Pragmatic aspect of information

From: Christophe Menant <[email protected]>
Date: Fri 17 Jan 2003 - 20:23:51 CET

Dear colleagues,
A late answer/continuation to Jerry's thread on Questions
About the Nature of Informational Theories.
Let me throw in my two pence by adding another subject:
the pragmatic aspect of information. This subject has not
been taken into account explicitly so far. It could be worded
as : "What is (that) information for ?". Such question is
most of the time present where a question about information
exists.
This large question is a general one that is present in most
of the cases we have been looking at (energy/entropy, biology,
human, firms, societies, ...). Several papers proposed in
FIS 2002 deal more or less implicitly with this subject, and
I take it also as part of Jerry's challenge.
To cover the diversity, we could think about a general approach
on pragmatic aspect of information. It would be about
considering the evolution of the universe with corresponding
increases in complexity, and begin the analysis of "what is (that)
information for" at the lowest level possible. And then try to
analyse the possible evolution of the "rational for information",
with addition of new contributors as needed.
You remember we had some discussion about the basic nature of
information with the chaining "variation of energy equals signal,
signal containing different information, information being
meaningless or meaningful vs the constraint of the system
managing it". The pragmatic aspect was there related to the
creation of meaningful information in order to satisfy the
constraint of a system.
Soren also brings up this point in his Monday post "can we fit
a theory of meaning in the natural sciences as we know them ?",
with his suggestion (on a broader horizon) to use Peircean
Biosemiotics. (For those who are interested by Peirce theory
of sign usability regarding generation of meaningful information,
you can access some current discussion on this point on the
Peirce-L forum by seraching "MGS" at
http://lyris.acs.ttu.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?visit=peirce-l).
But comming back to the pragmatic aspect of information, the
question about "what is (that) information for ?" is obviously
a significant aspect of all information
So I feel we should also consider the question regarding the
pragmatic aspect of information in our list of questions about
the nature of informational theories.
Would you agree ?

Cheers

Christophe
Received on Fri Jan 17 20:23:39 2003

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