ABSTRACT
In current French thinking, a somewhat tendentious opposition is sometimes set up between 'language' and 'communication'. It seems that in France the extent of the new and fruitful understanding of the function of speech and language is unfortunately matched by the extent to which communication is misconstrued in some circles there. The concept of communication is also commonly misunderstood in America, but here the misunderstanding is not so much between language and communication as between 'communication' and 'stimulus—response—reinforcement', that is to say, between the theory of communication and the theory of systems, on the one hand, and the more traditional energy-oriented 'behaviorism' (in the classic sense), on the other.
