Communication Skills

It strikes me as being rather comical that the premier textbook and study on understanding human communication is so convoluted with theories, that it takes the whole subject into the ‘boy do I have a migraine headache’ arena.

OK, so just for laughs try the following explanation of understanding human communication on for size:

"Human communication is powerful and overall successful, not entirely because of the immediate accuracy in understanding utterances, but in part due to the communicating parties ability to dynamically detect and correct problems as they arise. Acknowledgements are key to this process of monitoring communication to determine whether the quality of the communication is acceptably high. In studying natural language and human communications protocols, a problem we face is that by the time we are old enough to become interested in the underlying mechanisms, those mechanisms have become so automatic that we have difficulty observing them. As I study natural language, I supplement the direct study of acknowledgements in our corpus of human communication transcripts, by studying artificial communication protocols, and then apply that knowledge back to the study of human protocols."

It may gratify you to know that the Cognitive Science Program, Office of Naval Research under Grant NoN00014-94-1-0338 supports this above razzle-dazzle of a paragraph explaining human communication. Now don’t you feel better knowing that? I know I do.

Let me just say that the understanding of human communication is difficult namely because we all communicate and receive communication through our own filters of experience and perception. Some communicate and receive on a very literal level and other do so on an inferred level. Does the word love mean the same thing to your friends, relatives, and co-workers as it does to you? If you believe it does not than you would be correct. You would also be correct if you think that ‘love’ can have different meanings in different cultures. That can then be extended to just about every word you utter and every word you hear.

In light of that, let us now take a look how Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human understanding says it He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate , which is filled in through experience. Locke sets out his theory of ideas, including his distinction between passively acquired simple ideas, such as "red," "sweet," "round," etc., and actively built complex ideas, such as numbers, causes and effects, abstract ideas, ideas of substances, identity, and diversity. Locke also distinguishes between the truly existing primary qualities of bodies, like shape, motion and the arrangement of minute particles, and the secondary qualities that are "powers to produce various sensations in us" such as "red" and "sweet." These secondary qualities, Locke claims, are dependent on the primary qualities. He also offers a theory of personal identity, offering a largely psychological criterion.

Thank you very much, but does not Locke just say almost the exact the same thing I said? Therefore, I don’t feel it would be terribly far off-base to conclude that the understanding of human communication is wrought with enough difficulties all on its own, without having verbose essays, convuluted theories, and pontificating professors, complicating the subject even further