Unit One

Question 1

What is a theory?

Answer 1

set of systematic, informed hunches about the way things work

Question 2

What are the three ways to look at theories?

Answer 2

1. As nets; a way to separate stuff from the noise
2. As lenses; sharpen our focus
3. As maps; provides a direction to understanding

Question 3

What is communication?

Answer 3

Rational process of creating and. interpreting messages that elect a response

Question 4

What is an objective scholar? What makes it good?

Answer 4

Applies the scientific method to describe, predict and explain forms of human communication. It is good because it fulfills the twin objectives of scientific knowledge (the theory predicts some future outcome, and it explains the reason for the outcome

Question 5

What is an interpretive scholar?

Answer 5

Focuses on the ways language constructs realities that emerge in and across people accounts

Question 6

What is ethnography?

Answer 6

Not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive [approach] in search of meaning

Question 7

What is a humanist and what scholars are mostly humanist?

Answer 7

The study of what its like to be another person, in a specific time or place. Most interpretive scholars are humanists

Question 8

What is epistemology?

Answer 8

study of the organ, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge

Question 9

What is determinism?

Answer 9

assumption that behavior is caused by hereditary and environment

Question 10

What do interpretive scholars focus on? What to they believe?

Answer 10

They focus on conscious choices made by individuals and believe that ability to choose separates humanity from the rest of creation, ad value scholarship that expands free choice (emancipation)

Question 11

What are twin objectives of scientific knowledge?

Answer 11

Predicts the future and explains past and present

Question 12

Four additional criteria for theories

Answer 12

1. Relative simplicity
2. Testability
3. Practical utility
4. Quantitive research

Question 13

Six interpretive standards

Answer 13

1. Clarification of values
2. New understanding of people
3. Aesthetic appeal
4. Community of agreement
5. Return of society
6. Qualitative research

Question 14

Six scientific standards

Answer 14

1. Prediction of future events
2. Explanation of date
3. Relative Simplicity
4. Hypothesis that can be tested
5. Practical Utility
6. Quantitative Research

Question 15

What is cybernetics?

Answer 15

Study of information processing, feedback, and control is communication studies

Question 16

What is rhetoric?

Answer 16

Art of using all available means of persuasion; how are people influenced?

Question 17

What is semiotics?

Answer 17

Study of verbal and nonverbal signs that stand for something else (how their interpretation impacts society)

Question 18

What are symbols?

Answer 18

arbitrary words and nonverbal signs that bear no natural connection with the things they describe (meaning is learned within a given culture)