Person
Warren Weaver
American mathematician and science administrator (1894–1978). He ran the Rockefeller Foundation’s natural sciences programme and wrote the essay that opened Shannon’s theory to general readers.
Biography
Warren Weaver was born in 1894 in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, and died in Connecticut in 1978. He studied mathematics and engineering, completed a doctorate in mathematical physics in 1921 and taught mathematics for a while. But he made his name mainly as a science administrator: from 1932 to 1955 he headed the natural sciences division of the Rockefeller Foundation, and in that role he was influential in the development of biology worldwide. During the Second World War he directed the applied mathematics panel of the national defence research committee; he is also remembered as one of those who put forward the idea of translating languages with a computer.
His place in communication studies is his partnership with Shannon; but it is a relationship of interpreter and author, not of co-workers. Weaver was not an employee of Bell Laboratories; in his essay printed beside Shannon’s paper in 1949, he explained the theory to readers without mathematics. In the same essay he set out communication problems at three levels (how accurately the symbols are transmitted, how precisely the transmitted meaning arrives, how effectively the received meaning affects conduct in the desired way) and proposed that “semantic receiver” and “semantic noise” boxes could be added to Shannon’s diagram.
In the same year he also published a short popular account of the theory in Scientific American. For this reason the name “Shannon–Weaver model” describes a division of labour more than a drawing: Shannon built the diagram and the mathematics, and Weaver added the wider framework and a hopeful reading of the theory for other fields. This page contains only professional information that can be verified; personal details have deliberately been left out.
In this course
See The Lasswell and Shannon–Weaver Models; the sequel is Process Models: Schramm, Berlo, Westley–MacLean, Newcomb.
Key works
- Shannon, Claude E.; Weaver, Warren (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. — Weaver’s interpretive essay (three levels, the semantic receiver and semantic noise proposal) in the same volume as Shannon’s paper.