Badia, Antonio (Author)
The MIT Press
Physical Details: 352
Language: English
An argument that information exists at different levels of analysis―syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic―and an exploration of the implications.Although this is the Information Age, there is no universal agreement about what information really is. Different disciplines view information differently; engineers, computer scientists, economists, linguists, and philosophers all take varying and apparently disconnected approaches. In this book, Antonio Badia distinguishes four levels of analysis brought to bear on information: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and network-based. Badia explains each of these theoretical approaches in turn, discussing, among other topics, theories of Claude Shannon and Andrey Kolomogorov, Fred Dretske's description of information flow, and ideas on receiver impact and informational interactions. Badia argues that all these theories describe the same phenomena from different perspectives, each one narrower than the previous one. The syntactic approach is the more general one, but it fails to specify when information is meaningful to an agent, which is the focus of the semantic and pragmatic approaches. The network-based approach, meanwhile, provides a framework to understand information use among agents.Badia then explores the consequences of understanding information as existing at several levels. Humans live at the semantic and pragmatic level (and at the network level as a society), computers at the syntactic level. This sheds light on some recent issues, including “fake news” (computers cannot tell whether a statement is true or not, because truth is a semantic notion) and “algorithmic bias” (a pragmatic, not syntactic concern). Humans, not computers, the book argues, have the ability to solve these issues.
...MoreReview Sarah A. Bell (2021) Review of "The Information Manifold: Why Computers Can't Solve Algorithmic Bias and Fake News". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 634-635).
Similar Citations
Thesis
Rowe, Josh;
(2011)
The Public Life of Information
Article
McCarthy, Gavan;
(2011)
Mapping the Past: Building Public Knowledge Places to Meet Community Needs
Book
Ken Steiglitz;
(2019)
The Discrete Charm of the Machine: Why the World Became Digital
Article
Fosse, Sébastien de la;
(2013)
Media and Cognition: The Relationship between Thought Structures and Media Structures
Chapter
Downey, Greg;
(2007)
The librarian and the Univac: automation and labor at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair
Thesis
Rocker, Ingeborg M.;
(2010)
Emerging Structures: Information Aesthetics and Architectures of the Digital Medium
Article
Graham, Rebecca;
(2002)
Guest Editor's Conclusion: Reflections on the Evolution of Library Computing
Article
Malone, Cheryl Knott;
(2002)
Imagining Information Retrieval in the Library: Desk Set in Historical Context
Article
Fornes, Jordi;
(2014)
Computing in Transition: The Origins of Barcelona's School of Informatics, 1976--1984
Article
R. Crooks;
(2018)
Critical Failure: Computer-Aided Instruction and the Fantasy of Information
Book
Naumann, Friedrich;
(2001)
Vom Abakus zum Internet: Die Geschichte der Informatik
Thesis
Peters, Benjamin;
(2010)
From Cybernetics to Cyber Networks: Norbert Wiener, the Soviet Internet, and the Cold War Dawn of Information Universalism
Chapter
Downey, Greg;
(2003)
The place of labor in the history of information technology revolutions
Book
Thomas S. Mullaney;
Benjamin Peters;
Mar Hicks;
Kavita Philip;
(2021)
Your Computer Is on Fire
Article
M. Hicks;
(2019)
Hacking the Cis-tem
Book
Meredith Broussard;
(2024)
More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech
Book
Aspray, William F.;
Hayes, Barbara M.;
(2011)
Everyday information: The evolution of information seeking in America
Book
Alan G. Gross;
Joseph E. Harmon;
(2016)
The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities
Book
Mark Burgess;
(2013)
In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure
Article
Maggini, Golfo;
(2013)
Bodily Presence, Absence, and their Ethical Challenges: Towards a Phenomenological Ethics of the Virtual
Be the first to comment!