Mark,

I am sorry I can not be there, but here are a bunch of things that I would try to say at one 
time or another during the class. So if there is a suitable lull, please feel free to toss one 
or more of them out to the class. 

1. Becker. Last week we learned Becker's view that good social science should (1) admit 
that its hypotheses might be wrong, and design studies or research so tat it can be 
surprised and (2) should state the limitations of its conclusions. [A point that we spent a 
lot of time on, that it should state its own positions, was not actually part of his 
summation, as I read it. Supposing that Communication is a social science, which of the 
papers that we have read this week seem to meet condition (1)? How about condition (2).

2. Bringing order into chaos. We have several authors who seem to encompass not a 
specific issue (as in Malcolm Parks' on interpersonal communication, circa 1970, or 
Michael Reddy's attack on the conduit metaphor.) but attempt to bring order into the 
entire field. One is John Durham Peter's introductory chapter on the idea of 
communication. The other is Robert Craig's presentation of "communication as a field". 
Peters is historical in his presentation, Craig is analytic.  Supposing for the moment that 
they are talking about the same thing, can you make some reasonable alignment between 
the 5 aspects of Peter's and the 7 aspects of Craig? Are some of Craig's left out?  Which 
ones?  Why should we insist that we are able to reconcile these two pictures? Should we 
just say that they have personal realities, and that there is no reason for them to agree?

3.  Methodology. It may be the science of donkeys, but why is it so totally absent from 
these readings? We are given almost no clue as to how any of the things asserted in these 
papers came to be believed by the authors of the papers. In the case of Peters (1) and 
Craig, we conclude that they read the papers, say what they mean (aha!) and were able to 
organize them.  But we have not read those papers. We don't know if we would agree. 
And we don't know if the authors would agree. Does that last point matter? 

4. Worst paper award. While Peter's paper is gabby, and its religious cup floweth over, 
the hardest paper to stomach (personal opinion of course) is Michael Reddy on the 
"conduit metaphor". The devil is the details, and a self-styled linguist who says 
compliment when he means complement leaves me uncomfortably on-guard. His method 
seems to be that he makes up (or does he lift them, and if so, from where) numerous 
examples of expressions that more or less support the conduit metaphor. He then 
describes this as a problem of English. This is incomplete, as it leads us to expect a 
contrast with other natural language. Does he really mean to say that English scholar are 
disadvantages next to those in French or German? Or what?  Second, familiar metaphors 
such as "I see what he means" invoke a completely different metaphoric structure, related 
to vision, rather than cartage. How can he ignore it? In this class we could produce 100 
examples before going on break.  Third, his discussion of "Shannon and Weaver" like so 
many, ignores the fact that half the book was written by Weaver all by his lonesome. And 
that is the part he talks about. Shannon was not confused, and the role of the code book 
has been well understood from the beginning. Shannon's contribution, which is hard to 
appreciate when we all have heard of bits (binary selections) and Bytes (8 binary 
selections riding in the same car). HE realized that one could *count* the amount of 
information when all transmission was understood as continuous waves, like sound in the 
air.  In short, Reddy attacks a misunderstanding not held by people we should attend to 
much. And so we can skip it.   

5. So Malcolm Park's escapes the worst paper award. His method seems to be to cite 
papers and tell us what they found or showed. Always risky, and I wonder how many of 
his victims agree with him. His paper is severely time bound, as much of what it 
questions is, I hope, long gone. But I suppose the quest for sincerity and genuine 
relationships must persist, at least at dating services and ICA or NCA conferences.  But, 
when you lift the lid and look into the pot, he really seems simply to say "disclosure can 
harm" and "we don't have enough energy for full disclosure, it would exhaust us" and 
"deception and secrecy have vital social functions" and all of it "because I say so, and I 
expect you will agree".  

6. A bright light. Craig is pretty good, I think, at showing schools in their own terms. So 
on p146 we see that "reproduce" equals "bad" while "produce" equals "good". Yet so 
much of what is produced in the critical perspective does, arguable, reproduce the 
perspectives of the critical perspective. W also must admire Craig's diagonal in Table2, 
where he looks for the shortcomings of each view, on its own terms.

Overall, I enjoyed having to read these. But we have to empower the students to critique, 
question, and outright reject, if they can find grounds to do so. Also, we need to 
emphasize that with regard to choosing a perspective, they need not refute all others. But 
with regard to defending their perspective, they should be attentive to, at least, clarity and 
consistency.