The nature of communication

How do people use language to communicate with each other? For centuries the commonsense view has been that articulated by Locke: ‘Unless a man's words excite the same ideas in the hearer which he makes them stand for in speaking he does not speak intelligibly’ ([1689] 1971:262). Locke was himself fully aware of the difficulties of achieving such an ideal, guaranteed, form of communication, but it still claims its adherents in the twentieth century. In the simplest version of this view, the speaker has a thought which is encoded into words and transmitted through the air by sound-waves so that it reaches the listener, who decodes the words and then has the speaker's thought. Such an account of communication would have little more to say than that it consists of speakers exchanging thoughts (see for instance Shannon & Weaver's account of signal-information in Information Theory, 1949).

Swift parodies such a simplistic view in Gulliver's Travels, where Gulliver describes an even more direct method of ensuring the passage of the same thought. The mathematics master in the Grand Academy of Lagado (Swift's splenetic version of the Royal Society) requires his students to eat each idea, so that it may progress directly to the brain without any distorting mediation arising from the student's own contemplation of the idea: ‘the proposition and demonstration were fairly written on a thin wafer, with ink composed of a cephalic tincture. This the student was to swallow upon a fasting stomach, and for three days following eat nothing but bread and water. As the wafer digested, the tincture mounted to his brain, bearing the proposition along with it’ ([1726] 1960:224).