What is your Communication Theory?

What is your Communication Theory?

7 Responses | Created by shaper1975 |

There are 7 distinct paradigms or theoretical traditions in communication scholarship. This quiz is designed to unveil your underlying assumptions regarding how and why people communicate the way they do.

  1. 1

    All use of signs is rhetorical.

  2. 2

    Self & other are semiotically determined subject positions & exist only in/as signs.

  3. 3

    Functionalism fails to explain meaning as embodied, conscious experience.

  4. 4

    Communication involves circular causation, not linear causation.

  5. 5

    Socio-cultural theory is vague, untestable, ignores psychological processes that underlie all social order.

  6. 6

    Critical theory imposes an interpretive frame, fails to appreciate local meanings.

  7. 7

    Socio-cultural theory privileges consensus over conflict & change

  8. 8

    Socio-psychological "laws" are culture bound & biased by individualism.

  9. 9

    Cybernetics is too rationalistic; e.g. it underestimates the role of emotion.

  10. 10

    Phenomenological "experience" must occur in the brain as information processing.

  11. 11

    Langue-parole and signifier-signified are false distinctions. Languaging constitutes world.

  12. 12

    We do not use signs; rather they use us.

  13. 13

    Authenticity is a dangerous myth; good communication must be artful, hence strategic.

  14. 14

    Functionalist explanations ignore subtleties of sign systems.

  15. 15

    The subject-object dichotomy of socio-psychology must be transcended.

  16. 16

    The functional organization of any social system can be modeled formally.

  17. 17

    Critical theory confuses facts & values, imposes a dogmatic ideology.

  18. 18

    Rhetoric reflects traditionalist, instrumentalist, & individualist ideologies.

  19. 19

    Socio-psychology reflects ideologies of individualism, instrumentalism.

  20. 20

    Cybernetic models fail to explain how meaning emerges in social interaction.

  21. 21

    Phenomenological introspection falsely assumes self-awareness of cognitive processes.

  22. 22

    "Meaning" consists of functional relationships within dynamic information systems.

  23. 23

    Strategic communication is inherently inauthentic & often counterproductive.

  24. 24

    Practical reason is based in particular situations not universal principles.

  25. 25

    Practical reason cannot (or should not) be reduced to formal calculation.

  26. 26

    Socio-psychological "effects" are internal properties of sign systems.

  27. 27

    The social life-world has a phenomenological foundation.

  28. 28

    Self-organizing systems models account for social conflict & change.

  29. 29

    Rhetorical theory is culture bound & overemphasizes individual agency vs. social structure.

  30. 30

    Meaning is not fixed by a code; it is a site of social conflict.

  31. 31

    Cybernetics reflects the dominance of instrumental reason.

  32. 32

    Intersubjectivity is produced by social processes that phenomenology fails to explain.

  33. 33

    Semiotics fails to explain factors that influence the production & interpretation of messages.

  34. 34

    Intervention in complex systems involves technical problems rhetoric fails to grasp.

  35. 35

    There is nothing outside the text.

  36. 36

    Socio-cultural rules etc. are contexts & resources for rhetorical discourse.

  37. 37

    Effects are situational and cannot be precisely predicted.

  38. 38

    Socio-cultural rules etc. are all systems of signs.

  39. 39

    Critique is immanent in every authentic encounter with tradition.

  40. 40

    Rhetoric lacks good empirical evidence that its persuasive techniques actually work as intended.

  41. 41

    Sign systems are not autonomous; they exist only in the shared practices of actual communities.

  42. 42

    Individual consciousness is socially constituted, thus ideologically distorted.

  43. 43

    Problems of communication are theorized as:

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