Banno

A rigid education system might offer the student a multiple choice question about the date of the bombing, and conclude that she has the knowledge. A ...

The title is intentionally a provocation. I'll posit that any information transfer that takes place is incidental; the main game consists in what we d...

Google translation works by taking vast collections of already translated documents and examining statistically the recurrence of the words to be tran...

Popcorn or hotdogs?

Knowing such a date consists in so much more than the bare recitation. It's about knowing that it was after the start of the war in Europe, before the...

You don't have to be here if you don't want to.

Knowledge... Folk seem to think of it only in terms of knowing that...; they forget about knowing how... I've argued that knowledge being seen as just...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-30/australian-men-aged-over-85-have-the-highest-rate-of-suicide/8569740 Old news, but things have not improved. Th...

well, yes. That’s rather the point here.

there is a way of understanding rules that is not given in words, but consists in implementing the rule. PI

What's going on here? Is the point only for the student to be able to make the noises 'Pearl Harbour was bombed on December 7th, 1941' on demand? Then...

This is pretty close to what I would say, except for the notion that meaning is assigned to the parts of language. The implication of that would be th...

Knowledge might be a bit more complex. But your idea would be part of it. Knowing involves some sort of rule following....

Not without making use of that information...

So you think my suggestions would lead to some form of relativism?

This is good. Proper analytic stuff. My posit is that meaning is information doing work. Frank's comeback is that if this were so, then every meaningf...

Well, yes I did, since in that meaning is what is done with information, meaning is not the sort of thing that moves...

I thought it too obscure.

I'll just leave this here; have a think about it.

OK - real life beckons, but we might come back to this.

Did we have this discussion before?

I doubt that. You made the assumption that I, and others involved in the discussion, did not have at least a basic grasp of information theory, despit...

I was asking you what their import was; make your point. But given your name and your comment about god, perhaps 'trivial' is how you roll...

I think that a bit trivial. To know something is to act in certain ways.

OK - I understood Shannons entropy equation as a definition of information, but I may have read too much into that.

Why?

OK...

As usual I am leaving the definitions open, but with a watchful eye on where they go. The best articulated definition comes from information theory. A...

Hmm. I'd happily posit that information does not have meaning until it does work. I'm pushing the physics metaphor here, intentionally.

Better.

:razz: Or Harry's inability to see when a question has been answered...

Ah. Better.

Ah! This is new to me. Must take a deeper look. Cheers.

So it seems from this that you agree with the title of this thread?

Information theory treats the world as information - information being the order in a given system.

An excellent point. Does information mean anything without a decipherer?

Now, a signal has a location - or set of locations... And entropy had a location... And information can be understood as Shannon entropy... So... Well...

My other reply was a bit brief. I have in mind the sort of acts Austin wrote about in Speech Acts. So while asking of the salt does not move the salt,...

Yeah - @"Terrapin Station"?

Ah. That language is a subset of information transfer. It's a tempting notion. And to some extent is doubtless right. Wittgenstein observes that there...

Oh, Mr T, this is a Grand Topic! Just watch...

As if language were all nouns.

What moved?

Yep. As well as them hereabouts what think likewise.

"I name this child Bitter Crank".

Here's a report on the bombing of Guernica... https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/941/856/1ae12e439454b805e232cd3fab04a8eb_original.jpg?ixlib=rb-2.1....

...so context is important, which is part of what we are doing, not part of the transmitted information. Hence, it is what we are doing that counts, n...

So, who agree with Harry?

Perhaps, you not being a native speaker of English, I am explaining to you how to make use of "It's raining". Which fits in exactly with the OP. It's ...

I'm kinda thinking that the definitions of information and of language will come out in the wash. Yeah, I don't agree. Communication has information a...