Dear Mark,
Can you, please, explain "transduction" in more detail? Perhaps, you can
also provide examples?
Best,
Loet
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of
Sussex;
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>,
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;
Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University of London;
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
------ Original Message ------
From: "Mark Johnson" <[email protected]>
To: "Loet Leydesdorff" <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]; "FIS Group" <[email protected]>
Sent: 3/4/2018 1:03:17 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] A Paradox
Dear Loet, all,
I agree with this. Our construction of reality is never that of a
single system: there are always multiple systems and they interfere
with each other in the way that you suggest. I would suggest that
behind all the ins-and-outs of codification or information and meaning
is a very simple principle of transduction. I often wonder if Luhmann’s
theory isn’t really that different from Shannon’s (who talks about
transduction endlessly). The fact that you've made this connection
explicit and empirically justifiable is, I think, the most important
aspect of your work. You may disagree, but if we kept transduction and
jettisoned the rest of Luhmann's theory, I think we still maintain the
essential point.
There is some resonance (interesting word!) with McCulloch’s model of
perception, where he considered “drome” (literally, “course-ing”,
“running”) circuits each bearing on the other:
http://vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/mcculloch_heterarchy.pdf (look at the
pictures on pages 2 and 3) Perception, he argued was a syn-drome: a
combination of inter-effects between different circuits. There is a
logic to this, but it is not the logic of set theory. McCulloch wrote
about it. I think it’s not a million miles away from Joseph’s/Lupasco’s
logic.
Best wishes,
Mark
On 4 March 2018 at 07:03, Loet Leydesdorff <[email protected]>
wrote:
Dear Xueshan Yan,
May I suggest moving from a set-theoretical model to a model of two
(or more) helices. The one dimension may be the independent and the
other the dependent variable at different moments of time. One can
research this empirically; for example, in bodies of texts.
In my own models, I declare a third level of codes of communication
organizing the meanings in different directions. Meaning both codes
the information and refers to horizons of meaning being specifically
coded.
Might this work as an answer to your paradox?
Best,
Loet
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of
Sussex;
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>,
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;
Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University of
London;
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
<http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en>
------ Original Message ------
From: "Xueshan Yan" <[email protected]>
To: "FIS Group" <[email protected]>
Sent: 3/4/2018 2:17:01 AM
Subject: Re: [Fis] A Paradox
Dear Dai, Søren, Karl, Sung, Syed, Stan, Terry, and Loet,
I am sorry to reply you late, but I have thoroughly read every post
about the paradox and they have brought me many inspirations, thank
you. Now I offer my responses as follows:
Dai, metaphor research is an ancient topic in linguistics, which
reveals the relationship between tenor and vehicle, ground and
figure, target and source based on rhetoric. But where is our
information? It looks like Syed given the answer: "Information is the
container of meaning." If I understand it right, we may have this
conclusion from it: Information is the carrier of meaning. Since we
all acknowledge that sign is the carrier of information, the task of
our Information Science will immediately become something like an
intermediator between Semiotics (study of sign) and Semantics (study
of meaning), this is what we absolutely want not to see. For a long
time, we have been hoping that the goal of Information Science is so
basic that it can explain all information phenomenon in the
information age, it just like what Sung expects, which was consisted
of axioms, or theorems or principles, so it can end all the debates
on information, meaning, data, etc., but according to this view, it
is very difficult to complete the missions. Syed, my statement is "A
grammatically correct sentence CONTAINS information rather than the
sentence itself IS information."
Søren believes that the solution to this paradox is to establish a
new discipline which level is more higher than the level of
Information Science as well as Linguistics, such as his
Cybersemiotics. I have no right to review your opinion, because I
haven't seen your book Cybersemiotics, I don't know its content, same
as I don't know what the content of Biosemiotics is, but my view is
that Peirce's Semiotics can't dissolve this paradox.
Karl thought: "Information and meaning appear to be like key and
lock." which are two different things. Without one, the existence of
another will lose its value, this is a bit like the paradox about hen
and egg. I don't know how to answer this point. However, for your
"The text may be an information for B, while it has no information
value for A. The difference between the subjective." "‘Information’
is synonymous with ‘new’." these claims are the classic debates in
Information Science, a typical example is given by Mark Burgin in his
book: "A good mathematics textbook contains a lot of information for
a mathematics student but no information for a professional
mathematician." For this view, Terry given his good answer: One
should firstly label what context and paradigm they are using to
define their use of the term "information." I think this is effective
and first step toward to construct a general theory about
information, if possible.
For Stan's "Information is the interpretation of meaning, so
transmitted information has no meaning without interpretation." I can
only disagree with it kindly. The most simple example from genetics
is: an egg cell accepts a sperm cell, a fertilized egg contains a set
of effective genetic information from paternal and maternal cell,
here information transmission has taken place, but is there any
"meaning" and "explanation"? We should be aware that meaning only is
a human or animal phenomena and it does not be used in any other
context like plant or molecule or cell etc., this is the key we
dissolve the paradox.
In general, I have not seen any effective explanation of this paradox
so far.
Best wishes,
Xueshan
From: Syed Ali [mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>]
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:10 PM
To: Sungchul Ji <[email protected]>
Cc: Terrence W. DEACON <[email protected]>; Xueshan Yan
<[email protected]>; FIS Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Fis] A Paradox
Dear All:
If a non English speaking individual saw the newspaper headline
“Earthquake Occurred in Armenia Last Night”: would that be
"information?"
My belief is - Yes. But he or she would have no idea what it was
about- the meaning would be : Possibly "something " as opposed to the
meaning an English speaking individual would draw.
