A central origin of Speech Communication emerged from the debates between the philosophers and the sophists, roughly 2,500 years ago. Philosophers such as Socrates and Plato argued that knowledge is best communicated by way of pure argument, a style that deduces truth through logic, not perception. Attempts to employ language to convince others to adopt a point of view were viewed with suspicion, as being a form of trickery. Sophists such as Protagoras of Abdera and Gorgias of Leontini were less concerned with ideal forms of truth and more interested in teaching how to use speech to advance particular interests. Some of these sophists were teachers-for-hire who helped individuals prepare to face trial before their peers; others assisted and guided some of the Greek city-states' most preeminent thinkers and states-people. Plato's student, Aristotle, proposed that speech designed to convince, rhetoric, should be considered the counterpart of pure argument, dialectic. Doing so, he defined rhetoric as the "faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." Until the 20th century, most speech communication scholars concentrated their efforts on uncovering, analyzing, and categorizing those means of persuasion as Aristotle intended. All the while, truth and dialectic remained the domain of the philosophers.

The 20th century can fairly be said to be the time when speech communication emerged as a field in its own right, not a subset of Aristotle's categories of language, and not merely a collection of tricks and styles designed to avoid the hard work of logic and philosophy. After all, in the 20th century, philosophy began to lose ground in its promise to explain and prescribe the actions of humanity. Deep-seated doubt among individual philosophers, the rise of powerful new media, and unthinkable acts of genocide convinced many scholars to turn to communication studies as a field where individuals and group uses of signs and language could be interpreted and understood.

Prior to World War Two, most speech communications scholars continued to draw from Aristotle's views of meaning production - concentrating particularly on the ways in which speakers could shape the perceptions of audiences. From the 1930s through the 1960s, a growing number of communications scholars concentrated less on individual speakers and more on the effects of the media they chose, recognizing the powers of radio and television to shape meaning in ways unimagined by writers and orators. World War Two inspired a scientific and quantitative emphasis in both previously described schools of thought as scholars sought rules, laws, and systems to explain, predict, and control communications acts. Some members of the communication studies field even sought to craft a unified theory of communication that would reflect all sorts of meaning-production, transmission, and reception practices.

The 1960s challenged those somewhat fanciful notions. Neither the neo-Aristotelians, media effects scholars, law-crafters, nor grand theorists could account for the radical kinds of discourse emerging from the streets, college campuses, and international protest movements of their day. One response was to imagine that communication studies should avoid creating "covering laws" and concentrate instead on smaller, more manageable phenomena. From this response arose sub fields of interpersonal, family, gender, small group, and other forms of communication. A second response was to enlarge the definition of rhetoric and communication itself to extend beyond orality. At once, a peace sign, a clenched fist, and a "people's park" could possess the same kind of discursive power as a well-crafted speech.

Speech & Communication Studies Today
Today's communication studies field is defined both by ferment and optimism. The field has experienced ferment as traditional models of meaning-making were abandoned or made obsolete by the explosion of theories, standpoints, approaches, and questions in the aftermath of the 1960s. The field reflects optimism, however, because of the increase in students who have found their way to our classes. The growth of the field parallels its embrace of more diverse approaches, questions, and orientations. Participants in regional, national, and international conferences reflect a world of identities, ethnicities, nationalities, and communities. As a result, now, perhaps more than ever before, new students in the field of communication studies can practically custom-design their career paths to suit their individual visions and answer their unique questions.