"Information" in most, if not all, of its connotations seems to rest upon the notion of selective power. The Shannon theory regards the information s… - Colin Cherry
"Information" in most, if not all, of its connotations seems to rest upon the notion of selective power. The Shannon theory regards the information source, in emitting the signals (signs), as exerting a selective power upon the ensemble of messages. In the Carnap-Bar-Hillel semantic theory, the information content of statements relates to the selective power they exert upon ensembles of states. Again, at its pragmatic level, in true communicative situations [...] a source of information has a certain value to a recipient, where "value" may be regarded as a "selective power." Gabor, for example, observes that what people value in a source of information (i.e., what they are prepared to pay for) depends upon its exclusiveness and prediction power; he cites instances of a newspaper editor hoping for a "scoop" and a racegoer receiving information from a tipster. "Exclusiveness" here implies the selecting of that one particular recipient out of the population, while the "prediction" value of information rests upon the power it gives to the recipient to select his future action, out of the whole range of prior uncertainty as to what action to take. Again, signs have the power to select responses in people, such responses depending upon a totality of conditions. Human communication channels consist of individuals in conversation, or in various forms of social intercourse. Each individual and each conversation is unique; different people react to signs in different ways, depending each upon their own past experiences and upon the environment at the time. It is such variations, such differences, which gives rise to the principal problems in the study of human communication. (p. 244-5)
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About Colin Cherry
Edward Colin Cherry (23 June 1914 – 23 November 1979) was a British cognitive scientist whose main contributions were in focused auditory attention, specifically regarding the cocktail party problem, regarding the capacity to follow one conversation while many other conversations are going on in a noisy room.
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Edward Colin Cherry
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As we survey the various stages of evolution, from the simplest one-cell creatures up to man. we see a steady improvement in the methods of learning and adaptation to a hostile world. Each step in learning ability gives better adaptation and greater chance of survival. We are carried a long way up the scale by innate reflexes and rudimentary muscular learning faculties. Habits indeed, not rational thought, assist us to surmount most of life's obstacles. <P> Most, but by no means all; for learning in the high mammals exhibits the unexplained phenomenon of "insight," which shows itself by sudden changes in behavior in learning situations -- in sudden departures from one method of organizing a task, or solving a problem, to another. Insight, expectancy, set, are the essentially "mind-like" attributes of communication, and it is these, together with the representation of concepts, which require physiological explanation. <P> At the higher end of the scale of evolution, this quality we call "mind" appears more and more prominently, but it is at our own level that learning of a radically new type has developed -- through our powers of organizing thoughts, comparing and setting them into relationship, especially with the use of language. We have a remarkable faculty of forming generalizations, of recognizing universals, of associating and developing them. It is our multitude of general concepts, and our powers of organizing them with the aid of language in varied ways, which forms the backbone of human communication, and which distinguishes us from the animals. (p. 304)
The suggestion that words are symbols for things, actions, qualities, relationships, et cetera, is naive, a gross simplification. Words are slippery customers. The full meaning of a word does not appear until it is placed in its context, and the context may serve an extremely subtle function -- as with puns, or double entendre. And even then the "meaning" will depend upon the listener, upon the speaker, upon their entire experience of language, upon their knowledge of one another, and upon the whole situation. Words do not "mean things" in a one-to-one relation like a code. Words, too, are empirical signs, not copies or models of anything; truly, onomatopoeia and gestures frequently seem to possess resemblance, but this resemblance does not bear too close examination. A cockerel may seem to say cook-a-doodle-do to an Englishman, but a German thinks it says kikeriki, and a Japanese kokke-kekko. Each can paint only with the phonetic sound of his own language.
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