Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id NAA24996 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 11 Feb 2000 13:37:05 GMT Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2000 00:35:37 +1100 (EST) From: John Wilkins <wilkins@wehi.EDU.AU> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: More on what memes are made of In-Reply-To: <200002110116.UAA03564@mail1.lig.bellsouth.net> Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.05.10002120027010.23627-100000@wehiz.wehi.EDU.AU> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Nobody said that communication between people is physical interactions
between things and nothing more, but it is *at least* physical
interactions between things, and as such cannot escape the physical
limitations on communications. It doesn't really matter if meaning is
communicated from one perspective - that of communications theory. Apart
from the obvious comment that we do not have direct access into the minds
or in some cases even the cultures of the communicants (hence the problem
of the hermeneutic circle), *any* analysis of information must be
consonant with the technical notion of Shannon-Weaver information, and all
the other related notions such as Algorithmic Information, Fisher
Information and so on.
Any other technical notion of information you may have in mind will need
to be a fair bit more rigorous than the intuitive sense appealed to by
semiotics and hermeneutics. Attempts have been made in the philosophy of
language, but they still aren't fully explicated. Usually they either go
for a referential notion qua Dummett and Davidson, a causal notion qua
Kitcher and Putnam, or appeal to some Platonist notion qua Frege. If they
rely upon decidability, as does Dretske's account, they *must* be
Shannon-Weaver friendly, since a decision is a binary piece of
information, ie, a bit.
"Common sense" notions of information are misleading and generally false.
John Wilkins
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute
Sending from home on (ugh) pine
On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Joe E. Dees wrote:
> > I too have degrees in analytic philosophy, and indeed I'm still getting
> > another one, but although I've read Frege, Dummett, Davidson, and
> > Dretske, et al I still do not see how meaning qua representation escapes
> > the constraints upon transmitted information sensu Shannon-Weaver or
> > Kolmogorov-Chaitin, etc.
> >
> > Peircean semiotics is taken very seriously by a number of people I
> > respect, but they all recognise that information and content are two
> > different aspects of any message and that they do not relate directly.
> >
> Perhaps you should read the existential and hermeneutic
> phenomenologists as well as the Greimassian semioticians, so
> that you do not reduce communications between people to
> physical interactions between things, and nothing more.
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