The Concept Of Communication

Concepts are defined as ordinary ideas or general notions that occur in the mind, in speech, or in thought. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by several disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences. The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach called cognitive science.In contemporary philosophy, there are at least three prevailing ways to understand what a concept is: Concepts as mental representations, where concepts are entities that exist in the mind (mental objects) Concepts as abilities, where concepts are abilities peculiar to cognitive agents (mental states) Concepts as Fregean senses (see sense and reference), where concepts are abstract objects, as opposed to mental objects and mental statesConcepts can be organized into a hierarchy, higher levels of which are termed "superordinate" and lower levels termed "subordinate". Additionally, there is the "basic" or "middle" level at which people will most readily categorize a concept. For example, a basic-level concept would be "chair", with its superordinate, "furniture", and its subordinate, "easy chair". Concepts may be exact, or inexact. When the mind makes a generalization such as the concept of tree, it extracts similarities from numerous examples; the simplification enables higher-level thinking. A concept is instantiated (reified) by all of its actual or potential instances, whether these are things in the real world or other ideas. Concepts are studied as components of human cognition in the cognitive science disciplines of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, where an ongoing debate asks whether all cognition must occur through concepts. Concepts are used as formal tools or models in mathematics, computer science, databases and artificial intelligence where they are sometimes called classes, schema or categories. In informal use the word concept often just means any idea. Communication (from Latin communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is "an apparent answer to the painful divisions between self and other, private and public, and inner thought and outer word." As this definition indicates, communication is difficult to define in a consistent manner, because it is commonly used to refer to a wide range of different behaviors (broadly: "the transfer of information"), or to limit what can be included in the category of communication (for example, requiring a "conscious intent" to persuade). John Peters argues the difficulty of defining communication emerges from the fact that communication is both a universal phenomena (because everyone communicates), and a specific discipline of institutional academic study.One possible definition of communication is the act of developing meaning among entities or groups through the use of sufficiently mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic conventions. In Claude Shannon's and Warren Weaver's influential model, human communication was imagined to function like a telephone or telegraph. Accordingly, they conceptualized communication as involving discrete steps: The formation of communicative motivation or reason. Message composition (further internal or technical elaboration on what exactly to express). Message encoding (for example, into digital data, written text, speech, pictures, gestures and so on). Transmission of the encoded message as a sequence of signals using a specific channel or medium. Noise sources such as natural forces and in some cases human activity (both intentional and accidental) begin influencing the quality of signals propagating from the sender to one or more receivers. Reception of signals and reassembling of the encoded message from a sequence of received signals. Decoding of the reassembled encoded message. Interpretation and making sense of the presumed original message.These elements are now understood to be substantially overlapping and recursive activities rather than steps in a sequence. For example, communicative actions can commence before a communicator formulates a conscious attempt to do so, as in the case of phatics; likewise, communicators modify their intentions and formulations of a message in response to real-time feedback (e.g., a change in facial expression). Practices of decoding and interpretation are culturally enacted, not just by individuals (genre conventions, for instance, trigger anticipatory expectations for how a message is to be received), and receivers of any message operationalize their own frames of reference in interpretation.The scientific study of communication can be divided into: Information theory which studies the quantification, storage, and communication of information in general; Communication studies which concerns human communication; Biosemiotics which examines communication in and between living organisms in general. Biocommunication which exemplifies sign-mediated interactions in and between organisms of all domains of life, including viruses.The channel of communication can be visual, auditory, tactile/haptic (e.g. Braille or other physical means), olfactory, electromagnetic, or biochemical. Human communication is unique for its extensive use of abstract language. Development of civilization has been closely linked with progress in telecommunication.