2 - Communication Problems

Summary

1. Signal-Sign Systems

Shifting our focus slightly from the claim that philosophy and science are two contrasting efforts to the problem of making sense of life, we will turn in this chapter to explore how this problem has been taken up as a communication problem. This shift to communication problems opens up an entire world of research into language and communication. The effort here, however, will not be to encapsulate the many ways in which communication problems have been addressed, but to follow through on the implications of the previous chapter by employing Claude Shannon’s well-known approach to communication problems in order to highlight the difference between scientific and philosophical approaches to the problem of making sense. This difference will then be tracked through a variety of contexts in this and subsequent chapters, including (in this chapter) the territorial behaviour of animals, the challenges of narrative comprehension in AI research, Claude Steele’s self-affirmation studies, Plato’s view that philosophy is prompted by the contradictory nature of perceptions, and finally Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity. This varied, sinuous path will provide us with a number of threads that we will then draw together in setting forth a critical existentialism that can provide us with the tools to sidestep the tendency to become overly reliant on solutions without a problem, solutions that may become, as Foucault recognised, ‘the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, xiii).

a) Information theory

In the late 1940s, while working at Bell Labs, Claude Shannon published his landmark essay, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’. At the outset of this essay Shannon states the problem his approach sets out to resolve:

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. (Shannon and Weaver 1949, 1)

For those old enough to remember making phone calls from as recently as the 1980s, especially international calls, the quality of the call would often succumb to an acoustic fog of static noise and distortion that would make communication difficult if not impossible.