How To Talk About Communication Problems (draft, work in progress, part 1)

[Note: This is a preliminary draft of work in progress. Any feedback would be much appreciated. --RTC]

Introduction

The mid-twentieth century pragmatist philosopher Richard McKeon boldly declared, “All problems can be stated as problems of communication” (McKeon, 1957, p. 91). This was not only an analytical claim, and, as such, potentially the foundational premise of a practical discipline of communication; it was also a socio-historical claim that, if true, would support a rationale for the importance of that discipline in a communication-conscious era such as McKeon’s (and ours). 

McKeon observed that his post-World War II society was preoccupied with “communication” (in quotes), which had become a vogue word increasingly used to explain both the nature of problems and the means of their solution. "'Communication,'” he wrote, “does not signify a problem newly discovered in our times, but a fashion of thinking and a method of analyzing which we apply in the statement of all fundamental problems" (p. 89). This heightened awareness of communication was “a result of the invention of instruments of communication and the massive extension of their use" (p. 92)—needless to say, a trend that continues. For McKeon, the importance that was attributed to communication was well warranted by an historical situation in which problems were complex and interrelated but there was no agreed-upon framework of laws or values for resolving them, a world in which the social cooperation necessitated by growing global interdependence was too often impeded by cultural and ideological conflicts. All problems were communication problems insofar as they were best resolved peacefully by the effective use of means of communication to develop tenuous agreements in pluralistic, democratic communities. 

McKeon’s analytical claim was that all problems “can be stated” as communication problems. He was not claiming that all problems inherently are communication problems but that they can be stated as such; nor was he claiming that they must be stated that way but that they can be, which implies, of course, that problems can be stated in other ways. He was talking about how we talk about, or frame, problems in society, and he was claiming that we can always choose to express them as problems of communication. This is so, he explained, because: 

The nature of a problem may be explored by examining what we are talking about or the warrant for asserting anything we propose to say about it; it may also be explored by considering the conditions of stating the problem or saying anything whatsoever about it. A problem is determined not merely by what is the case, or by what is understood to be the case, but also by what is stated and by communication elucidating what is said. (McKeon, 1955, p. 91)

Not only can we choose to talk about any problem in this way; for McKeon, in a pluralistic society, we often should do so. “When problems are broad and complexly interrelated, the initial distinctions” (the starting points for deliberation) are not objectively given in advance but “must be found in communication itself” (p. 91), that is, in a process that considers “what is said and how what is meant might be influenced by communication” (p. 92). 

For a recent example, consider the controversy surrounding public health measures such as masking and social distancing that arose during the Covid-19 pandemic. Such measures were obviously correct as “objectively given” epidemiological means for reducing disease transmission until effective vaccines could be developed, but the complexity of a pluralistic society revealed itself in the myriad conflicting opinions, protests, and cries of pain that emerged in response. Arguably, an essential failure of public health policy was not to have approached the pandemic from the outset as a communication problem, not just an objectively given technical problem in virology, epidemiology, or medicine. 

To frame a problem like the pandemic as a communication problem in McKeon’s sense would require that we avoid reducing communication itself to a technical science of designing messages to produce predicted effects. While we might be tempted by the spectacular ongoing development of the technical means of communication to embrace what McKeon called “the mechanical analogy” (p. 92), doing so would be counterproductive because “[c]ommunication can be controlled only when communication in any true sense has failed" (p. 98). Rather than technical control, communication in a pluralistic society should cultivate the “attitudes and abilities” needed for democratic deliberation to flourish. "Communication is an art, and it must develop powers as well as achieve effects" (p. 97). For McKeon, the practical discipline of communication that was both analytically possible and urgently needed by a modern pluralistic society would be founded upon the classical art of deliberative rhetoric.  

This paper [work in progress] develops McKeon’s theme in the current intellectual and socio-historical context. That communication was becoming a preoccupation of society in the mid-20th century is confirmed by scholarship showing that the idea of communication was both increasingly prominent and dynamically evolving in that period and since. Therapeutic and technical strands in the idea of communication emerged in the post-war period (Peters, 2008). From the 1950s on, “communication” as a category of knowledge (in library catalogs, academic programs, etc.) greatly expanded and differentiated (Craig & Carlone, 1998). By the late 20th century, what Cameron (2000) referred to as a “communication culture”—a cultural trend that emphasizes the importance of good communication in all spheres of life—had progressively deepened and globalized (e.g., Boromisza-Habashi, 2016). By then, the idea of communication had become, indeed, “a registry of modern longings” (Peters, 1999, p. 2). We do still talk a lot about communication problems, and our common ways of doing so are both worthy of cultivation and subject to criticism on various grounds.  

As communication has grown as a practical category in society, it has grown too as a conceptual category in theory, research, and education.  Communication and media scholars professionally talk and write about communication problems—observing, interpreting, and critiquing ordinary metadiscourse (ways of talking about communication) and contributing new forms of metadiscourse based on systematic research and theorization. This ongoing engagement with the metadiscourse on communication problems and practices in society is, arguably, the essential business of a communication discipline (Craig, 2018). And for conducting that business we have at our disposal a wide range of empirical and theoretical resources.  While McKeon proposed the classical art of deliberative rhetoric as the normative basis for a communication discipline, in the current context rhetoric should be regarded as one of several traditions of communication theory in which problems are framed with different assumptions and vocabularies, each tradition having a specific practical relevance and normative rationale (Craig, 1999). Moreover, the rising global awareness of communication has given voice to many culturally specific communication practices and concepts that further constitute alternative ways of framing problems (Carbaugh, 2017; Craig & Xiong, 2022; Miike & Yin, 2022).  

Thus, although it may be analytically true, as McKeon claimed, that all problems can be stated as problems of communication, there are potentially many ways of doing so. An analysis that begins with “what is said,” as McKeon recommended, often encounters a plethora of competing claims that reveal tensions among different communicative as well as non-communicative accounts of a situation. No real-world problem is uncontestably a problem of communication in whatever version, if only because, as McKeon implied, any problem can also be stated in other ways, and, in a pluralistic society, someone is likely to do so. Even in a communication culture, communication statements of problems compete with other, non-communication problem frames that may have equal or greater cultural authority in some situations. Deliberating on a problem thus often unavoidably requires deliberating among competing problem frames, and communication becomes a meta-frame for deliberation on how to talk about problems that may or may not be framed, in the end, as communication problems. 

The remainder of this essay [work in progress] begins to explore the field of communication and competing problem frames, first by introducing a broad theoretical distinction between communication and non-communication frames as expressions of conflicting cultural and institutional discourses, then by further elaborating the dialectics between communication and each of four competing discourses: economic, biological, agonistic, and dogmatic. The essay concludes with the suggestion that McKeon's art of deliberative rhetoric for a pluralistic society should be expanded to include a meta-level of deliberation on problem framing. How to talk about problems in a pluralistic society is itself a complex communication problem that can be usefully illuminated by a pluralistic field of communication theory.  

(to be continued)

References

Boromisza-Habashi, D. (2016). What We Need Is Good Communication: Vernacular Globalization in Some Hungarian Speech. International Journal of Communication, 10, 4600-4619. https://doi.org/1932–8036/20160005 

Cameron, D. (2000). Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture. Sage. 

Carbaugh, D. (Ed.). (2017). The Handbook of Communication in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Routledge. 

Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9(2), 119-161. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.1999.tb00355.x 

Craig, R. T. (2018). For a practical discipline. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 289-297. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqx013 

Craig, R. T., & Carlone, D. A. (1998). Growth and transformation of communication studies in U.S. higher education: Towards reinterpretation. Communication Education, 47(1), 67-81.  https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529809379111 

Craig, R. T., & Xiong, B. (2022). Traditions of communication theory and the potential for multicultural dialogue. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 17(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2021.2009487 

McKeon, R. (1957). Communication, truth, and society. Ethics, 67, 89-99. https://doi.org/10.1086/291096 

Miike, Y., & Yin, J. (Eds.). (2022). The handbook of global interventions in communication theory. Routledge. 

Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. University of Chicago Press. 

Peters, J. D. (2008). Communication, History of the idea. In W. Donsbach (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication (pp. 689-693). Blackwell Publishing.  https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405186407.wbiecc075 

Review of "Communication Theory: Mapping a Diverse Field" by Karsten Pedersen (Ethics International Press, 2025)

 

Image source: https://ethicspress.com/products/communication-theory

Karsten Pedersen, a professor at Roskilde University in Denmark, has written an engaging introduction to communication theory that prominently features, but is not exactly based on, my constitutive metamodel with its scheme of theoretical traditions. Rather, as he puts it, Pedersen uses the metamodel "as a sounding board in large parts of the book" (p. ix). In doing so, he engages deeply not only with the metamodel but with criticisms of it by Myers, Bergman, Cooren, Pablé, and others, and develops his own critical position, based on his own perspectivist "ontology" of communication.  

