Re: [Fis] information(s)
Bob
maybe you would like to analyze this (metonymical) use of information in
Shakespeare's Coriolanus
(...) But reason with the fellow,
Before you punish him, where he heard this,
Lest you shall chance to whip your information,
And beat the messenger who bids beware
Of what is to be dreaded.
(Coriolanus, Act IV, Scene IV).
Here is/was my interpretation http://www.capurro.de/trita.htm
kind regards
Rafael
Hi Rafael - here is Chapter 2 - thanks for your interest and I hope
to have your feedback - Bob
On 9-Dec-08, at 10:09 AM, Rafael Capurro wrote:
Bob,
very exciting! please send me a copy of your book once it is printed.
The fact that in early English information was use in the plural
maybe means that only the processes were meant not the idea of
pieces of information. What is your impression (!) on this?
kind regards
Rafael
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
Re: [Fis] information(s)
Dear colleagues, In Dutch, the two words/concepts would mean something differently. We can use units of information (eenheden van informatie) like in English. The plural (informaties), however, would be used more colloquially as the results of an inquiry. I assume that this is similar in French. Best wishes, Loet Loet Leydesdorff Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam. Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/ -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Collier Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2008 10:12 AM To: Michel PETITJEAN; fis@listas.unizar.es Subject: Re: [Fis] information(s) 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
[Fis] information(s)
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 ? Thank you very much. Michel. Michel Petitjean, DSV/iBiTec-S/SB2SM (CNRS URA 2096), CEA Saclay, bat. 528, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France. Phone: +331 6908 4006 / Fax: +331 6908 4007 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://petitjeanmichel.free.fr/itoweb.petitjean.html ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] information(s)
Michel -- Of course, a countable quantity certainly inheres in one aspect of information -- the Shannon version. But in English we would not say 'many informations'. Rather 'much information' could be used. 'Many' does have a countable sense of individual pieces, while 'much' is a holistic locution. 'More' is also holistic, insofar as it does not specify particular amounts. It is directive toward increase, just as 'less' is directional toward decrease. But surely there are equivalent words in French for 'much', 'more', 'less', etc. Also, it would be possible in English to say 'many pieces / bits of information'. But here we have added the sense of individual bits that may be countable. Other aspects of information, such as 'pattern', 'constraint' 'difference' might have numerical interpretations -- 'great difference', 'large constraint', 'complicated pattern', but I don't think they are intrinsically quantitative in themselves. STAN 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 ? Thank you very much. Michel. Michel Petitjean, DSV/iBiTec-S/SB2SM (CNRS URA 2096), CEA Saclay, bat. 528, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France. Phone: +331 6908 4006 / Fax: +331 6908 4007 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://petitjeanmichel.free.fr/itoweb.petitjean.html ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] information(s)
Dear FIS Colleagues, For me, information is a typical English collective noun, with no plural in s, that subtends a number of individuals. These are designated by some modifying phrase, as a piece of information. But I slightly disagree with Guy, since I see the distribution not from zero (the empty set), but from the smallest real value of one bit of information. Merci, Michel. It's good to think these things through from time to time. Cheers, Joseph - Original Message - From: Michel PETITJEAN [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2008 3:35 PM Subject: [Fis] information(s) 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 ? Thank you very much. Michel. Michel Petitjean, DSV/iBiTec-S/SB2SM (CNRS URA 2096), CEA Saclay, bat. 528, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France. Phone: +331 6908 4006 / Fax: +331 6908 4007 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://petitjeanmichel.free.fr/itoweb.petitjean.html ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] information(s)
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
