Com Theory.txt

Deals with questions of "what counts for knowledge" (such as the way in which objectives & interpretivists approach their research).

Pertains to the place of values, whether values should play a role in the search for knowledge.

Aristotle

A tradition that focuses on settings where a single sppeaker attempts to influence an audience of many listeners through explicitly persuasive discourse.

Epicuris

An ethical position that insists that people should live their lives to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

George Herbert Mead

Humans act toward people, things, and events on the basis of meanings they assign to them. W/out language there would be no thought; no snese of self, and no socializing presence of society withtin the individual.

Martin Buber

An ehtical position that makes relationships more important than codes of conduct and calls on peole to avoid both egotism and selfless martyrdom.

Jesse Delia

Individuals who are more cognitively complex in their perceptions of others have the mental capacity to create messages that pursue multiple goals.

Altman & Taylor

Interpersonal closeness proceeds in a gradual and orderly fashion from superficial to intimate levels of exchange as a function of anticipated outcomes.

Frankfurt School

Communication can create unjust power imbalances and the unjust distribution of suffering.

Carl Rogers

Affirms the importance of such things as unconditional positive regard, congruence and authenticity, dialog, and affirming the validity of another person's experience in communication.

Pearce & Cronen

Persons-in-conversation co-construct their own social realities and are simultaneously shaped by the social worlds they co-create.

Sandra Petronio

People have personal boundary rules to guide whether or not they will disclose private information to someone else -- and whether they will share someone's private information with a person who is outside the relationship.

Shannon & Weaver

A model of communication that focuses on the isolated elements of communication, such as information source, message, transmitter, signal, noise, and determination without any significant reference to feedback or the alternating roles of speaker and listener.

Carl Hovland

A tradition that focuses on influence/persuasion and works, within a framework that begins, "Who says what to whom, how, and with what effect."

Sapir & Whorf

The notion that language produces and reproduces culture, that language shapes culture and that culture shapes language.

Thibaut & Kelley

People try to predict the outcome of an interaction before it takes place using an economic model of anticipated and present costs of the rewards of the relationship.

I.A. Richards

A tradition that focuses on the connection between words (symbols) and things (referents), concluding that the connection between the two is only indirect through thought (reference).

Paul Watzlawick, et al.

Relationships within a family system are interconnected and highly resistant to change.

Petty & Cacioppo

Processing a message on the central route is more likely produce an attitude change in a listener.

Baxter & Montgomery

Social life is a dynamic knot of contradictions.

Muzafer Sherif

The larger the discrepancy between a speaker's position and a listener's point of view, the greater the change in attitude--as long as the message is within the hearer's latitude of acceptance.

Deals with the assumptions scholars may make regarding the nature of human beings (such as whether human beings are primarily shaped by outside forces or by free will).

Charles Berger

As verbal output, nonverbal warmth, self-disclosure, similarity, and shared communicationnetworks increase, uncertainty decreases--ad vice versa.

Thomas Nilsen

An ethical position that maintains that persuasion is ethical to the extent that it maximizes people's ability to exercise free choice.