After weeks of painful but constructive criticisms on my writing, I finally got some positive feedback from my professor. All of the critical comments have made me feel fairly self-conscious about my writing, and while I feel better about this piece for having has some encouraging remarks, I don’t expect it to generate any comment here. I’m going to post it anyway, though blogging feels a bit pointless when it’s so one-sided…
To dig deeper into the question of what is happening when a dyad (a pair of people) is communicating, I’m taking the perspective where each action constitutes a “behavioral molecule.” (from Richard F. Carter) Each actor must be capable of sequentially attending, cognizing, and moving, which should effectively rule out communicating with an entity that is unable to do one or more of these things. In particular, attending requires active participation in communicating as opposed to passive behavior.
The goal of communicating is creating meaning within the dyad, where meaning consists of topic and comment. I assume that every such interaction is context-specific, and that the meaning constructed by the dyad is affected by the context of their interaction. I assume that communicating behaviors are fundamentally observable by the dyad who are communicating, as they would otherwise be unable to communicate. While some portion of these communicating behaviors are also observable to an outside observer, the full context of the observed behaviors cannot be experienced outside of the dyad.
Several behavioral molecules are required to communicate. Each instance of communicating begins with a behavioral molecule from each actor; if I initiate, then I perceive and attend to you. I then cognize (deciding what to express and how to do that) and move, producing an utterance that can be perceived by you. You are also attending to me and cognizing (interpreting and determining how to respond), perhaps simultaneously, and then you move in response to my move. If you or I are not attending to the other, then we cannot communicate. It is difficult to say when the attending and cognizing occur, because each behavioral molecule produced by each actor is produced simultaneously, but not necessarily in exact synchrony. However, for communicating to work as intended, you must attend when I move and vice versa. This requires at least two behavioral molecules, one from each actor.
An episode of communicating can involve many behavioral molecules as each actor moves to comment on the topic around which meaning is being constructed. To address the issue of when an episode ends, I think that communicating requires at least three behavioral molecules: the initiating molecule from one actor containing an utterance, a replying behavioral molecule from the other actor, and a closing molecule from the first actor, by which the reply is attended to and cognizing occurs, and the first actor determines that no further communicating is necessary and moves to indicate this. This last bit is important; communicating continues so long as it continues to have utility with respect to creating meaning, assuming no other events pre-empt the communication as it is occurring. The utility of the communication is evaluated continuously as a part of cognizing. However, each behavioral molecule generates a movement or utterance that the other actor may attend to, so perhaps the end of attending is a better marker of the end of an episode of communicating. This would be difficult to observe, but I don’t think that an actor stops attending in order to cognize or move, nor that the actor stops cognizing in order to move - at least, that does not seem to be the way it happens in lived experience. The last behavioral molecules in an episode of communicating may then be the ones that result in the actors moving on to some other activity and signaling an end of attention.
So what happens in communicating behavioral molecules with respect to attending, cognizing and moving? Attending includes perception and attention to the movements of another actor, i.e. listening and watching. Attending is indicated through movement, most often eye contact but also through utterances. I think specifically of experiences communicating with blind and deaf people, who rely heavily on one sensory perception channel, to clarify the ways that attention is demonstrated. Blind people make vocal utterances in communicating, with relatively few gestures, while eye contact is very important to establishing attention for deaf people, who communicate primarily through gesture. Although deaf people can learn to talk, this often still seems secondary to gesture when they communicate with hearing people. For most people, attending is indicated primarily through eye contact. Because establishing attention is important to communicating but requires movement to demonstrate, each actor must generate a behavioral molecule for the pair to continue communicating, and it seems that this is a necessary minimum for interaction.
Cognizing includes a number of activities including encoding/decoding the movements of self and other (interpreting), determining how to reply, and evaluating the utility of the communication as it progresses. Some of these cognizing activities are essentially reflexive; we are not necessarily aware of evaluating the utility of communicating as it progresses, but we nonetheless decide how long to engage in communicating based on its continued utility. Moving includes the utterances observable to others, where utterances can be acts or physical expressions other than speech that can be interpreted linguistically. Movement is really the only part of the behavioral molecule that we can observe, so attending and cognizing are assumed or inferred from movement.