THE CRUCIAL BRANCH of philosophy that forms the base of the whole field of communication is epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and means of human knowledge. Epistemology tells us what reason is and how it operates, what objectivity is and how we can achieve it. I want to begin with some key aspects of the Objectivist epistemology as the base of understanding what communication is. This will serve as background before we plunge into our main subject.
Knowledge as Conceptual
The first point I want to stress in the philosophic base is that thought and communication require language. There is no thought without words. You can have images, emotions, percepts, or sensory data, but to know what you are perceiving, to identify the percepts, and to communicate your knowledge, you need words. Every word is the symbol of a concept, every word except proper names, such as “John Smith” or “Idaho.” Every other word, like “table,” “chair,” “man,” “red,” “fish,” and so on, stands for a concept. The broader point here is that all human knowledge, thought, and communication is conceptual. That is the base of all communication theory.
What are concepts? Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology gives a detailed technical account,* but as a popular, nontechnical version, we can say that a concept is an integration of percepts. It is a mental symbol that enables us to condense a vast number of percepts into a single entity, one we can thereafter hold as one unit in our minds. Consider the example of “table.” How do you form that particular concept? You observe several tables; you observe that they are similar to one another in certain ways and different from other items around them, like chairs, sofas, and so on. On the basis of those differences, you isolate the tables, segregate them out from their surroundings, in your mind. You look at the tables and see that they differ in various ways, but you are able to drop, or abstract away from, the differences. That is the process that Ayn Rand describes as omitting measurements. By this process, we are able to blend or unite all of these percepts into one single mental entity, which we symbolize by a term, “table.” It represents the awareness in our mind of the whole group, but it is an awareness in the form now of one symbol. The term “table” stands for an unlimited number of instances, for all the tables of the past, the present, and the future, all of them subsumed in that one word, and we are now able to deal with that vast quantity in one mental unit. That is the pattern of concept formation.
As Ayn Rand points out, concepts are a form of unit reduction. Or, to put it another way, they are a form of shorthand, akin to mental space savers. Concepts take whole chunks of reality—in this case, all the enormous number of tables past, present, and future—and condense them into one unit. The result, for us, is a whole new scale of consciousness immensely more powerful than anything possible to animals. Because of this condensing ability, for instance, we can apply the knowledge we have learned from just a few cases to all the members of that field, and thereby get to know universal principles, scientific laws, something impossible to animals. Animals may perceive the same original concretes that we do. But they cannot unite them into a whole; they cannot deal with that scale of information; they cannot conceive it. Consequently, they are reduced to passive observation.
While it is true that concepts give us magnificent advantages, they also create a problem. Or, to put it another way, they impose a responsibility. Animals may not get too far cognitively, but as far as they go, they are always clear. On the perceptual level, you are automatically tied to entities out there in reality. If you look out there at a table, you see what you see. It is sharp and delimited (leaving aside cases in which there is fog); there is no effort required on your part as an adult. You, or the dog, or the cat, or whatever, look and see that it is sharp and clear. Concepts, however, as a shorthand, are a complex creation. They are neither automatically clear, nor necessarily formed correctly, nor even necessarily tied to reality.
Most people learn concepts from other people, and often do so without basing those concepts on any actual facts. The result, in such people’s minds, is what we call “floating abstractions”—abstract terms with no connection to reality. For instance, suppose you ask the typical student in class today what he thinks of freedom, and he says he is all in favor of it. Then you ask him what he means by the term “freedom,” and he says, “Well, freedom is doing whatever you want.” You say, “Does that mean you can punch somebody else in the mouth?” And he will say, “No, you have to say ‘as long as you do not make other people unhappy.’” So then you say, “In other words, then, if you get an A in this course, that is going to make your neighbor unhappy, so you have deprived him of freedom.” “Well,” he will say, “I did not mean that. It means not making other people unhappy in improper ways.” And you say, “What is an improper way?” “Oh, well, I do not know; we have to go by majority rule.”
