The purpose of this paper is to critically engage with a recent attempt by Thom Scott-Phillips to offer a general account of communication. As a general account, it is intended to apply equally well to both non-human and human interactions which are prima facie communicative in character. However, so far, Scott-Phillips has provided little detail regarding how his account is supposed to apply to the latter set of cases. After presenting what I take to be the most plausible way of filling in those details, I argue that his account would appear to be too narrow: it (minimally) fails to capture a range of human interactions which strike us as instances of communication. To wit, these are cases in which some but not all of the information an act is designed to convey to a reactor actually reaches that reactor. An alternative account incorporating Scott-Phillips’ main insights is then sketched, and it is suggested that this account, or something like it, would accommodate the full range of non-human and human interactions that are intuitively communicative.

中文翻译：

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论 Scott-Phillips 的传播概论

本文的目的是批判性地参与 Thom Scott-Phillips 最近的尝试，以提供一般的交流说明。作为一般说明，它旨在同样适用于具有初步交流特征的非人类和人类交互。然而，到目前为止，斯科特-菲利普斯几乎没有提供关于他的账户应该如何应用于后一组案件的细节。在展示了我认为最合理的填写这些细节的方式之后，我认为他的描述似乎过于狭隘：它（至少）未能捕捉到一系列人类互动，这些互动将我们视为交流的实例。也就是说，在这些情况下，行为旨在传达给反应堆的一些信息实际上到达了该反应堆。