1. Midterm Questions Revisited
Talking Points
Midterm Questions Revisited

2. About Science & Theory
What are the basic elements of a theory? [components, characteristics, and laws]
What is the concept of isomorphism and what does it have to do with scientific knowledge?
Explain the four types of measurement scales:  nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio
What are the characteristics of theory as reflecting different styles of thinking:  literary, academic, eristic, symbolic (formal and postulational)?  [Kaplan]

3. About Communication Theories
Discuss some of the problems associated with defining communication
Discuss Dance’s three points of “critical conceptual differentiation” among definitions of communication.
Discuss Bowers & Bradac’s notion of competing axioms of communication

4. About Particular Theories
Newcomb
Shannon & Weaver
Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson
Becker
Hymes

5. Explain each TRADITION
The Semiotic Tradition: study of how signs come to represent objects, ideas, states, situations, feelings, and conditions outside of themselves.
The Phenomenological Tradition: study of how people actively interpret their experience and come to understand the world by personal experiences with it.
The Cybernetic Tradition: study of complex systems in which many interacting elements influence one another.
The Sociopsychological Tradition: study of the individual as a social being—behavior and the personal traits and cognitive processes that produce behavior.
The Sociocultural Tradition: study of the ways our understandings, meanings, roles, norms, and rules are worked out interactively in communication.
The Critical Tradition: study of questions of privilege and power—how race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, income level, etc. identity and social differences.
The Rhetorical Tradition: study of ways humans use symbols to affect those around them and construct the worlds in which they live.