Pedersen agrees with some essential aspects of the metamodel, especially what I call theoretical pluralism—the pragmatic idea that many different theories of communication, including theories that may contradict each other—can all be valid and useful in different ways without necessarily being "true" or "false" in any absolute sense. Indeed, Pedersen's main criticism of the metamodel is that its pluralism doesn't go far enough. While he sees it as a useful starting point for bringing different perspectives into the discussion of communication theory, he says it necessarily misrepresents those perspectives and privileges some over others by simplifying them and forcing them all into a uniform social constructionist framework (the scheme of theoretical traditions). Since any "meta" model, however structured, is going to have some version of the same problem, the real question for Pedersen is whether we need a metamodel at all to engage with the diverse forms of communication theory. Although he vacillates on this question as he considers it from various angles, his answer in the end is no, we do not need a metamodel. Nevertheless, he finds the constitutive metamodel useful as a "sounding board" and has a lot to say about it and the traditions of communication theory throughout the book. 

While it offers an accessible introduction to communication theory that covers numerous theories and approaches, this is not a standard, systematically organized textbook. Rather, through its ten chapters it ruminates on its central themes—the diversity of communication theory, the importance of being able to see communication in different perspectives, and the subjective, "inside-out" nature of human understanding—through critical discussions of the constitutive metamodel and specific theories ranging from Lasswell's functionalist model to Bitzer's theory of the rhetorical situation to Luhmann's system theory, and many others. As it ruminates, the book returns again and again to certain issues and arguments (for example: Do we need a metamodel?) to consider them from different viewpoints. 

Chapter 1 introduces the idea that communication "can only be produced and understood from the inside out," that is, from our own individual perspective, and that communication theories can expand our perspective with the ability to approach communication flexibly from different vantage points. In this light, it's a problem that some theories present themselves as the one and only valid way of seeing communication, rather than as one perspective among many, and Pedersen points out how some critics of the constitutive metamodel, such as Myers and Pablé, have committed this error. 

Illustrating the book's non-linear organization, chapter 2 is titled "I Skipped Ahead, Here Is the Real Chapter 1: What Is Communication?" This chapter steps back to consider some of the many different ways that communication has been defined and conceptualized, including ways that focus on the message, signs and codes, thoughts or mental representations, and evolutionary narratives. Pedersen concludes that defining communication is problematic because every definition is incomplete, and a value of the metamodel is that it presents multiple definitions. 

Chapter 3 returns to examine criticisms of the constitutive metamodel in greater depth and detail than before. Pedersen distinguishes three types of critics: those who reject the metamodel entirely, those who supplement it with a different perspective on the traditions, and those who increase the metamodel's "complexity and descriptive power" by including more traditions. The chapter features an extended illustration of how discussion across theoretical traditions is possible when a common theme, such as the communicator, the message, or the channel, is approached from theories in different traditions. 

The next two chapters ruminate on the need for a metamodel. Chapter 4 is titled "We Need a Metamodel" and has two subsections, titled, respectively, "We Don't Need Craig's Metamodel," and "Or Do We?" Chapter 5 is titled "We Don't Need a Metamodel: Communication is Interdisciplinary Already" and includes an extensive discussion of an approach to communication analysis that Pedersen has introduced in an earlier book, which he characterizes as a way of using the traditions of communication theory without using the metamodel. The approach is to center the analysis on one tradition, for example the sociocultural, to focus on some phenomenon theorized in that tradition, such as discourse, and to bring in contrasting perspectives from other traditions in which the same phenomenon is theorized, such as semiotic, rhetorical, and critical theories of discourse. This is a way of pursuing discussions across traditions without reducing the traditions to the definitions given in the metamodel, which in my view is not actually a rejection of the metamodel but rather a good way of using it as a heuristic scheme for a specific purpose. 

Chapter 6 discusses the fields of epistemology (theory of knowledge) and ontology (theory of existence), argues that theories in those fields are all limited perspectives on the world, none exclusively valid, and presents Pedersen's own ontology of communication, which flows from the idea, introduced in chapter 1, that we can only know the world from our own individual perspective. Here he writes:

The main argument of my book is that human communication is an individual activity and even further that the construction and understanding of communication is and can only be individual. (p. 92)

This thesis poses something of a paradox because, having argued that any ontology is only one perspective among others, Pedersen presents his own ontology as "the human condition" or what communication "can only be" and suggests in a couple of places that this is something we can all agree on. Well, I'm not so sure of that. A survey of the traditions of communication theory turns up quite a few theories that question the status of individual perspectives, seeing individuals as existing only in relation to others or as constituted by social practices and discourses, or seeing the mind as something other than private individual consciousness. When it comes to ontologies, Pedersen's radically individualistic perspectivism (he admits somewhere that it could be described as solipsism) is one useful perspective among others. Of course, we are all inclined to privilege our own perspective, but Pedersen's commitment to theoretical pluralism entails what I have described elsewhere as the paradox of pluralism: To embrace pluralism is to take a standpoint that can take no standpoint.  

