Hi FIS folks - You might be interested in the origin of the use of the
word information in English so I am transmitting an excerpt
from Chapter 2 of my new book What is Information? I would be happy to
send all of Chapt 2 off line to any member of the list interested in
receiving all of Chapt 2. Just email me off line your request and I
will send you a copy hoping for your feedback. The general purpose of
my What Is Information? project is to better understand the nature of
information which is more than a collection of bits and more than
Shannon's definition of information which totally lacks the notion of
meaning.
Hope to hear from some of you
Bob Logan
Origins of the Concept of Information
We begin our historic survey of the development of the concept of
information with its etymology. The English word information according
to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first appears in the written
record in 1386 by Chaucer: ?Whanne Melibee hadde herd the grete skiles
and resons of Dame Prudence, and hire wise informacions and
techynges.? The word is derived from Latin through French by combining
the word inform meaning giving a form to the mind with the ending
?ation? denoting a noun of action. This earliest definition refers to
an item of training or molding of the mind. The next notion of
information, namely the communication of knowledge appears shortly
thereafter in 1450. ?Lydg. & Burgh Secrees 1695 Ferthere to geve the
Enformacioun, Of mustard whyte the seed is profitable.?
The notion of information as a something capable of storage in or the
transfer or communication to something inanimate and the notion of
information as a mathematically defined quantity do not arise until
the 20th century.
The OED cites two sources, which abstracted the concept of information
as something that could be conveyed or stored to an inanimate object:
1937 Discovery Nov. 329/1 The whole difficulty resides in the amount
of definition in the [television] picture, or, as the engineers put
it, the amount of information to be transmitted in a given time.
1944 Jrnl. Sci. Instrum. XXI. 133/2 Information is conveyed to the
machine by means of punched cards.
The OED cites the 1925 article of R. A. Fisher as the first instance
of the mathematization of information:
What we have spoken of as the intrinsic accuracy of an error curve may
equally be conceived as the amount of information in a single
observation belonging to such a distribution? If p is the probability
of an observation falling into any one class, the amount of
information in the sample is S{(?m/??)2/m} where m = np, is the
expectation in any one class [and ? is the parameter] (Fisher 1925).
Another OED entry citing the early work of mathematizing information
is that of R. V. L. Hartley (1928, p. 540) ?What we have done then is
to take as our practical measure of information the logarithm of the
number of possible symbol sequences.? It is interesting to note that
the work of both Fisher and Hartley foreshadow Shannon?s concept of
information, which is nothing more than the probability of a
particular string of symbols independent of their meaning.
On 9-Dec-08, at 4:11 AM, John Collier wrote:
At 04:35 PM 12/6/2008, Michel PETITJEAN wrote:
Hello FISers.
Recently, one of my colleagues attract my attention on the following point.
In French, we often use information as a countable quantity,
so that we can write "informations".
In English, it seems that it is unusual, if not incorrect, to do that.
(1) Please can some English native FISers give their opinion about that ?
(2) Please can some FISers from non English-speaking countries tell us
how is the situation in their own language ?
Michel, folks,
I haven't seen anything on the specific philosophical grammar of
'information' in English yet, so I will add some remarks. In English
there are count nouns and mass nouns. Count nouns always take an
adjective, like a South African, the Pope, a bicycle, and have plural
forms. Mass nouns do not take an adjective when referred to
singularly, such as water, gold, and humanity, and do not have a
plural form. Mass terms refer to things not collectively per se, but
in a distributed way. So we can say "Dogs are typically larger than
cats", but we have to say "Gold is heavier than water." Mass terms
can take an adjective, however, such as in "The gold in this ring is
90% pure." 'Information', in English, is a mass term. Note that count
nouns and mass nouns can both have quantitative values, such as
"There are ten dogs in this pen." and "The gold in this ring weighs 2
grams." However, typically, count nouns need no modifiers for their
quantities, whereas mass nouns do, as in the previous examples.
Information, as a mass term, follows this practice, and requires a
measure, typically bits or entropy units, or something of the like.
Furthermore, count nouns require something like 'the number of' in
comparisons, for example, "The number of dogs in this pen is less
than the number of cats in that pen." Contrast this with, "The
information in this data is less than the information in the previous
set of data." The phrase "the number of informations" is not
grammatical in English, indicating that information is not a count noun.
I my French is not sufficiently idiomatic to speak with any authority
here, but I had thought that the mass/count distinction was pretty
much the same, so I am surprised that 'informations' is grammatical.
I think that there is a mass/count distinction in all languages (it
is far to handy to not use), but grammatical markers are quite
different (English articles, for example, are hard to translate). I
should also point out that there are often hidden or suppressed
grammatical differences that do not appear in the surface structure,
or are apparently violated in surface structure. An example is that
in English ships are feminine gender, even though there are no gender
markers in English. I suppose the mass'count distinction could be
hidden in some languages. It is possible that even in English the
distinction is hidden or grammatically violated; I am not that expert
on idiomatic English, either.
The mass/count distinction I know mostly from work on identity, in
which it is a very basic distinction that must be understood before
one can go on. Count nouns are sometimes called 'sortals', with
sortals applying to a period of time but not the whole period of
existence of something being called 'phasal sortals'. There is no
similar concept for mass terms, so one has to circumlocute, or else
use implication. For example, if some clay is made into a statue of
the Baby Goliath, and then squeezed down into a lump again, we can't
really call the Baby Goliath a phase of the clay, but have to refer
to the clay in terms of its being a lump: "That clay was a statue of
the Baby Goliath, but now it is not." means, more precisely that that
lump of clay was once a statue of the Baby Goliath, where 'lump' is a
count noun, and a sortal.
'Data', incidentally, is often treated as a mass term, but it has a
singular, 'datum'. So the rules are not hard and fast. Information
and data are obviously closely linked, so one could have a
grammatical nightmare if one wasn't careful, but idiomatic English
speakers have no trouble (most of the time -- I could tell you a
story of my boss at the Dominion Observatory, but I digress).
Cheers,
John
----------
Professor John Collier [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
http://www.ukzn.ac.za/undphil/collier/index.html
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