This is just a condensed example. But does this type of individual know what “freedom” means? He actually does not. He is thus ripe for legislation restricting it and annihilating it in the name of majority rule, and therefore “freedom.” Now, in his mind, and in the minds of most people in this category, “freedom” is not an empty noise devoid of any meaning, like “triddle.” It has a tenuous connection to something. He may have a mental image of a body racing down a beach without fetters; he may have an emotion, or one or two examples, or a sense of a positive connotation. But he does not have a concept actually subsuming a number of instances integrated by some essential. With such a floating abstraction, of course, he can neither think clearly nor communicate.
To say what you mean, and to know its implications—in other words, to mean what you say—has to be achieved. Or, to put it another way, it takes work to acquire clarity in your own mind in the use of concepts. Just the same way that a lens in seeing has to be focused, so does it in thinking. But whereas in seeing, clarity is given to you automatically, in thinking and communicating, it is not; it has to be achieved and maintained by you. Clarity means an unbreached tie to reality; to your listener, therefore, clarity means that he sees, at each point, what in reality you are talking about. Clarity has to be achieved by definite, specific techniques. That is inherent in a conceptual consciousness.
You may think that all that is required is to define all your terms. To be sure, definition is important, but it is not the only technique or method required. Even if you had a perfect definition of every term you used, you could not pepper your readers or listeners with a whole string of such definitions. That would stun them. At most, in any given presentation, you can offer only a few central definitions. In fact, there are a whole variety of methods, techniques, and skills required to keep that lens focused, so that at each point, you know exactly what you are thinking and your audience knows exactly what you are saying. These include answering such questions as: Where do you start in any presentation so that the base in reality is clear? What do you cover? What do you omit? On the perceptual level, there is no equivalent of that. You can see something in your path, and turn and see something else, and turn back, and it does not interfere with the clarity; each step is clear. On the conceptual level, though, what you include or omit is essential to the clarity of what is there. Other issues include: What confusions should you pause on and answer? When should you ignore something, even though it occurs to you? In what order should you proceed in a presentation? What options are there? What kinds of things are not optional? Should you give examples? When? How many? Why? The answers to these questions, and many more, are the types of things that have to be learned, by the very nature of a conceptual consciousness.
In summary, on the conceptual level we are not plunging in from scratch. We are speaking in an advanced shorthand; we are counting on a whole structure of knowledge that has to be tied to reality, and we have to know how to do that.
Knowledge as Contextual
A second aspect of a conceptual consciousness, one that is essential to clarity in both proper thought and communication, is that human knowledge is contextual. We do not acquire knowledge in a vacuum. Our knowledge is based on previous knowledge. Of course, we have to begin by sensory observation. Thereafter, though, we build a whole structure. At any given point, there is a certain sum that represents what we know on a given topic, and that is what permits us to go on to learn more. That sum, we say, is the context for the new point. The context means the cognitive sum that conditions everything that is still to come. It determines how we understand the new point, estimate it, interpret it, and apply it.
The point here is that in all thought and communication, there is a context that conditions what is occurring. Knowledge, to look at it another way, is relational. It is not a mosaic of independent, disconnected pieces, but a sum of interconnected elements, each bearing on and relevant to the others. Contrary to the claims of religion, knowledge is not a series of revelations, each a kind of separate, disconnected thunderbolt that you have to accept apart from its relation to any other revelation, or to anything else you know. Human beings have no way of dealing with ideas except by relating one item of knowledge to the rest, connecting it to the context. In a vacuum, we can do nothing.
