Lee,
Grrr, yourself! T [NST==>larding below!<==nst] His is a very pure example of the semantic drift that drives me crazy, in that "the lab bench meaning" was the *first* meaning: the word DID NOT EXIST before it was coined (in its adjectival form, in German, by composing badly-understood-by-its-coiner morphemes from Greek, by the physicist Clausius) in 1865. Tait (an early knot theorist and somewhat of a religious nut, as well as a thermodynamic theorist) brought it into English three years later, but changed its sign (more or less). By 1875 Maxwell had changed it back to what it now is. During this period of time the concept expressed by "entropy" [NST==>OK. In the spirit of checking the recipe after the cake is in the oven, I looked on Wikipedia. OH BOY, are you right about this one! If Wikipedia is correct, it turns out that a mathematical symbol for entropy predates the name. Bathe in your rightness at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_entropy#1854_definition<==nst] became clearer, as did the whole field of thermodynamics, and eventually a good mathematical formalism for it developed--"good" in the sense that it "made sense" of results from "the lab bench" by reducing downwards (if I have your phrase right? I dunno, maybe upwards, or both ways?) so as to define "entropy" of a macroscopic system in terms of the statistical behavior of the ensemble of microscopic entities participating in that system[NST==>I am always abit uneasy about defining something we are frustrated by every day in terms of something so small and numerous that we will never see it. <==nst] (1) , and (2) facilitate calculations (some exact, some asymptotic) of the "entropy" (and similar thermodynamic quantities) which (3) often agreed with "lab bench" observations. When Shannon came along to study signals and noise in communication channels, he had the insight to see that *the same mathematical formalism* could be applied. He did *not* have the insight (or dumb luck) of Clausius, so he overloaded the already-existing Common English word "information" with a new, technical, mathematical meaning. [NST==>Ok, Hoist by my own petard. As you full well know, I HATE what people do with the concept of information. So, perhaps I have to modify my position to assert that sometimes the search for a common core fails and results in a core divorce. <==nst] *That* rather quickly allowed visionaries, hucksters, and cocktail partiers to talk about "information theory" without understanding much or any of its technicalities. It also (I suspect; but here I am arguing ahead of what data I happen to have around, so this may merely be my default Enraged Bloviator talking) encouraged the same gangs of semantic vandals to appropriate the word "entropy" to their various malign uses. (For what it's worth, the OED doesn't have citations of non-specialist uses of thermodynamic "entropy" until the mid 1930s--by Freud [as translated by a pair of Stracheys, not by Jones] and a Christian apologist; non-specialist uses of information-theoretic "entropy" appear to hold off until the mid 1960s.) So, to whatever extent the vernacular ("cocktail party") meaning(s) of entropy has or have a common core with the technical ("lab bench") meaning(s), it is because that core REMAINS FROM THE TECHNICAL MEANING after the semantic shift, and not because (as I *think* you mean to imply in your sentence containing the word "positivist") there is some ("common core") concept which BOTH the technical AND the vernacular meanings are INDEPENDENT ATTEMPTS to "reliably measure". If "we have a responsibility to try to find" anything, I think it is to try to find *why* some people insist on (1) glomming onto bits of jargon with very well-defined in-domain meanings, (2) ignoring much or all of those meanings while re-applying the jargon (often without ANY definition to speak of) in a new domain, while (3) refusing to let go of some (or all) of the Impressive Consequences derived in the original domain by derivations that (4) depend on the jettisoned definitions (and the rest of the technical apparatus of the original domain). [NST==>I can both share the rage and frustration of your Bloviator and yet know, deep down, that this has something to do with the crucial role of metaphor in science. Even Kuhn, right?, had something positive to say about having conceptual Genies escape from one scientific bottle and infect the next. Perhaps I have to take a kind of pragmatist position here: If we don't assume (wrongly) that all uses of a word avert to a common core, then we will never have the sort of conversation in which the different meanings get articulated and the forementioned frauds (and Freuds) and hucksters get exposed. But I am way out of my league here, am having way too much fun, and it is way past time for me to stop. Thanks for your patience, everybody, and, in some cases, for your Godlike forbearance. <==nst] ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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