Re: [asa] Information and knowledge

On 4/13/07, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I do not, however, entirely agree with this. The mathematics of
> information theory have potential philosophical consequences. Read the
> blurb from Floridi and check out his resources on Philosophy and Ethics of
> Information. It's a burgeoning field that has nothing directly to do with
> ID, and it most certainly draws on Shannon, Weiner, etc.
>

Floridi correctly identifies what he calls communication theory and the rest
of the world calls information theory deals with syntactic information.
There are other theories that deal with semantic information which he
unfortunately also calls "information". Since the word information is being
equivocated here I will just proceed with using the terms communication
theory, syntax, and semantics. Communication theory deals with syntax and
only syntax. Design is a semantic concept and not a syntactical one.
Application of Shannon or any derivatives of Shannon tells us nothing about
design because it deals only with syntax. ID's application of communication
theory to infer intelligent design is thus a category error. The irony of
this should not escape anyone because a category error is a
syntactically correct statement that is semantically meaningless.

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Received on Fri Apr 13 15:32:01 2007