Conduit metaphor

Though other theorists had noticed some of these characteristics of metaphor, Reddy was the first to demonstrate them by rigorous linguistic analysis, stating generalizations over voluminous examples.

[3] Research on information theory had led Norbert Wiener to publish in 1950 the seminal book on cybernetics, in which he had stated, "Society can only be understood through a study of the messages and communications facilities which belong to it.

"[4] Social-systems theorist Donald Schön examined the effects of metaphorical speech in matters of public-policy; he suggested that people's conflicting frames of reference were often to blame for communication breakdown.

[5] Schön's frame-restructuring solution resembled in some ways Thomas Kuhn's groundbreaking views on the shifting of scientific paradigms through what he called the "translation" process.

The overwhelming majority of what he calls core expressions involved dead metaphors selected from speakers' internal thoughts and feelings.

Since words are actually marks or sounds and do not literally have "insides," people talk about language largely in terms of metaphors.

Most English core expressions used in talking about communication assert that actual thoughts and feelings pass back and forth between people through the conduit of words.

These core expressions assert that speakers "insert" mental content into the "containers" represented by words with varying degrees of success.

[17] These examples— —indicate that speakers and writers are responsible to a large extent for the mental content conveyed by language, and that listeners and readers play a more passive role.

The conduit is no longer a sealed pipeline between people, but an open pipe allowing mental content to escape into, or enter from, this space.

This isolation can be represented by a wheel-shaped compound, each wedge-shaped sector of which is an environment (a brain) bounded by two spokes and part of the circumference (right).

[25] Living in a forested sector, Alex builds a wooden rake, draws three identical blueprints, and drops them in the slots for Bob, Curt and Don.

Bob finds a piece of wood for the handle, but because he lives in a rocky sector, starts making a stone rake head.

When halfway done, Bob connects his stone head to the handle, realizes it will be heavy, and decides it must be a device for digging up rocks when clearing a field for planting.

[27] Although the toolmakers paradigm is available as a more accurate model of communication, the conduit metaphor is pervasive and difficult to avoid in English syntax and semantics.

Thinking in terms of another model of communication is generally brief, isolated and fragmentary because of an entrenched system of opposing attitudes and assumptions.

If language had been operating historically under the toolmakers paradigm, these two different concepts would not currently be accessed by the same word: talking about mental content and signals as if they were the same would have led to insoluble confusion.

Information theory, with its concept-free algorithms and computers as models, would seem to be immune from effects arising from semantic pathology, because the framework shares many attributes with the toolmakers paradigm.

[39] The negative impact of ordinary language on information theory's use in other fields can be traced to terms the founders themselves used to label parts of their paradigm, telegraphy.

Shannon and Weaver were also unaware that the choice of the term "message" to represent the selection of alternatives from the repertoire shared the same semantic pathology as "poem."

"[46] But conduit metaphors continue to appear in the form of "encode" and "decode," defined as putting the repertoire members into code and taking them out, respectively.

[47] Confusion between the message and the signal persisted for two decades as theorists in other fields of inquiry drew on the insights of information theory.

[48] "Those models based upon a mathematical conception describe communication as analogous to the operations of an information processing machine: an event occurs in which a source or sender transmits a signal or message through a channel to some destination or receiver."

The insights of information theory have been challenged by using the conduit metaphor instead of the more accurate toolmakers paradigm, upon which its premises were initially based.

[51] The conduit-metaphor paradigm states that communication failure needs explanation, because success should be automatic: materials are naturally gathered, but misguided people expend energy scattering them.

Conversely, the toolmakers paradigm states that partial miscommunication is inherent and can only be fixed by continuous effort and extensive verbal interaction: materials are gathered using energy or they will be naturally scattered.

The conduit metaphor objectifies meaning and influences people to talk and think about mental content as if it possessed an external, inter-subjective reality.

[52] Having discussed the conduit metaphor's impact on theorists within and outside of linguistics, Reddy speculates about its distorting potential in culture and society.

The implication of this minor-framework core expression is that libraries full of books, tapes, photographs, videos and electronic media contain culture.

[53] Since the publication of Reddy's paper in 1979, it has garnered a large number of citations in linguistics, as well as a wide spectrum of other fields of inquiry.