3 Defining Communication
Hundreds of explicit and implicit definitions of communication have been published
in the communication and related literatures for use by scholars and practitioners
trying to describe, predict, and understand communicative phenomena.
These definitions vary around the common language definitions, with variations
depending on individual scholarly interests and general scholarly trends. The diverse
definitions of communication offered by Hauser [Hau96, p. 7] serve as a
representative, albeit small, sample of ideas about communication from a wide
range of disciplines. Of seven definitions provided by Hauser, three definitions
of communication place communication in the context of humans or organisms,
while a majority mention the effect of a message on its recipient.
Edward Wilson notes that “the ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting
chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of
scholarship” [Wil98, p. 8]. The definition of communication developed below is
both rigorous and general in capturing all and only the communication phenomena
in the “real world.” We are not trying to build on traditional definitions of communication
and our definition isn’t “an artifact of scholarship”; instead, we build
a model of communications on both a precise definition of information and on a
list of required characteristics for a definition of communication. Thus, there is no
explicit preference for which side should win in long-running intra-disciplinary
debates, such as whether there is intrapersonal communication, for example. We
assume that communication has the following characteristics (derived in part from
questions posed by Motley [Mot90]):