The Notion of Information

Manuel Campos (Departament de Lògica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain)

The term “information” has an obvious ordinary use: from information we obtain in our interaction with the world, we are capable of acquiring knowledge about it. Assuming a realist point of view, information thus interpreted (measurable in propositional terms) is acquired by the subject through inductive fallible processes based, in part, on the recognition of natural correlations. This approach to the notion of information has, however, as a counterpart, that it seems to render the notion redundant.

• Full article published in Triple C, 7(2), special issue What is really information?
• Spanish article published in ¿Qué es información?, 2008

 

One sense of information: A quick tutorial to Information-theoretic logic

J.M. SAGÜILLO (Universidad Santiago de Compostela)

One of the multiple meanings of the word ‘information’ is given implicitly in the postulates and conditions of information-theoretic logic (I-T-L). The tradition of looking at logical phenomena from an informational stance goes back as far as the XIX century. Logicians such as Boole, De Morgan, Jevons, and Venn already suggested that deducing is a sort of unpacking the information already contained in given premises. In the XX century this tradition is recovered by Carnap and Bar Hillel, Cohen and Nagel, and more recently by Corcoran. John Corcoran has articulated a specific information-theoretic viewpoint of logic with its own particular characteristics. I intend to explain the basic ideas of I-T-L by motivating their philosophical underpinnings. One desideratum is to complement and to shed light on some of the philosophical shortcomings of the nowadays paradigmatic model-theoretic concept of logical consequence. Another is to provide a brief sample of questions to be newly addressed form the I-T-L, such as insufficiency as well as redundancy of information in a given axiom-set.

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