COMMUNICATION AS AN INTENTIONAL,SOCIAL SYSTEM

The argument is presented that taking communication as intentional and as a social system is necessary although not sufficient for defining the concept of communication for scholarly and research purposes. To illustrate the tendency and the error of ignoring the sociality of communication the notion of “intrapersonal communication” is examined. It is contended that many authors reject “intention” as a defining attribute of communication as a result of a strong tendency toward seeing the concept only in a defective form, represented as “speaker's purpose” and that the sense of “intention” needs to be grounded in a prior notion of “intentionality.”