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The communication constraint is the impediment to understanding a theory that is new relative to those currently conventional.

In his Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800 Herbert Butterfield wrote that of all forms of mental activity the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another.

The communication constraint has the same origins as the cognition constraint. It is the semantical impediment to understanding a new theory relative to those currently accepted and thus currently conventional. This impediment is both cognitive and psychological. The scientist must cognitively learn the new theory well enough to restructure the composite meaning complexes associated with the descriptive terms common both to the old theory that he knows and to the new theory to which he has just been exposed. And this involves overcoming existing psychological habit that enables linguistic fluency, which reinforces existing beliefs.

This learning process suggests the conversion experience described by Kuhn in revolutionary transitional episodes, because the new theory must firstly be accepted as true however provisionally for its semantics to be understood, since only statements believed to be true can operate as semantical rules that convey understanding. If testing demonstrates the new theory’s superior empirical adequacy, then the new theory’s pragmatic acceptance should eventually make it the established conventional wisdom.

But if the differences between the old and new theories are very great, some members of the affected scientific profession may not accomplish the required learning adjustment. People usually prefer to live in an orderly world, but innovation creates disorder. In reaction the slow learners and nonlearners become a rearguard that clings to the received conventional wisdom, which is being challenged by the new theory at the frontier of research, where there is much conflict that produces confusion due to semantic dissolution and consequent restructuring of the web of belief.

In his “Changes of Thought Pattern in the Progress of Science” in his Across the Frontiers Heisenberg wrote that there have always arisen strong resistances to every change in the pattern of thought. When new groups of phenomena compel changes in the pattern of thought, even the most eminent of physicists find immense difficulties, because a demand for change in thought pattern may create the perception that the ground is to be pulled from under one’s feet. A researcher who has achieved great success in his science with a pattern of thinking he has accepted from his young days, cannot be ready to change this pattern simply on the basis of a few novel experiments. Heisenberg states that once one has observed the desperation with which clever and conciliatory men of science react to the demand for a change in the pattern of thought, one can only be amazed that such revolutions in science have actually been possible at all.

Since the conventional view has had time to be developed into a more elaborate system of ideas, those unable to cope with the semantic dissolution produced by the newly emergent ideas take refuge in the psychological comfort of coherence provided by the more elaborate conventional wisdom, which assumes the nature of an ideology if not a theology. In the meanwhile the developers of the new ideas together with the more opportunistic and typically younger advocates of the new theory, who have been motivated to master the new theory’s language in order to exploit its perceived career promise, assume the avant-garde rôle and become a vanguard.

1970 Nobel-laureate economist Paul Samuelson wrote in his Keynes General Theory: Reports of Three Decades (1964) that Keynes’ theory had caught most economists under the age of thirty-five with the unexpected virulence of a disease first attacking and then decimating an isolated tribe of South Sea islanders, while older economists were immune.

Note that contrary to Kuhn and especially to Feyerabend the transition does not involve a complete semantic discontinuity much less any semantic incommensurability. And it is unnecessary to learn the new theory as though it were a completely foreign language. For the terms common to the new and old theories, the component parts contributed by the new theory replace those from the old theory, while the parts contributed by the test-design statements remain unaffected. Thus the test-design language component parts shared by both theories enable characterization of the subject of both theories independently of the distinctive claims of either, and thereby enable decisive testing. The shared semantics in the test-design language also facilitates learning and understanding the new theory, however radical the new theory may be.

It may also be noted that the scientist viewing the computerized discovery system output experiences the same communication impediment with the machine output that he would were the outputted theories developed by a fellow human scientist. New theories developed mechanically are grist for Luddites’ mindless rejection mills.

In summary both the cognition constraint and the communication constraint are based on the reciprocal relation between semantics and belief, such that given the conventionalized meaning for a descriptive term, certain beliefs determining the meaning of the term are reinforced by psychological habit that enables linguistic fluency. The result is that the meaning’s conventionality impedes change in those defining beliefs.

The communication constraint is a general linguistic phenomenon and not limited to the language of science. It applies to philosophy as well. Thus many philosophers of science who received their education before 1970 or whose education was otherwise retarded are unsympathetic to the reconceptualization of familiar terms such as “theory” and “law” that are carried forward into contemporary pragmatism. They are dismayed by the semantic dissolution resulting from the rejection of the old positivist beliefs. For example Hickey remembers hearing a Notre Dame University professor tell his philosophy-of-science class when contemporary pragmatism was emerging in the 1960’s, “Now everything is messy.” That culturally retarded professor advocated positivist operational definitions to the end of his teaching career.