You can see the role of context in human thought, knowledge, and communication very simply. Suppose you come late to a lecture. You arrive in the middle of the lecture and sit down, and the first sentence that you hear the lecturer say is, “All human beings have a right to life.” Your neighbor then turns to you and says, “Wonderful! Do you agree with him?” Obviously, you believe that men have rights; but as you will see immediately, you do not know what has conditioned this statement; you do not know what the context is. Depending on the context, this statement can have enormously different implications and significance. For instance, if it is made by a follower of Thomas Jefferson, that is one thing, and in that sense, of course, Objectivism would certainly endorse it. But suppose it is made by an advocate of socialized medicine who has just made a speech claiming that if you do not have medical care, your life is threatened and rights become meaningless. In that context, the statement “All human beings have a right to life” takes on a completely different significance. Suppose it is made by an anti-abortionist who has given an implicit definition of “life” as applying to the fetus or the embryo, or by a pacifist who has implicitly defined war as an assault on life, or by an opponent of capital punishment. There are many, many different contexts in which, by the time a person gets to this particular statement, “All human beings have a right to life” takes on an entirely different significance or implication. The context profoundly conditions how a given statement will be interpreted. You, then, have to know what the framework of a given statement is, where it appears, what affects how you are going to interpret it, analyze it, apply it—in short, what the context is.
To look ahead for a moment to how this would apply to communication, you are going to have to know your audience’s context. What do your listeners or readers know? What are they coming to your talk or paper with? What ideas will govern their interpretation of what you say? What errors do they bring that might confuse them? What obvious points do they already know that you will simply bore them with if you repeat? All of that and more is part of the context that they are bringing to your presentation, and that will certainly have effects on what you should include. It will also affect the organization of your material, because the essence of a good structure is that each point you present paves the way for the next. In other words, each point creates the necessary context, so that what comes next will be clear and understandable.
The Crow Epistemology
The third basic principle of effective communication is a metaphysical principle. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the universe as a whole. The principle of metaphysics that I want to stress here is the one first defined by Aristotle: the Law of Identity. A is A. Everything is something; it is what it is; it is definite, it has a nature, it is something specific. To put it another way, everything that exists is limited. There is no such thing as an infinite quantity or an infinite number of attributes, because “infinite” means a quantity without any specific identity. According to Objectivism, this law applies as much to space and time as to every other aspect of the universe. A is A; everything is limited.
Let us apply this to epistemology. Consciousness, too, is limited. It, too, obeys the principle that A is A. This is not an insult to consciousness; it is inherent in the fact that consciousness exists. Everything that exists is something specific, and so is consciousness. It can deal with and hold only so much. Informally, we call this point the “crow epistemology,” a term I will use throughout this course. Let me explain briefly why it is given this name.
An experiment with crows was conducted, as described in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.* In this experiment, if one man came to a place in the woods where some crows were gathered, the crows would hide, and they would not come out until the man left. If three men came, they would hide, and if two left, they still would not come out, because they knew that one was still there. But if five men came and then four left, the crows would come out. To put it in human terms, the crows figured: “Many came, many left, so it is safe to come out.” The crows could distinguish and hold only up to about three units. They could, in effect, grasp “one, two, three,” but beyond that, they could not hold a further number of units in mind. So their arithmetic, so to speak, would be “one, two, three, lots.”
The point here is that some kind of limitation, in principle, is true of every kind of consciousness, not merely that of crows. Human beings are better off than crows; for instance, we can retain an awareness at one time, let us say, of six objects (that is, perceptually, without counting or concepts). But there is a limit for us, too. After a certain figure—when it reaches dozens, let alone hundreds—you simply cannot distinguish or deal with such a number of units at one time, not perceptually. Your mental screen, so to speak, is limited in what it can hold in any one frame. Any consciousness is finite. It has a specific scope of material that it can deal with, and only that much in any given frame. A is A. There is only a limited number of units, therefore, that a consciousness can hold in awareness at any one time. Beyond that number, the content simply becomes a blur; the mind cannot encompass it or take it in. It is against this background that Ayn Rand explains one of the crucial functions of concepts, which is that they enormously broaden the scope of the material that we can deal with, precisely by condensing a vast number of perceptions into one new whole. They reduce all the vast number of percepts of a given type into one new unit, the concept, which subsumes all of them.
