ABSTRACT
Education gives us the power to use language to understand the world better, and to be able to shape it better. 'Theory of education' is not particularly an incremental discipline. It is hard to determine where communication stops - but it should not be pursued without limit. Nevertheless, there are two main areas which need to be developed. The first is the relationship between 'communication skills' in the narrow sense, and the other areas of non-clinical education and training which doctors require. Linguists can analyse formal aspects of language with extraordinary subtlety and discuss functional aspects of language in use with equal subtlety, but they cannot analyse them with the same level of precision. At least, it ought to be so where the purpose of research is - as is typically the case in clinical communication - to educate people to communicate better.
