Dear Pedro and colleagues,
"Agency" is missing. It is factually minimized under the form of constraints and uncertainty. Communication occurs because some kind of "emitter" agent operates as a "source" and sends "messages" via an appropriate "channel" to some "receiver". I have put quotations to the standard Shannonian terms. My central question: could there be any form of non-living agency? And then, What different forms of life could receive the "agent" label? How being alive biases the non-at-all-free communication game? For example: if one constructs a citation matrix with the cited papers in the rows and the citing papers in the columns, citing can be considered as action and cited as structure. There is a mutual information between cited and citing, but the effect of citing on cited is different from the effect of cited on citing. Thus, one can evaluate agency. See also: The Production of Probabilistic Entropy in Structure/Action Contingency Relations, <http://www.leydesdorff.net/jses95/jses95.pdf> Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 18 (1995) 339-56. <http://www.leydesdorff.net/jtsb93/index.htm> "Structure"/"Action" Contingencies and the Model of Parallel Distributed Processing, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 23 (1993) 47-77. A similar argument can be made for evidence (agency) in relation to theory (structure): Knowledge Representations, Bayesian Inferences, and Empirical Science Studies, <http://www.leydesdorff.net/ssi92/index.htm> Social Science Information 31 (1992, nr. 2), 213-37. If so wished, I can provide pdf. These questions will be refined next days... Best--Pedro Best, Loet _____ Loet Leydesdorff Professor, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] ; <http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ Associate Faculty, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> SPRU, University of Sussex; Guest Professor <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/> Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> ISTIC, Beijing; Visiting Professor, <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/> Birkbeck, University of London; <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en> http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
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