This is a Survey of previous blog and wiki posts on the Semiotic Theory Of Information. All my projects are exploratory in essence but this line of inquiry is more open-ended than most. The question is:
What is information and how does it impact the spectrum of activities that answer to the name of inquiry?
Setting out on what would become his lifelong quest to explore and explain the “Logic of Science”, C.S. Peirce pierced the veil of historical confusions enclosing the issue and fixed on what he called the “laws of information” as the needed key to solving the puzzle. This was in 1865 and 1866, detailed in his lectures at Harvard University and the Lowell Institute.
Fast forward to the present and I see the Big Question as follows. Having gone through the exercise of comparing and contrasting Peirce’s theory of information, however much it remains in a rough-hewn state, with Shannon’s paradigm that so pervasively informs the ongoing revolution in our understanding and use of information today, I have reason to believe that Peirce’s idea is root and branch more general and has the potential, with due development, to resolve many mysteries that still bedevil our grasp of inference, information, and inquiry.
Inference, Information, Inquiry
- InterSciWiki • Information = Comprehension × Extension
- Blog Series • { Information = Comprehension × Extension }
Excursions
Blog Dialogs
Reference
- Peirce, C.S. (1867), “Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension”. Online.
