The development of ideas about communication in European thought from Ancient Greece to the early Modern Age

Abstract

The field of communication is highly fragmented. There are half-a-dozen major competing schools; dozens of incompatible theories; no agreed research methods; and poor connection between research, practice and policy. Although theorists recognise fragmentation is a problem and agree that it must be resolved, they do not agree on its causes—ontological, methodological, or institutional—nor how the problem might be overcome. This thesis argues that sources of our present confusion have been misdiagnosed. The problems are not, in the first place, conceptual. Disagreement in the scope and practice of communication are symptoms of the problem; not its causes. This thesis argues that the main source of incoherence lies in the unregarded development of ideas about communication over the last 2,500 years. Far from being a single idea of communication in Western thought, there are three very different traditions that have existed and competed throughout Western history. Each tradition exists for different reasons, has an entirely different scope and purpose, and is made up of ideas from different categories (factual claims, value claims, and plans of action). In their development however, all three interacted and concepts were transferred between them, giving the appearance of a single unbroken tradition. My thesis describes the core concepts of each tradition, the sources and development of these concepts, the reasons for their evolution, the interactions and borrowings between the three traditions, and what these concepts have committed the field to—particularly in its attachments to other fields such as psychology, linguistics, law and politics. The first tradition is the idea of communication as transference, which seeks to explain what happens when people speak and listen to one another. The main sources of this tradition have been everyday explanation of human physiology, although in the last four hundred years, these have been supplemented with scientific theories concerning physical nature. Everyday metaphors used in ancient Greece and Rome show a fully formed but implicit model which treated communication as breathing words out of one person and into another. This model became more complex with the appearance of ideas concerning the mind, soul and language. This model in turn provided the basis for many key Western beliefs about thought and consciousness, which were later incorporated into medieval theories of speech. This model persisted until the seventeenth century, when physiology was displaced by mechanics, and the tradition was split into physical and symbolic transference. In contemporary theory, this tradition dominates the other two traditions, and is the development of ideas about communication in european thought is represented in mass communication studies, ‘message-driven’ and transmission models, behavioural and cognitive psychology, cybernetics, and information processing. The second tradition is organised around the idea of communication as making order. In particular, it treats communicating as the way in which communities are formed, regulated and advanced. This tradition has been heavily influenced by political theory and jurisprudence throughout its history, also becoming intertwined with theories of creation in Platonism and medieval Christian theology. This view of communication began to decline in the early Modern Age with the Protestant Reformation and the rise of liberal democracies and the physical sciences. These undermined belief in an intrinsic social order by emphasising human beings as individuals rather than social creatures. Today this tradition is most apparent in structuralism, French semiotics, aspects of descriptive grammar, social psychology, cultural theory, and some critical theory. The third tradition sees communication as a matter of applying techniques. From the earliest times, these techniques were divided into a prominent collection concerned with speaking and arguing (rhetoric and dialectic) and a diffuse and specialised group concerned with reading (grammar and legal interpretation—extended to biblical exegesis in the third century ad). The latter interpretative tradition evolved concepts of meaning and symbols, although they were later grafted onto communication-as-transmission. Both branches of the tradition were dormant throughout the early Middle Ages, but were revived by the Humanists in the Renaissance. During the dispute between philosophers and rhetoricians in the sixteenth century, communication-as-technique was stripped of anything to do with the material presented and was left only with style and presentation—the origins of the contemporary division of substance and style, thought and word. This division ultimately denied communication any claims to essence, substance, or ontology. The rise of Protestantism and the natural sciences contributed to the decline in rhetoric, and the transformation of dialectic from a spoken art into formal, mental reasoning divorced from communication. Today, the main representatives of this tradition are journalism, design, and the plain language movement—although rhetoric, hermeneutics and critical theory still find a place in Western universities. The thesis concludes by exposing contradictions between the three traditions, attachments and accretions they have acquired in their development, and how these are manifested in the current fragmentation of the field. Finally, I consider what might be salvaged from the history of ideas about communication, upon which a new unified tradition might be built. Show more