Pragmatics of Human Communication

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about communication between humans, moreso than communications between entities/institutions and humans. It deals with a lot of interesting behaviour disorders in the context of communications.

🎨 Impressions

It was a bit of a slow read. I found it to have interseting segments but also was dreadfully slow at times.

✍️ My Top Quotes

This book deals with the pragmatic (behavioral) effects of human communication, with special attention to behavior disorders.
When we no longer use communication to communicate but to communicate about communication, as we inevitably must in communication research, then we use conceptualizations that are not part of but about communication.
Vocalizations, intention movements, and mood signs of animals are analogic communications by which they define the nature of their relationships, rather than making denotative statements about objects. Thus, to take one of his examples, when I open the refrigerator and the cat comes, rubs against my legs, and mews, this does not mean “I want milk”—as a human being would express it—but invokes a specific relationship, “Be mother to me,” because such behavior is only observed in kittens in relation to adult cats, and never between two grown-up animals.
To talk about relationship requires adequate translation from the analogic into the digital mode of communication. Finally we can imagine similar problems when the two modes must coexist, as Haley has noted in his excellent chapter, “Marriage Therapy”:
When a man and a woman decide their association should be legalized with a marriage ceremony, they pose themselves a problem which will continue through the marriage: now that they are married are they staying together because they wish to or because they must?
Human beings communicate both digitally and analogically. Digital language has a highly complex and powerful logical syntax but lacks adequate semantics in the field of relationship, while analogic language possesses the semantics but has no adequate syntax for the unambiguous definition of the nature of relationships.
Birdwhistell has even gone so far as to suggest that an individual does not communicate; he engages in or becomes part of communication. He may move, or make noises … but he does not communicate
One day she was able to prove to him conclusively that he was factually wrong, and he replied, “Well, you may be right, but you are wrong because you are arguing with me.”
Laing quotes William James, who once wrote: “No more fiendish punishment could be devised, even were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof”
The characteristic family pattern that has emerged from the study of families of schizophrenics does not so much involve a child who is subject to outright neglect or even to obvious trauma, but a child whose authenticity has been subjected to subtle, but persistent, mutilation, often quite unwittingly.
All behavior is communication and therefore influences and is influenced by others.
It is presently clearer to refer to the steady state or stability of a system, which is generally maintained by negative feedback mechanisms.
As it is later revealed, Nick married Honey because he thought she was going to have a baby, but her condition turned out to be a hysterical pregnancy, which of course disappeared as soon as they were married; and perhaps he was also motivated by thoughts of her father’s wealth.
The Party denied the free will of the individual—and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives—and at the same time it demanded that he should always choose the right one.