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.