Grasping this point of the crow epistemology—that consciousness is limited in what it can deal with in any given frame—is essential to all communication. You must always remember that your audience can retain and deal with only so many units. Therefore, it is up to you to economize the units, reducing the number wherever possible. Otherwise, you overload your readers or listeners by giving them too many points. As a result, their ability to grasp breaks down, and communication comes to an end. When this takes place, it is exhausting as well as demoralizing to the audience members; they characteristically give up, flatly and defiantly, for the rest of that encounter, and you have your work cut out ever to get them back again.
The principle of the crow epistemology has applications on every level of communication, from a single sentence to a book as a whole. The point, on whatever level you look at it, is that the members of your audience have to hold on to the parts you give them. If you give them too many before you add up those parts into a unit, then they have to give up, of necessity, because they cannot deal with the overload.
Observe your own mental process, for instance, if I utter a sentence like this: “The man who, having hit his friend (the doctor who graduated from Columbia with the highest grades of his class that year) during an argument which was very bitter and committed many fallacies over which of them was more intelligent”—and I am still going on here, while you are still holding “The man who.” At a certain point, you cannot do it anymore. You will find that, if you really try to follow me, you get a little tense, and it starts to mount very rapidly. At a certain point, the mechanism snaps, and you say the mental equivalent of “What the hell,” and tune out. That is the crow epistemology asserting itself. It would not make any difference if the wording were the clearest you could imagine, the context perfect, the audience passionate—the mind cannot retain it, and therefore communication is over.
If you think no one does such a thing in real life, consider a sentence chosen at random from the world-champion violator of the crow epistemology: “To gain assurance that [category and judgment] do actually accord, we must observe that in all disjunctive judgments the sphere (that is, the multiplicity which is contained in any one judgment) is represented as a whole divided into parts (the subordinate concepts), and that since no one of them can be contained under any other, they are thought as coordinated with, not subordinated to, each other, and so as determining each other, not in one direction only, as in a series, but reciprocally, as in an aggregate—if one member of the division is posited, all the rest are excluded, and conversely.” That is from page 117 of the Kemp Smith translation of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.*
This point applies not only to individual sentences, but to your piece or presentation as a whole. I once heard a very interesting paper that violated this point inadvertently. The speaker wanted to discuss the importance of thinking in principles. Hoping to intrigue the audience, he started with three long examples, which he did not explain at first. The audience had one, and then he said, “Now hold that,” and then he gave them a second, and then a third. Then he thought, “Now I am going to explain the theory”—which itself was fairly complex—“and then I will show how it applies to these examples.” The audience was waiting, and you could see the tension. And when he got to the second point of the theory, they lost the examples and tuned out. He did go on, finally, and he gave a perfectly good explanation of the three examples, but it absolutely could have been in Greek to that audience, because they had tuned out. It was just too much to hold.
You have to remember that as soon as you start to speak, you are setting up a certain tension in your listener. They have to hold what you are saying, then connect it to the next point, and so on. You, in turn, have to keep tying it all up for them, reducing the number of units. You see that there is a certain problem here. Suppose you are giving a paper, and you want to start with examples to create the right context so that your audience will understand what you are saying. You then have the problem of how to set the context in such a way as not to overload your listeners. You have to know how to set that context, what kind of examples to use, in what order, and at what pace, being sure to avoid certain misinterpretations, all without causing your audience to overstrain. You see, therefore, that you have to strike a balance between being clear and being economical.
We will see the issue of the crow epistemology recurring throughout this course. In fact, it is true in every field, even beyond that of communication. Consciousness is something, and that necessitates certain methods of dealing with it. If you violate these methods, you are assaulting human consciousness as such, and you therefore make communication impossible. If you want a visual example, remember the McLuhan method in television: very fast jumps from frame to frame and from shot to shot, too quick to take in, to grasp, or to connect. The result is nil. It does not add up to anything; it is outside human epistemology. The net effect is simply visual irritation. This is an example of what is more broadly true of every form of consciousness and every form of communication. You have to direct your communication to the requirements of human consciousness.
These three points—that knowledge is conceptual, that it is contextual, and that A is A and consciousness is limited—are the briefest I can make the philosophic base of this course. Hereafter I want to apply it; I want to work out various principles of communication, and then go into details.