"These seemingly unrelated examples have one common denominator: a phenomenon remain unexplainable as long as the range of observation in not wide enough to include the context in which the phenomenon occurs. Failure to realize the intricacies of the relationships between an organism and its environment either confronts the observer with something ‘mysterious', or induces him to attribute to his object of study certain properties the object may not posses."
"Human interaction is described as a communication system, characterized by the properties of general systems: time as a variable, system-subsystem relations, wholeness, feedback, and equifinality. Ongoing interactional systems are seen as the natural focus for study of the long term pragmatic impact of communicational phenomena."
"This book will touch upon all three areas, but will deal mainly with the pragmatics, that is, the behavioral effects, of communication. In this connection it should be made clear from the outset that the two terms communication. In this connection it should be made clear from the outset that the two terms communication and behavior are used virtually synonymously. For the data of pragmatics are not only words, their configurations, and meanings, which are the data of syntactics and semantics, but their nonverbal concomitants and body language as well. Even more, we would add to personal behavior actions the communicational clues inherent in the context in which communication occurs. Thus, from this perspective of pragmatics, all behavior, not only speech, is communication, and all communication--even the comunicational clues in the impersonal context--affects behavior.
"Every child learns at school that movement is something relative, which can only be perceived in relation to a point of reference. What is not realized by everyone is that this same principle holds for virtually every perception and, therefore, for man's experience of reality. Sensory and brain research have proved conclusively that only relationships and patterns of relationships can be perceived, and these are the essence of experience. Thus when, by an ingenious device, eye movement is made impossible so that the same image continues to be perceived by the same areas of the retina, clear visual perception is no longer possible. ...These examples could easily be multiplied and would all point to the fact that in one way or another a process of change, motion, or scanning is involved in all perceptions. In other words, a relationship is established, tested over as wide a range as a given contingency allows, and an abstraction is eventually gained that, we hold, is identical with the mathematical concept of function. Thus, not ‘things', but functions are the essence of out perceptions; and functions, as we have seen, are not isolated magnitudes, but signs representing a connection... an infinity or possible positions of like character..."
"We are in constant communication, and yet we are almost completely unable to communicate about communication. This problem will be a major theme of this book.
"The search for pattern is the basis of all scientific investigation. Where there is pattern there is significance... this epistemological maxim holds for the study of human interaction."
"First of all, there is a property of behavior that could hardly be more basic and is, therefore, often overlooked: behavior has no opposite. In other words, there is no such thing as nonbehavior, or, to put it more simply, one cannot not behave. Now, if it is accepted that all behavior in an interactional situation has message value, i.e. communication, it follows that no matter how one may try, one cannot not communicate."
"The reader will have noticed that I have been unable to avoid the use of terms like ‘really', ‘actually', ‘in actual fact', and thus have apparently contradicted the main thesis of this book: that there is no absolute reality but only subjective and often contradictory conceptions of reality. Very frequently, especially in psychiatry where the degree of an individual's ‘reality adaptation' plays a special role as the indicator of his normalcy, there is a confusion between two very different aspect of what we call reality. This first has to do with the purely physical, objectively discernable properties of things and is intimately linked with correct sensory perception, with questions of so-called common sense or with objective, repeatable, scientific verification. The second aspect is the attribution of meaning and value to these things and is based on communication."
"Feedback has been accurately referred to as the secret of natural activity. Systems with feedback distinguish themselves not only by a quantitatively higher degree of complexity; they are also qualitatively different from anything that falls into the domain of classical mechanics. Their study requires new conceptual frames; their logic and epistemology are discontinuous from some traditional tenets of scientific analysis, such as the ‘isolate one variable' approach or the Laplacian belief that the complete knowledge of all facts at a given point in time will enable one to predict all future states. Self-regulating systems--systems with feedback--require a philosophy of their own in which the concepts of pattern and information beginning as those of matter and energy were at the beginning of the century. Research with these systems is, at least for the time being, greatly hampered by the fact that there exists no scientific language sophisticated enough to be the vehicle for their explanation, and it has been suggested, for instance by Weiser, that the systems themselves are their own simplest explanation."
