Read the first part of the text carefully and identify its main ideas.

IS THERE AN ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INTERCULTURAL AND INTRACULTURAL COMMUNICATION? [7] Part I

Although the expression 'intercultural communication' frequently appears in a wide range of scholarly writings, its meaning remains either vacuous or inscrutable. Most statements which seem to be offering a definition of it amount to no more than circular explications. For example, in the foreword of Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication, it is said, "Intercultural communication generally involves face-to-face communication between people from different national cultures (Gudykunst & Mody 2002:ix; my italics)." Here both the term ‘communication’ and ‘culture’ re-appear in the very sentence supposed to be an explanation of the expression 'intercultural communication'. Would it be possible to say anything substantial regarding the signification of intercultural communication without using the two key concepts of the term which themselves call for clarification? The authors of the first chapter of the afore-mentioned Handbook define intercultural communication as the study of "forms of culturally heterophilous communication (communication that takes place between unalike individuals) and thus deal with the difficulties that come with cross-border/culture communication (Rogers & Hart 2002:1; italics and bracketed illustration original)." The bracketed illustration aims to elucidate the term "(culturally) heterophilous", that is, the individuals involved in intercultural communication are "unalike", coming from supposedly different cultures. The implication is that individuals from different cultures are unalike simply because of the difference of culture. But this supposition does not have firm ground to stand upon. Whether people are alike or not

depends on various judgments according to different contexts and criteria. Besides, such terms as alike/unalike are very vague and ambiguous: completely alike/unalike or only to a certain degree? Alike/unalike in all respects, in some unspecifiable respects, or in some relevant respects? Adding the latter expression (relevant respects) may seem to have resolved the vagueness, but in fact, this merely pushes the problem at stake a step further.

Underlying elucidation of intercultural communication by other authors is a particular model which can be called the 'code model' of communication and culture. For example, Richard E. Porter and Larry A. Samovar explain: "Intercultural communication occurs whenever a message producer is a member of one culture and a message receiver is a member of another." This proposition, together with another one which says that "Culture and language are inseparably intertwined" has been regarded as the two fundamental propositions on which the field of intercultural communication has reached consensus. The above quoted article by Porter and Samovar was published sixteen years ago. All the same, they continue to hold the same code model conception of communication. This can be found in one of their more recent publications in which even the diction they choose remains almost the same. It is said, "intercultural communication occurs when a member of one culture produces a message for consumption by a member of another culture." In other more recent publications the wording becomes more sophisticated, but the same messenger-receiver model remains in the foreground. For example, intercultural communication is characterized as "a transactional, symbolic process involving the attribution of meaning between people from different cultures." In another place, it is described as "involving the exchange of symbolic information between well-defined groups with significantly different cultures." Such characterizations attempt to delineate the conceptual contours of intercultural communication by employing a picture of communication as message production followed by message reception. Notwithstanding its widespread adherence in many disciplines, this is a highly questionable conception of human communication. I will first deal with this problematic picture of communication, and then come to the issue of culture, where we will see that the same code model still plays the crucial role.

Philosophers in the twentieth century came to realize the great influence of an erroneous conception of communication and language. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes:

We are so much accustomed to communication through language, in conversation, that it looks to us as if the whole point of communication lay in this: someone else grasps the sense of my words – which is something mental: he as it were takes it into his own mind.

As Wittgenstein points out, human communication has been pervasively conceived as a determinable process of meaning transference, wherein meanings are regarded as definite entities. This conception is adopted in a variety of elaborate theories of intercultural communication. S. Ting-Toomey describes intercultural communication as a process of "simultaneous encoding (i.e., the sender choosing the right words or nonverbal gestures to express his or her intentions) and decoding (i.e., the receiver translating the words or nonverbal cues into comprehensible meanings) of the exchanged messages)." Porter and Samovar define the notion of communication as "a dynamic transactional behaviour-affecting process in which sources and receivers intentionally code their behavior to produce messages that they transmit through a channel in order to induce or elicit particular attitudes or behaviors." In accordance with this definition, they lay out eight specific ingredients of communication: source, encoding, message, channel, receiver, decoding, receiver response, and feedback. The picture of communication seems to be the following: a person who wishes to share an internal state of being with another human being conducts an internal activity called encoding, in which verbal and nonverbal behavior are selected and arranged according to the rules of grammar and syntax applicable to the verbal or non-verbal language being used to create a message. On the basis of this encoding activity, the 'source' person produces a message, that is, a set of verbal and/or nonverbal symbols that stand for a source’s particular state of being. Another person, the receiver, decodes the message by conducting a similar internal activity of meaning attribution to the message and thus grasps the source’s internal state of being.

The ideas dominating this mechanistic picture of communication are highly dubious. First of all, it is doubtful whether one’s "internal state of being" is always clear and determinate before it is

said to be transmitted in one way or another. It is not the case that one always already has a distinct awareness of one’s feelings, ideas and thoughts which are not yet put into verbal or bodily expressions. Second, although the nonverbal aspect of communication is taken into account, both verbal and nonverbal acts are seen as consciously processed according to a determinate set of rules in order to convey a certain determinate inner state. These acts are assumed to constitute a message with a clear connotation which in turn is interpreted according to the same set of rules.

