Abstract
A fertile theory of communication must depend on a well-developed and accurate model of the agents who are communicating. In the Shannon-Weaver model (Shannon and Weaver 1964), an agent transmits a message to another agent across a possibly noisy channel. Classical information theory (Ash 1965) treats the agents as Markov processes, or a collection of states with transition probabilities between states, reflecting the likelihood of moving from one state to the next. While this view has great utility in explaining such phenomena as the relation between uncertainty and redundancy in message transmission over noisy channels, it is inadequate as a model of the mind, in general, and communicating agents, in particular. This chapter will suggest that many key properties of communication theory are best expressed as relations between decomposable states, and not as transitions between unanalysable state variables.
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© 1992 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Katz, B.F., Dorfman, M.H. (1992). The Neural Dynamics of Conversational Coherence. In: Clark, A., Lutz, R. (eds) Connectionism in Context. Artificial Intelligence and Society. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1923-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1923-4_10
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