitter can know whether or not he is transmitting stimuli for the purpose of influencing the behavior of others. When the process of communication is viewed from the perspective of the person responding, the above problem of what to do with the closely related behavior no longer exists. There seems to be no significant difference in the process of response whether or not it is to deliberately transmitted stimuli, and therefore no reason to classify the responses on this basis. To use the office examples again, in the non-verbal situations, if the responders had known whether or not the situations were intentionally structured, it might have made a difference in the behavior elicited, but this difference would have been the result of their having perceived the stimulus pattern differently. Had they assumed intentional structure, then whether or not there was in fact intentional structure would have made no difference to their response. There may appear to be a problem in viewing communication from the point of view of the responder when we proceed from people's influencing each other through words, actions, or man-made artifacts as communication to including as communication the individual's response to some object in the natural environment that human effort has in no way structured. Take, for instance, some one's responses to the moon. Yet, here again, apart from the very basic response of awareness, his reactions, intellectual and emotional, and the meanings he "sees" in the moon are a function of the influence of other minds; he is inter acting, though indirectly, with other people. Thirdly, we are able to select a basic and useful definition of "communication." The logical end result of accepting any of the definitions in Category Two is the acceptance of the broadest of the definitions, that of Stevens, which includes all instances of discriminatory response to environmental stimuli as communication (disregarding, of course, mechanical interaction as communication). As a basic definition this is the most satisfactory. It is inclusive of the other definitions, and it provides a perspective that permits us to see the relationships be tween the many other proposed definitions of communication. 20 Viewed from the perspective of this definition, the other definitions differ from each other on the basis of the range of response-evoking stimuli included in the communication situation. By the same token, this definition permits us systematically to delineate areas of communicative behavior for purposes of study, while keeping these limited areas of behavior in a consistent relationship to the total area of communicative behavior of which they are a functionally inseparable part. We can delineate these areas for study by delimiting the range of response-evoking stimuli that is to be included in a given communication situation. Thus we might include as communication only those responses to words, objects, or actions deliberately structured to evoke response in a given situation. We might include only responses to written words designed to "communicate" at a particular time. We might include only spoken words and bodily actions, or only spoken words, or spoken words in a face-to-face situation, depending upon what aspect of the human interaction we happen to be primarily interested in. There can, of course, be no sharp line of demarcation between the responses 20. In this paper I have arbitrarily limited my discussion to a consideration of communication at the human level. defined as communicative and those that are not. There is, as Cooley stated, no sharp line between the means of communication and the rest of the external world. Moreover, delimiting the communication situation by limiting the range of response-evoking stimuli included does not cancel the effects of other stimuli. The individual is constantly making differential responses to a wide range of stimulus patterns, environmental and internal, responses which are often inextricably intermingled with the responses to the stimuli that would be, by definition in a given case, included within the area of communicative behavior. The process of limitation suggested here, however, makes possible a systematic approach to the problem of limited definition, and makes us more clearly aware of what we are including and excluding for purposes of study and how these parts are related to each other. The broad, basic definition adopted here points to the basic nature of communicative behavior. While it may often serve our purpose to consider as communication situations only those in which people are responding to verbal stimuli, or rather, to consider primarily their responses to verbal stimuli, we must recognize the integral relationship between such responses and responses to other stimuli. The problem of defining "communication" is not unlike that of defining "education." In a sense, all learning experiences are educational (perhaps all experiences beyond reflex action), but to make learning more rapid and profitable we set up certain conditions of learning and in general limit the term "education" to an application to learning under such conditions. But to see what is conventionally termed "education" in the proper perspective we must see it in relationship to the vast number of other experiences of which it is a functionally inseparable part. And so, too, must we see communication, particularly that pro cess of communication we call speech. 21 What I have written about the process of communication in no way suggests that any one factor in the process of producing, transmitting, or receiving stimuli is more important than another. Within what may be defined in a given case as a "communication situation" we may single out for further analysis the source of the stimuli, the nature of the stimuli transmitted, the method of transmission, the receiver of the stimuli, the responses evoked, or relationships among these factors. Also in Part 1:
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