The Communicative Event

Elements demand Simplicity

The biggest confusion in explaining this hierarchy flows from a tendency to mentally evoke the more complicated aspects of communication. We must, however, start by considering the simplest.

Is it obvious what is not simple?

• Using argument to explain, or rhetoric to persuade, is not simple.
• A written article or novel is not simple.
• Discussion of a practical problem is not simple.
• Even a short conversation is not simple.
  

Understanding and being understood is extremely complex. So is anything else that is part of larger group interactions, language conventions or agreements.

Such complex communication issues and situations will surely be clarified in structures derived from the elements—if we get these elements more or less right.

A communicative event is my name for the simplest piece of communication I am unaware of any technical or conventional name for this phenomenon. that is still recognizably communicative in nature. Anything more complicated will then (of necessity) be composed of many communicative events. Usually there will be vast numbers of such events. But we are most unlikely to be able to understand and describe these matters usefully if we have not grasped the basic elements of which any single event is necessarily composed.

Two Sorts of Communicative Event

A communicative event is the property of one person with an intention. So an event occurs if a person deliberately sends a message as short as possible in practice; and it occurs if a person deliberately gets or construes a similarly short message. It follows that:

• There is no requirement for a sending event to correspond or relate to a receiving event and vice versa (even if that is typically desired).
• The personal or social relationships that underpin any communicative event, important as they are, will be regarded as a separate issue for now.

To restate this basic inquiring position ►

For the Sender:  A communicative sending event does not require anybody to notice or understand. It is a «sending event» because that was the purpose of the person who made the communication.

For the Receiver:  A communicative receiving event does not require anybody to have purposefully sent a message. It is a «receiving event» because that was the purpose of the person who construed something occurring in a social situation.

We often refer to «communication» as involving both the sender and the receiver, but that is to add a complexity. Here we want simplicity. Also: THEE exists within a person, so its elements must be sought there.

The Relevance of Biology

It is important to recognize conscious and unconscious communications (for both senders and recipients) and the irrelevance of instinctual factors. If you can do this, you eliminate confusions related to the natural entanglement of Communication-PH5 with biology.

• Communicative events that are deliberate, i.e. purposefully sent or purposefully noticed, must be sent or received consciously. Otherwise, in what sense are they deliberate? This is definitely biological: it always involves some combination of the vocal cords, body movements, visual system, other sense organs &c.
• Communicative events that are unconsciously sent or noticed are also biological. They may involve the autonomic nervous system (e.g. flushing, twitching) or the voluntary system (e.g. choice of clothes, body posture). Such unconscious activity can be brought into consciousness. In that aware state, the communication can be affirmed, retracted or modified purposefully.
• Instinctual-reflex activity on the sending or receiving side is biological but it is not communication. My instinctual emission of stimuli may be noticed by you, but they are not being sent by me. Instinctual reception by me may be due to your state, but it does not imply that I am enabling or activating a communicative event. See specific explanatory examples.

Reflex movement based on sudden unexpected pain is involuntary. If you move reflexly on this basis, you are not sending a message to anyone. If another person is unaware of your circumstances and notices such movement, he could construe it incorrectly as deliberate, and therefore communicative.

If you nurse an incontinent person, you may react reflexly to the odour. However, even if you feel disgusted and screw up your face, that is not how you necessarily construe the stimulus. Just as in the pain reflex, you are not purposefully engaged. You experience a sensation and react, but you do not see yourself as getting (i.e. being sent) a message from the patient. Cognitive science studies have revealed that we show neuronal evidence of noticing and being influenced by stimuli on many occasions without any awareness. Such deep lack of awareness places such phenomena outside our present concerns.

THEE Note:  In the Root Hierarchy, Purpose-RL6 and Willingness-RL7 do not seem to be entangled in biology in the same way as Communication-RL5 and all lower levels, from RL4 through to RL1.

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• Start now with the Foundation: Stimuli at Level-1.

Originally posted: 31-Jul-2011.