Inquiry Into Inquiry

What is information that a sign may bear it?

Three more questions arise at this juncture.

• How is a sign empowered to contain information?
• What is the practical context of communication?
• Why do we care about these bits of information?

A very rough answer to these questions might begin as follows.

Human beings are initially concerned solely with their own lives but then a world obtrudes on their subjective existence and so they find themselves forced to take an interest in the objective realities of its nature.

In pragmatic terms our initial aim, concern, interest, object, or pragma is expressed by the verbal infinitive to live, but the infinitive is soon reified into the derivative substantial forms of nature, reality, the world, and so on.  Against that backdrop we find ourselves cast as the protagonists on a scene of uncertainty.

The situation may be pictured as a juncture from which a manifold of options fan out before us.  It may be an issue of “truth”, “duty”, or “hope”, the last codifying a special type of uncertainty as to what regulative principle has any chance of success, but the chief uncertainty is that we are called on to make a choice and all too often we have very little clue which of the options is most fit to pick.

Just to make up a discrete example, let us suppose the cardinality of the choices before us is a finite integer and just to make it fully concrete let us say   Figure 1 affords a rough picture of the situation.

This pictures a juncture, represented by a node marked where there are options for the outcome of a conduct and we have no clue as to which it must be.  In a sense the degree of the node, in this case measures the uncertainty we have at that point.

The Figure illustrates the minimal sort of setting in which a sign can make any sense at all.  A sign has significance for an agent, interpreter, or observer because its actualization, its being given or its being present, serves to reduce the uncertainty of a decision the agent has to make, whether it concerns the actions the agent ought to take in order to achieve some objective of interest, or whether it concerns the predicates the agent ought to treat as being true of some object or situation in the world.

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Information • What’s it good for?

The good of information is its use in reducing our uncertainty about an issue which comes before us.  But uncertainty comes in many flavors and so the information which serves to reduce uncertainty can be applied in several ways.  The situations of uncertainty human agents commonly find themselves facing have been investigated under many headings, literally for ages, and the categories subtle thinkers arrived at long before the dawn of modern information theory still have their uses in setting the stage of an introduction.

Picking an example of a subtle thinker almost at random, the philosopher‑scientist Immanuel Kant surveyed the questions of human existence within the span of the following three axes.

• What’s true?
• What’s to do?
• What’s to hope?

The third question is a bit too subtle for the present frame of discussion but the first and second are easily recognizable as staking out the two main axes of information theory, namely, the dual dimensions of information and control.  Roughly the same space of concerns is elsewhere spanned by the dual axes of competence and performance, specification and optimization, or just plain knowledge and skill.

A question of what’s true is a descriptive question and there exist what are called descriptive sciences devoted to answering descriptive questions about any domain of phenomena one might care to name.

A question of what’s to do, in other words, what must be done by way of achieving a given aim, is a normative question and there exist what are called normative sciences devoted to answering normative questions about any domain of problems one might care to address.

Since information plays its role on a stage set by uncertainty, a big part of saying what information is will necessarily involve saying what uncertainty is.  There is little chance the vagaries of a word like uncertainty, given the nuances of its ordinary, poetic, and technical uses, can be corralled by a single pen, but there do exist established models and formal theories which manage to address definable aspects of uncertainty and these do have enough uses to make them worth looking into.

cc: FB | Semeiotics • Laws of Form • Ma^thstodon • Ontolog • Academia.edu
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science