Re: [Fis] A definition of Information

Dear Rafael

I have had this comment from a many people in the humanities, but I
think the solution is too simplistic. If we have a face to face
conversation a lot of the meaning will be in our facial expressions and
our body postures. In fact I am told that for ordinary people only a
small fraction of the meaning is in the cogntive/intellectual content of
the language message. How will you handle that?

Rafael Capurro wrote:
>
> Dear Soeren,
>
> I am not very happy with this discussion on meaning as it seems to make the
> simple mistake called by Aristotle 'metabasis eis allo genos' (to trans-late
> one concept from one 'genus' into another). This is of course the main
> debate of this list with regard to the information concept itself as a
> 'human-neutral' concept. Trying to do this with the concept of meaning makes
> for me not to much sense and blurrs the difference between specific
> phenomena by giving the impression of an overall 'cybersemiotic'
> explanation, while in fact all remains the same, there is just more
> conceptual confusion. Why do we not keep the concept of meaning as a
> specific concept related to what human language is able to perform in an
> explicit or implicit way and use other concepts for talking about the
> 'trans-formation' of beings at different pre-linguistic levels?
> To put it in another way: if what we want is to explain, say, the meaning of
> the Mona Lisa, we will never get to it by, say, a chemical analysis or
> measuring how much canvas was used. We cannot also explain the meaning of a
> car by explaining its engine etc. In this sense, reductionism is the wrong
> strategy as well as any kind of evolutionary cybersemioticism, that
> remembers me more and more the kind of 'explanations' offered by DIAMAT
> (dialectical materialism).
> kind regards
> Rafael

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