The picture of communication presented as a process of message encoding and decoding proves to be a far cry from the real everyday life of human beings. One laughs, before getting conscious of any determinate inner being of happiness which one then wishes to convey to another person. One groans, and tends where one is hurt, before one conducts any fictitious process of encoding one’s feeling painful into these activities. One speaks, before one, in some mysterious way, translates one’s intentions and ideas into words, or has the whole sentence to be spoken present to the mind first.

Compared with non-verbal behavior, verbal behavior is more easily thought of as being connected with a mental process of encoding and decoding. This is because, linguistically speaking, language has grammar, syntax and semantics. But those are rules belonging to a field where language is taken as an object of study. It is not convincing to assume that one always has to bear grammatical rules in mind and making sentences accordingly in order to speak at all. In the daily life, nobody would speak in that way. In some special activity such as translating or recitation, there may be a certain correlating or transferring process, because of the conscious reflection (of one person) on various 'theoretical' stages to master the complexity of the process of going from one text to another. But one cannot generalize this picture and conclude that speaking is a means of conveying one’s thought, which already exists in one’s mind.

Consider the example of making a gesture. Is one who makes a gesture always clear about his inner state and then chooses a gesture to express it? The answer is in the negative. In most cases, it seems that the gesture just comes over one and only after the gesture has been made does one sometimes try to provide some explanations as to what is meant by the gesture. Thinking is not an incorporeal process which is hidden somewhere in the speaker’s mind. What one thinks is always to be judged on the basis of what one says, one’s tone of voice, and numerous other shades of nonverbal behavior.

Wittgenstein has devoted many sections in his Philosophical Investigations to this sort of confusion which assumes that there is already thought existing before it finds expression.

What happens when we make an effort – say in writing a letter – to find the right expression for our thoughts? – This phrase compares the process to one of translating or describing: the thoughts are already there (perhaps were there in advance) and we merely look for their expression. This picture is more or less appropriate in different cases. – But mayn’t all sorts of things happen here? – I surrender to a mood and the expression comes. Or a picture occurs to me and I try to describe it. Or an English expression occurs to me and I try to hit on the corresponding German one. Or I make a gesture, and ask myself: What words correspond to this gesture? And so on.

Now if it were asked: "Do you have the thought before finding the expression?" what would one have to reply? And what, to the question: "What did the thought consist in, as it existed before its expression?

This case is similar to the one in which someone imagines that one could not think a sentence with the remarkable word order of German or Latin just as it stands. One first has to think it, and then one arranges the words in that queer order.

It is true that such cases as trying to remember a sentence in its exact order, translating a piece of work from one language to another language, or describing an object in view, may give one the intriguing impression that meaning or intention already exists in one way or another, which is then transposed to an outward expression. But it is wrong to conveniently generalize this picture and apply it to all sorts of communication process.

In respect to understanding, it is equally incredible that human beings should understand either verbal or nonverbal behavior by a mental process of decoding according to a set of definite rules, as if

one always has to sort out from what one hears or sees some authentic and determinate meaning for which the ‘outward’ sensory elements merely serve as a crust. Again this assumption results from generalizing across the board such special activities as translation, where the model might apply in some cases.

The identification of understanding with a decoding process is far from convincing. When one is learning a language, illustrations concerning grammar and syntax can be an aid in getting a grasp of the language. But when one already has a mastery of a language, in the daily social interaction, one does not comprehend what others say by means of a quasi-translation process in which sentences are dissected in terms of grammar and syntax. There is a kind of immediacy, smoothness, or naturalness to discursive human interaction, which has a certain kinship with the way in which one understands a musical theme. Wittgenstein quite often compares understanding a sentence with understanding a musical theme:

Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think. What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical theme. Why is just this the pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One would like to say "Because I know what it’s all about." But what is it all about? I should not be able to say. In order to ‘explain’ I could only compare it with something else which has the same rhythm (I mean the same pattern). (One says "Don’t you see, this is as if a conclusion were being drawn" or "This is as it were a parenthesis", etc. How does one justify such comparisons? – There are very different kinds of justifications here.) (Wittgenstein 2001:§527)

Just as one simply recognizes the melody in its variation of loudness and tempo without having to analyze it in detail, one simply picks up or makes out the other person’s intention and react accordingly without any reliance on a certain mental process of decoding.

Human communication is not a mechanistic way of thought processing, according to which communication is conducted on the basis of a determinate set of codes. When culture is understood in analogy with such a set of codes, one can conveniently infer that the agents involved in communication would be employing sets of codes different from each other for expressing and understanding, and so would assign quite different or even conflicting interpretations to the same linguistic or nonlinguistic expressions. On this line of reasoning, the conclusion may be easily drawn that intercultural communication is necessarily more difficult. Hence it is intrinsically different from intracultural communication.

 

 

2. Answer the questions based on the text:

- Why does the author call the definitions of intercultural communication “circular explications”?

- Explain the 'code model' of intercultural communication offered by Richard E. Porter and Larry A. Samovar.

- How does S. Ting-Toomey describe intercultural communication?

- Name eight specific ingredients of communication.

- Why is the picture of communication presented as a process of message encoding and decoding a far cry from the real everyday life of human beings?

- Why is verbal behavior more easily thought of as being connected with a mental process of encoding and decoding than a non-verbal one?

- How can you explain the author’s though: The identification of understanding with a decoding process is far from convincing?

- How do you understand the comparison: understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music?

- Why is intercultural communication more difficult than intracultural?