“Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.”

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 362

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today …" by Marshall McLuhan?
Marshall McLuhan photo
Marshall McLuhan 416
Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor … 1911–1980

Related quotes

Howard Bloom photo

“The real core of communication is what information theory's founder, Claude Shannon calls "meaning." And meaning is not covered in information theory.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Brace Yourself: The Five Heresies
The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012)

“If quantum communication and quantum computation are to flourish, a new information theory will have to be developed.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 25, Zeilingers Principle, Information at the root of reality, p. 231

“The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport (1956), as quoted in: Richard C. Huseman (1977) Readings in interpersonal & organizational communication. p. 35
1950s

Immanuel Kant photo

“Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

This is declared to be "an old Kantian maxim" in General Systems Vol. 7-8 (1962)‎, p. 11, by the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, but may simply be a paraphrase or summation of Kantian ideas.
Kant's treatment of the transcendental logic in the First Critique contains a portion, of which this quote may be an ambiguously worded paraphrase. Kant, claiming that both reason and the senses are essential to the formation of our understanding of the world, writes: "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind (A51/B75)".
Disputed

Niklas Luhmann photo

“No matter how abstractly formulated are a general theory of systems, a general theory of evolution and a general theory of communication, all three theoretical components are necessary for the specifically sociological theory of society. They are mutually interdependent.”

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) German sociologist, administration expert, and social systems theorist

Luhmann (1982) The Differentiation of Society, Translated by Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore. Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, pp. 261. Cited in: Loet Leydesdorff (2000) " Luhmann, Habermas, and the Theory of Communication http://www.leydesdorff.net/montreal.htm".

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 111

Henry Mintzberg photo
Leonardo DiCaprio photo

“The "flow of information" through human communication channels is enormous. So far no theory exists, to our knowledge, which attributes any sort of unambiguous measure to this "flow."”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport (1969) in: Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist. p. 139
1960s

Related topics