"Since man's existence is not observable in the same sense as are his social relations, we are forced to abandon the objective ‘outside' position we have tried to maintain through out the preceding seven chapters of this book. For at this point of our inquiry, there is no ‘outside' anymore. Subject and object are ultimately identical, the mind studies itself, and any statement made about man in his existential nexus is likely to run into the same phenomena of self-reflexiveness, which as we have seen generate paradox."
"In modern biology it would be unthinkable to study even the most primitive organism in artificial isolation from its environment. As postulated particularly by General Systems Theory, organisms are open systems that maintain their steady state (stability) and even evolve toward states of higher complexity be means of a constant exchange of both energy and information with their environment. If we realize that, in order to survive, any organism must gain not only the substances necessary for its metabolism but adequate information about the world around it, we see that communication and existence are inseparable concepts."
"This book is about the way in which communication creates what we call reality. At first glance this may seem a most peculiar statement, for surely reality is what is, and communication is merely a way of expressing or explaining it. Not at all. As the book will show, our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at considerable risk of trying to face facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa. And the most dangerous delusion of all is that there is only one reality. What there are, in fact, are many difference versions of reality, some of which are contradictory, but all of which are the results of communication and not reflections of eternal, objective truths."
"It is the theory which decides what we can observe." --Albert Einstein
"There is, however, the important difference that while the computer program is presented in a language that the machine completely ‘understands', the impact of the environment on an organism comprises a set of instructions whose meaning is by no means self-evident but rather is left up to the organism to decode as best it can. It to this consideration we add the obvious fact that the organism's reactions in turn affect the environment, it becomes apparent that even on the very primitive levels of life, complex and continuous interactions take place that are nonrandom and are, therefore, governed by a program or, to use an existentialist term, by meaning.
"Seen in this light, then, existence is a function of the relationship between the organism and its environment. At the human level this interaction between organism and environment reaches its highest level of complexity."
"The reader will have noticed that the relationship aspect of a communication, being a communication about a communication, is, of course, identical with the concept of metacommunication elaborated in the first chapter, where it was limited to the conceptual framework and to the language the communication analyst must employ when communicating about communication. Now it can be seen that not only he but everyone is faced with this problem. The ability to metacommunicate properly is not only the conditio sine qua non of successful communication, but it is intimately linked with the enormous problem of awareness of self and others. This point will be explained in greater detail (later). For the moment, and by way of illustration, we merely want to show that messages can be constructed especially in written communication, which offer highly ambiguous metacommunicational clues. As Cherry points out, the sentence, "Do you think that one will do?" can have a variety of meanings, according to which word is to be stressed--an indication that written language usually does not supply. Another example would be a sign in a restaurant reading, "Customers who think our waiters are rude should see the manager.", which, at least in theory can be understood entirely different ways. Ambiguities of this kind are not the only possible complications arising out to of the level structure of all communication; consider for instance, a notice that reads "Disregard this sign". As we shall see in the chapter on paradoxical communication, confusions or contaminations between these levels--communication and metacommunication--may lead to impasses identical in structure to those of the famous paradoxes in logic. For the time being, let us merely summarize the foregoing into another axiom of our tentative calculus: Every communication has a content and a relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommmuncation."
"Wittgenstein shows that we could only know something about the world in its totality if we could step outside it; but if this were possible, this world would no longer be the whole world. However, our logic knows nothing outside it:
Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.
We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, that there is not.
For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also.
What we cannot think, we cannot think: we cannot therefore say we cannot think.
The world, then, is finite and at the same time limitless, limitless
precisely because there is nothing outside that together with the inside could form a boundary.
But if this be so, then it follows that ‘The world and life are one. I am my world.' Subject and
world are thus no longer entities whose relational function is in some way governed by the
auxiliary verb to have (that one has the other, contains it or belongs to it), but by the existential
‘to be': ‘The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world'."