After introducing Pedersen's ontology of communication, chapter 6 goes on to relate that ontology in some detail to each of the seven traditions of communication theory as defined in the metamodel, highlighting how human individuals are theorized as communicators in each tradition. Then (it's a long chapter!) Pedersen stages a discussion between Harris's and Pablé's theory of integrational semiology and Dervin's sense-making theory as two theories that are both fully consistent with his own ontology yet offer different insights. In discussing integrational semiology, he also brings in criticisms of semiotics from the metamodel's seven traditions. So, a lot goes on in this chapter, but, taken as a whole, we can see it as further illustration of Pedersen's idea that discussions across theoretical traditions can be centered on one theory, which in this case is Pedersen's ontology of communication. I have some problems (which I won't go into here) with the way Pedersen uses the metamodel's seven traditions in this discussion, but reading chapter 6 to learn about some interesting theoretical concepts and issues is worth the long trek nonetheless. 

Taking an applied turn, chapter 7 considers how each of the seven traditions can be used in communication analysis and planning while noting advantages and limitations of each tradition and making a case that it's often best to combine different traditions rather than use them one at a time. Written from the perspective of Pedersen's ontology of the individual communicator as a fixed standpoint, the chapter underplays the fact that each tradition has its own ideas about the individual. Aside from that, however, this chapter gives the reader a good sense of each tradition's approach to practical problems and makes useful suggestions. 

Chapter 8 develops the metatheoretical claim that communication theories, as constructed ways of understanding communication, are not true or false but only helpful or not for some purpose. But Pedersen exempts his own ontology of communication from this claim, arguing that the individual, "inside-out" nature of human understanding is a true description of the human condition, not just a constructed perspective useful for some purposes. The ontology, he says, has nothing specifically to do with communication or communication theory but describes a fact about the human mind that impacts communication and all other human activities. This tricky line of argument takes us to some interesting places, such as the claim that there are no misunderstandings in communication, only different understandings, and, ultimately, that "reception is not part of the communication process in the somewhat startling sense that anything can be understood as anything and that the sender of the message never (as in never ever) controls the individual understanding of any message" (p. 173). Solipsism, indeed. 

Chapters 9 and 10 conclude the book with further reflections on the constitutive metamodel and metamodels in general. Chapter 9 takes a detailed look at the framework used for defining traditions in the constitutive metamodel, with an emphasis on how the traditions criticize each other (and themselves) within the metamodel, which points toward issues for discussion across traditions. 

Chapter 10 is titled, "Is the Inside-Out View the New Metamodel, but without the Hassle?" It opens with the observation that Pedersen never intended to present a new theory or metamodel of communication in this book, but now he wonders if that is what his ontology of communication has turned out to be: a theory and/or a metamodel. Rumination on this question leads finally to the conclusion that the ontology is neither a theory nor a metamodel, although it does some of the work of a metamodel in provoking theoretical discussion across traditions. Returning to the constitutive metamodel, Pedersen revisits some criticisms mentioned earlier and offers a suggestion about how to use the metamodel that I, for one, can wholeheartedly endorse:

So, if we want to find out how e.g. the sociopsychological and semiotic traditions compare, we can use Craig’s metamodel with that purpose in mind, but if we want to know what semiotics is all about, we will have to find sources that go deeper to make sure that we do not deal with semiotics from [a] general communication theoretical point of view, but from a specialised semiotic point of view.

Thereby, a metamodel can be seen as a navigation tool with which we can steer in the general direction of a tradition (in the case of Craig’s metamodel). But when we get there, we need a more detailed map true to the tradition. (p. 184).

In sum, there's a lot of lively thinking displayed in this book, and I enjoyed reading it, even though I had to read it in the form of an online e-book accessed through my university library, because I was unwilling to pay the $120 that the publisher (named "Ethics") charges for this slim volume. Or, you can purchase the e-book through Google for $118.95, thereby saving a cool $1.05. Or, hopefully, your library has it or will order it.