Michel
this is an interesting question and you can find a plausible answer for
if you take a look at the etymology of this word.
http://www.capurro.de/infoconcept.html
Latin informatio as a noun is used, as far as I know, only in the
singular and means giving form to something in a 'material' as well as
in a 'spiritual' (education, communication) sense. It would be possible
to say in (ancient and medieval) Latin informationes but not in the
sense we use it today. It would mean different processes of formation,
not 'pieces' of 'information'.
The ontological (or 'material') use of 'informatio' becomes (partly)
obsolete in Modernity (and is rediscovered today). In English the use of
the plural goes back to the 14th Century, but is rare later. The use of
the singular is a reminiscence also in the case of British empiricists
who prefer the term impressions of Aristotelic philosophy probably
because it sounds less Aristotelian .
Nevertheless the epistemological context that prevails in Modernity
(information = communicating something to someone) (since the
ontological sense became obsolete with the disappearence of Aristotelian
philosophy) makes possible (and meaningful...) the use of the plural (as
in the case of French, Spanish, Italian)
Take a look at this text quoted from the article by Capurro/Hjoerland I
mentioned before (or go directly to my Dissertation written in German
some 30 years ago! http://www.capurro.de/info.html where you will find
in detail many of the sources):
Peters (1988, p. 12) asserts that Bacon's (1967) Great Instauration:
criticizes the logicians of his day for receiving as conclusive the
immediate informations of the sense... Instead, those informations
must be subjected, according to Bacon, to a sure plan that will sort the
true form the false. Though Bacon's usage may not appear irreconcilable
with our own, the inverted pluralization should tip us off that he does
not completely share our prejudices (we should say the information of
the senses). In fact, this locution exemplifies a perfectly hylomorphic
notion of the workings of the senses: they are a kind of matter (wax
being a favorite empiricist instance) on which objects of the world may
leave their shapes or stamps. What is interesting here is that the site
of information is being shifted from the world at large to the human
mind and senses. This shift requires no break with scholastic notions of
mind or nature.
Indeed this epistemological notion of information(s), particularly the
wax metaphor, was a key higher-level concept throughout the Middle Ages.
Consider Locke's (1995, p. 373) statement: No existence of anything
without us, but only of GOD, can certainly be known further than our
senses inform us. Peters (1988, pp. 12-13) concludes:
Information was readily deployed in empiricist philosophy (though it
played a less important role than other words such as impression or
idea) because it seemed to describe the mechanics of sensation: objects
in the world in-form the senses. But sensation is entirely different
from form — the one is sensual, the other intellectual; the one is
subjective, the other objective. My sensation of things is fleeting,
elusive, and idiosynchratic [sic]. For Hume, especially, sensory
experience is a swirl of impressions cut off from any sure link to the
real world... In any case, the empiricist problematic was how the mind
is informed by sensations of the world. At first informed meant shaped
by; later it came to mean received reports from. As its site of action
drifted from cosmos to consciousness, the term's sense shifted from
unities (Aristotle's forms) to units (of sensation). Information came
less and less to refer to internal ordering or formation, since
empiricism allowed for no preexisting intellectual forms outside of
sensation itself. Instead, information came to refer to the fragmentary,
fluctuating, haphazard stuff of sense. Information, like the early
modern worldview more generally, shifted from a divinely ordered cosmos
to a system governed by the motion of corpuscles. Under the tutelage of
empiricism, information gradually moved from structure to stuff, from
form to substance, from intellectual order to sensory impulses.
Later developments on etymology are partly covered by the next section.
Here we will conclude that the modern uses of information show a
transition period in which the medieval ontological concept of molding
matter is not just abandoned but reshaped under empirical and
epistemological premises. It has been extremely interesting to observe
how the concept of information is closely connected to views of
knowledge. This conclusion is important when we later analyze the
concept of information in information science, because it indicates a
severly neglected connection between theories of information and
theories of knowledge.
Probably the opposition between Aristotle and Empircism is less stronger
