How to define an information concept for a universal theory of information?
The view argued that I argue (Brier 2008, 2010 and 2011) is that If we want to define a universal concept of information covering subjective experiential and meaningful cognition-as well as intersubjective meaningful communication in nature, technology, society and life worlds-then the main problem is to decide,which epistemological, ontological and philosophy of science framework the concept of information should be based on and integrated in.All the ontological attempts to create objective concepts of information as Claude Shannon”s (Shannon and Weaver 1963/1948), Norbert Wiener”s (Wiener 1965/1948) cybernetic and John Archibald Wheeler”s ”it from bit” (Wheeler 1994) results in concepts that cannot encompass meaning and experience of embodied living and social systems.I do not find the evidence that the core of reality across nature, culture, life and mind can be proven to be of a purely either mathematical or logical nature.Therefore the core of the information concept should not be based only on pure logical or mathematical theory and rationality concepts like game theory or probability theory or the Turing computation concept used for the brain as a universal Mentalese.We need to include interpretation, signification and meaning construction from the start in our transdisicplinary framework for information as a basic aspect of reality alongside the physical, chemical and molecular biological.Even a semantic probability information theory like Bar-Hillel and Carnap”s imagining a formal language consisting of all sentences that might be true in a given possible universe is problematic; because as Chomsky has pointed out, natural language has the intrinsic capacity to generate an infinite number of well-formed sentences.This makes it difficult to quantitatively operationalizc the idea of probability.Dretske then defines information as the content of new, tree, meaningful, and understandable knowledge.Thus information in a transdisciplinary theory cannot be ”objective”, but has to be relativized in relation to the receiver”s knowledge, as also proposed by Floridi.It is difficult to produce a quantitative statement independently of a qualitative analysis based on some sort of relation to the human condition as a semiotic animal.An alternative is to build information theories based on semiotics from the basic context of embodied meaningful cognition and communication.I agree with Peircean biosemiotics that signs are real relational processes manifesting as tokens connecting all living beings with each other and with the environment.C.S.Peirce”s pragmaticist transdisciplinary semiotics therefore seems to be an attractive place to start for integrating the quantitative and qualitative aspect of cognition and communication, as it has it has a combination of a phenomenological and pure mathematical foundation! Peirce suggest that the human serf can be seen as a symbol growing and the world can be understood as a big argument developing.Signs-not only information-is what connects those two aspects of reality and all living being to each other is the patter that connect and bridges C.P, Snows two cultures.
S(φ)ren Brier
Copenhagen Business School,Depart.of international Business Communication
国内会议
西安
英文
277-299
2013-10-18（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）