inselpeter: thanks for the link. I'll need time to digest it, but it is interesting. I was thinking of the standard model of communication that people often propose and, I suppose, believe in. You know speaker (S) has an idea (C), encodes it into a sentence (M) in some language (L) known to him and hearer (H). H hears M and decodes it. Now H has the same C in his mind. Thoughts have been transfered. The code has to be fixed for maximum telementation.

A different, funnier model of communication suggested in a lecture once by Charles Fillmore was that discourse was like two people juggling balls and occasionally throwing a ball at one another, knocking some of the other person's balls in flight out, etc.