コミュニケーションと倫理学 (上)

Abstract

As a propaedeutic study of 'Communication Ethics', this paper is the first part of attempts to review communicative phenomena in a comprehensive way from philosophical standpoints. While the concept of communication has been so prevalent that it might well be called a buzzword, it is hard to say that philosophy or ethics has succeeded in providing any adequate explanation of the notion from the ground up. Discourse Ethics of Harbermas was a landmark attempt to explain communicative phenomena on the basis of the ideal of "good communication" that is to be taken in advance. Nevertheless, it tried to move on to the topic of ethics in such haste that it seemed to have a certain biased view toward everyday communication. Looking at the history of Western ethics reminds us of Plato's Socratic dialogues, which were considered to be the method of inquiring into truth and make a clear departure from daily communications. But then we could also think that the very presence of everyday communications of Plato's day made these dialogues possible. Unfortunately, everyday communications, or communications in our daily 'conversation' has not been paid any serious attention throughout the history of Western philosophy. This paper examines the following two theories to make an attempt to explain communicative phenomena : the code model in Shannon's information theory, and Sperber & Wilson's 'relevance theory' designed to overcome the fundamental problems of Shannon's theory.