Essays on Communication

<p>One of the central issues of contemporary philosophy and biology is the nature of communication. Early accounts of communication tended to focus on just one side of the communicative divide – the speaker side or the receiver side – and took as their starting point the case of human language. Animal communication, historically, was largely treated as a special case. Now things are different. Now it appears we might have a model that makes sense of sign use in both the human and animal realms and brings together both sides of the signaling divide. It’s still to be seen, however, how much the model actually captures, especially the farther down we go on the animal side, and it’s still to be seen how well the model captures the human cases, especially those around the edges. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the foundations of the sender-receiver model and to show that it can cover more than was previously imagined. Topics discussed include the nature of communication and signaling, animal communication, the nature of meaning or content, the communicative nature of objects such as works of art, blueprints, and maps, and the possibility of communication between groups and collective agents.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Philosophy

Grantor

The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York

Year dc:date.available

2021

Author dc:creator

• Simpson, Shawn M

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Noël Carroll

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• John Greenwood
• Stephen Neale
• Michael Devitt

• Aesthetics
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Science
• signals
• information
• animal communication
• film
• game theory
• groups

Repository record dc:identifier

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4469

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:gc_etds-5514