What is communication?

To say that language serves as an instrument of communication is to utter a truism. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any satisfactory definition of the term ‘language’ that did not incorporate some reference to the notion of communication. Furthermore, it is obvious, or has appeared so to many semanticists, that there is an intrinsic connexion between meaning and communication, such that it is impossible to account for the former except in terms of the latter. But what is communication? The words ‘communicate’ and ‘communication’ are used in a fairly wide range of contexts in their everyday, pre-theoretical sense. We talk as readily of the communication of feelings, moods and attitudes as we do of the communication of factual information. There can be no doubt that these different senses of the word (if indeed they are truly distinct) are interconnected; and various definitions have been proposed which have sought to bring them under some very general, but theoretical, concept defined in terms of social interaction or the response of an organism to a stimulus. We will here take the alternative approach of giving to the term ‘communication’ and the cognate terms ‘communicate’ and ‘communicative’ a somewhat narrower interpretation than they may bear in everyday usage. The narrowing consists in the restriction of the term to the intentional transmission of information by means of some established signalling-system*; and, initially at least, we will restrict the term still further – to the intentional transmission of factual, or propositional, information.