Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe Feynman understood that he was oversimplifying, and I believe he was able to do because his reason for reading the paper was not the same as the reason another sociologist might have. Thus a sentence like, "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels", does, to a non-expert, mean "people read", but to another sociologist of a researcher in relat…
Well, maybe, but you can rationalize arbitrary amounts of pointless jargon that way. Besides, in the example Faynman gives the simple sentence is actually shorter . Maybe that shorter sentence loses some information that the jargon carried, but Occam's razor suggests the writer was just trying to sound smarter.
A lot of research involves lumping and splitting: what underlying properties do these seemingly-different share (or vice versa). For example, reading text is just one possible instantiation of a “visual symbolic channel.” Traffic lights, road signs, gauges and dials, logos, and clocks also carry information the same way. If you want to discuss “reading and reading-like activities”, you may want some kind of umbrella term.
Plus, you may want to contrast them with other ways of sharing information: non-symbolic systems that literally depict the item in question (photos on a picture menu, for example) or using a different sense altogether, like church bells for telling time.