Principles of Successful Communication

Timothy Habick (Reasoning, Inc and Institute for Linguistic Evidence)

 

For certain types of communications, the stakes are so high that only ideally appropriate and efficient structures are appropriate for inclusion in them. Many high-stakes communicative events make it impossible for respondents to request clarification. Including materially ineffective and negligently inefficient structures in such messages could constitute communicative malpractice, for which there could, and maybe should, be legal repercussions. People have a right not to be disadvantaged by defective high-stakes documents.

On what bases can we identify these ideally appropriate and efficient structures? Such identification should not be a matter of opinion, just a replicable matter of checking whether a participant in communicative event violated one or more established principles of successful communication. It’s easy enough to identify flaws and impediments to successful communication, but what are the positive defining features to which high-stakes communications have a duty to aspire?

The process of communication is a pervasive aspect of human existence, so the principles governing successful communication are pervasive too, not limited in origin and application to a particular field of inquiry. Communication is linguistic, logical, and pragmatic. In other words, communication is governed by linguistic, logical, and pragmatic rules. The principles of successful communication, accordingly, emerge from the linguistic, the logical, and the pragmatic levels of analysis.

In order to merit acceptance, each principle of communicative success requires reasoned justifications and evidence; otherwise, it will merely be someone’s opinion about the way we all should talk. In this presentation, I consider categories of linguistic, logical, and pragmatic evidence that imply certain principles and can be used to support them.