In both situations there would be still be meaning - A for the non
English speaking and B for the English speaking.
Conclusion: Information is the container of meaning.
Please critique.
Syed
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On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 5:43 PM, Sungchul Ji
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi FISers,
I am not sure whether I am a Procrustes (bed) or a Peirce
(triadomaniac), but I cannot help but seeing an ITR (irreducible
Triadic Relation) among Text, Context and Meaning, as depicted in
Figure 1.
f
g
Context --------> Text
---------> Meaning
|
^
|
|
|
|
|_________________________|
h
“The meaning of a text is irreducibly dependent on its context.”
“Text, context, and meaning are irreducibly triadic.” The “TCM
principle” (?)
Figure 1. The Procrustean bed, the Peircean triadomaniac, or both ?
f = Sign production; g = Sign interpretation; h = Correlation or
information flow.
According to this 'Peircean/Procrustesian' diagram, both what Terry
said and what Xueshan said may be valid. Although their thinking
must have been irreducibly triadic (if Peirce is right), Terry may
have focused on (or prescinded) Steps f and h, while Xueshan
prescinded Steps g and h, although he did indicate that his
discussion was limited to the context of human information and human
meaning (i.e., Step f). Or maybe there are many other
interpretations possible, depending on the interpreter of the posts
under discussion and the ITR diagram.
There are an infinite number of examples of algebraic operations:
2+3 = 5, 3 - 1 = 2, 20 x 45 = 900, etc., etc.
If I say "2 + 3 = 5", someone may say, but you missed "20 x 45 =
900". In other words, no matter what specific algebraic operation I
may come up with, my opponent can always succeed in coming up with
an example I missed. The only solution to such an end-less debate
would be to discover the axioms of algebra, at which level, there
cannot be any debate. When I took an abstract algebra course as an
undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, in 1962-5, I
could not believe that underlying all the complicated algebraic
calculations possible, there are only 5 axioms
(https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-the-5-basic-axioms-of-algebra
<https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-the-5-basic-axioms-of-algebra>).
So can it be that there are the axioms (either symbolic,
diagrammatic, or both) of information science waiting to be
discovered, which will end all the heated debates on information,
meaning, data, etc. ?
All the best.
Sung
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Fis <[email protected]> on behalf of Terrence W.
DEACON <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2018 1:13 PM
To: Xueshan Yan
Cc: FIS Group
Subject: Re: [Fis] A Paradox
It is so easy to get into a muddle mixing technical uses of a term
with colloquial uses, and add a dash of philosophy and
discipline-specific terminology and it becomes mental quicksand.
Terms like 'information' and 'meaning" easily lead us into these
sorts of confusions because they have so many context-sensitive and
pardigm-specific uses. This is well exhibited in these FIS
discusions, and is a common problem in many interdisciplinary
discussions. I have regularly requested that contributors to FIS try
to label which paradigm they are using to define their use of the
term "information' in these posts, but sometimes, like fish unaware
that they are in water, one forgets that there can be alternative
paradigms (such as the one Søren suggests).
So to try and avoid overly technical usage can you be specific about
what you intend to denote with these terms.
E.g. for the term "information" are you referring to statisitica
features intrinsic to the character string with respect to possible
alternatives, or what an interpreter might infer that this English
sentence refers to, or whether this reference carries use value or
special significance for such an interpreter?
And e.g. for the term 'meaning' are you referring to what a
semantician would consider its underlying lexical structure, or
whether the sentence makes any sense, or refers to anything in the
world, or how it might impact some reader?
Depending how you specify your uses your paradox will become
irresolvable or dissolve.
— Terry
On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 1:47 AM, Xueshan Yan <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear colleagues,
In my teaching career of Information Science, I was often puzzled
by the following inference, I call it Paradox of Meaning and
Information or Armenia Paradox. In order not to produce unnecessary
ambiguity, I state it below and strictly limit our discussion
within the human context.
Suppose an earthquake occurred in Armenia last night and all of the
main media of the world have given the report about it. On the
second day, two students A and B are putting forward a dialogue
facing the newspaper headline “Earthquake Occurred in Armenia Last
Night”:
Q: What is the MEANING contained in this sentence?
A: An earthquake occurred in Armenia last night.
Q: What is the INFORMATION contained in this sentence?
A: An earthquake occurred in Armenia last night.
Thus we come to the conclusion that MEANING is equal to
INFORMATION, or strictly speaking, human meaning is equal to human
information. In Linguistics, the study of human meaning is called
Human Semantics; In Information Science, the study of human
information is called Human Informatics.
Historically, Human Linguistics has two definitions: 1, It is the
study of human language; 2, It, also called Anthropological
Linguistics or Linguistic Anthropology, is the historical and
cultural study of a human language. Without loss of generality, we
only adopt the first definitions here, so we regard Human
Linguistics and Linguistics as the same.
Due to Human Semantics is one of the disciplines of Linguistics and
its main task is to deal with the human meaning, and Human
Informatics is one of the disciplines of Information Science and
its main task is to deal with the human information; Due to human
meaning is equal to human information, thus we have the following
corollary:
A: Human Informatics is a subfield of Human Linguistics.
According to the definition of general linguists, language is a
vehicle for transmitting information, therefore, Linguistics is a
branch of Human Informatics, so we have another corollary:
B: Human Linguistics is a subfield of Human Informatics.
Apparently, A and B are contradictory or logically unacceptable. It
is a paradox in Information Science and Linguistics. In most cases,
a settlement about the related paradox could lead to some important
discoveries in a subject, but how should we understand this
paradox?
Best wishes,
Xueshan
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