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Semiotic information theory


Semiotic information theory considers the information content of signs and expressions as it is conceived within the semiotic or sign-relational framework developed by Charles Sanders Peirce.

The good of information is its use in reducing our uncertainty about some issue that comes before us. Generally speaking, uncertainty comes in several flavors, and so the information that serves to reduce uncertainty can be applied in several different ways. The situations of uncertainty that human agents commonly find themselves facing have been investigated under many headings, literally for ages, and the classifications that subtle thinkers arrived at long before the dawn of modern information theory still have their uses in setting the stage of an introduction.

For example, the philosopher-scientist Immanuel Kant divided the principal questions of human existence into three parts:

The third question is a bit too subtle for the present frame of discussion, but the first and second are easily recognizable as staking out the two main axes of information theory, namely, the dual dimensions of information and control. Roughly the same space of concerns is elsewhere spanned by the dual axes of competence and performance, specification and optimization, or just plain knowledge and skill.

A question of what is true is a descriptive question, and there exist what are called descriptive sciences devoted to answering descriptive questions about any domain of phenomena that one might care to name.

A question of what should be done, in other words, what must be done by way of achieving a given aim, is a normative question, and there exist what are called normative sciences devoted to answering normative questions about any domain of problems that one might care to address.


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