Précis of Knowledge and the Flow of Information

Abstract

A theory of information is developed in which the informational content of a signal (structure, event) can be specified. This content is expressed by a sentence describing the condition at a source on which the properties of a signal depend in some lawful way. Information, as so defined, though perfectly objective, has the kind of semantic property (intentionality) that seems to be needed for an analysis of cognition. Perceptual knowledge is an information-dependent internal state with a content corresponding to the information producing it. This picture of knowledge captures most of what makes knowledge an important cpistcmological notion. It also avoids many of the problems infecting traditional justificational accounts of knowledge (knowledge as [justified, true belief’). Our information pickup systems are characterized in terms of the way they encode incoming information (perception) for further cognitive processing. Our perceptual experience is distinguished from our perceptual beliefs by the different way sensory information is encoded in these internal structures. Our ropositional attitudes – those (unlike knowledge) having a content that can be either true or false (e.g., belief) – are described in terms of the way internal (presumably neural) structures acquire during learning a certain information-carrying role. The content of these structures (whether true or false) is identified with the kind of information they were developed to carry

Perception without Awareness

“…In the second form information, though not available as a reason to do (or believe) anything, helps to determine how we do whatever we (with or without reasons) choose to do (Clark 2001;Jacob and Jeannerod 2003). This kind of picture also lies behind efforts by Dretske (1981), Evans (1982), and Tye (1995, to conceive of perceptual experience (each is talking about conscious perceptual experience) as that portion of incoming information available to cognitive centers for fixation of belief (reasons to believe) and goal selection (reasons to do).…”

“…I simply assume a satisfactory account is available. If my own account (Dretske 1981) is deemed unsatisfactory (Haugeland 1996 thinks it is), the reader is free to supply his or her own. If perception-conscious or unconscious-of physical objects (newspapers, gas gauges, people) is deemed possible, some such account must be presupposed.…”

Get the Latest Upgrade: Functionalism 6.3.1

“…Briefly, a mental state has its content in virtue of some combination of the natural information it carries [ Dretske 1981Dretske , 1988 and its teleological function [Millikan 1984[Millikan , 1993, which may include the way it is used by the brain to drive behavior.…”

Using Formal Concept Analysis and Information Flow for Modelling and Sharing Common Semantics: Lessons Learnt and Emergent Issues

“…Building upon Shannon's probabilistic theory, and using his insight of seeing information as an objective commodity that can be studied independently of the means of transmission, Dretske developed a qualitative, semantic theory of information, in which he was able to formulate a definition of information content of concrete messages [9]. However, the probabilistic approach did not captured satisfactorily the semantic link between the information generated at the source and that arriving at the receiver.…”

“…The research areas originate from a standard classification system, the ACM Computing Classification System 8 . We also used a second data set, the Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE) journal from Else-vier 9 . In this context we had the same articles (objects) as in the ACM context, but this time we classified them against the DKE's own classification system, Elsevier's classification of DKE fields 10 , which uses 27 research areas (attributes) for classifying the aforementioned articles.…”