This paper asks in turn: (1) What is phenomenology? (2) What is a phenomenology of communication? and (3) What is a phenomenology of human communication? The progressive application of the three questions represents an explicit use of the phenomenological method, involving description, reduction and interpretation. The phenomenological reduction…

This essay distinguishes several different kinds of measures of information from each other, noting that differences between them show that our pretheoretical concept of information is multiply ambiguous. Incremental information, conditional information, transmitted information, expected information, and deductive information are discussed. Ten…

Situationally relevant items of information are those that answer, or logically help to answer, questions of concern. Significant situationally relevant information is explained in terms of changes of view in relation to questions of concern. It is claimed that situational relevance is an explication of the ordinary notion of practical relevance.…

Games in the communications classroom must not be regarded as ends in themselves, but as methods of increasing an understanding of communication behavior. (RN)

When a root model, a system of concepts orienting an entire discipline," loses its ability to present a provisional interpretation scheme of an entire phenomenal field," it retards development of the discipline and becomes a blinker." Discussion of Katz's model of linguistic communication shows how Chomsky's mentalism can become…

A hypothetical methodology is presented for measuring retrieval effectiveness by using the personal utility, based on a user's subjective evaluation, of a retrieval system's output. Because the methodology is impractical, compromise methods are outlined and their underlying assumptions, which can serve as criteria for formulating appropriate…

This article focuses on the relationship between research'' and action'' as contradictory and complementary activities. Recent research and theory indicate the two may be synergistic and difficult to separate. (Author)

Deals with the relationship between a theory of indexing and a theory of information storage and retrieval. Attention is directed to the view that indexing is an order increasing operation, and some thermodynamic notions are invoked to aid in this description. (MF)

The third of a series, this article describes prototype experiments which place human decision makers in an interactive decision-making situation, presents results typical of those thus far observed in the prototype experiments, and describes preliminary analysis of the data. Three references are listed. (FM)

Argues that in information science we must distinguish physical, objective, or document space from perspective, subjective, or information space and holds that transformations can easily be made once these two spaces are distinguished. (FM)