Communication Ethics book part for Integrity of Messages as Derivation Trees. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Recall that in Expression and Derivation Tree Equivalence, we observed that expressions are their derivation trees. The same is true of messages, they are their derivation trees, it's just that messages may have much more complicated relationships then traditional expressions. In fact, it was an exploration of those more complicated relationships that first convinced me that the expression doctrine is not useful for understanding the current communication world.

This chapter's thesis is a somewhat subtle argument, so let me re-cast it in terms of derivation trees and quickly run through the argument in terms of derivation trees, with the advantage that I get to use pretty pictures that way. First, we need to make two simple observations: