Information = Comprehension × Extension • Selection 2.3
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/10/06/information-comprehension-x-extension-selection-2-a/

❝The third and last kind of representations are “symbols” or general representations. They connote attributes and so connote them as to determine what they denote. To this class belong all “words” and all “conceptions”. Most combinations of words are also symbols. A proposition, an argument, even a whole book may be, and should be, a single symbol.❞

(Peirce 1866, pp. 467–468)

Reference —

Peirce, C.S. (1866), “The Logic of Science, or, Induction and Hypothesis”, Lowell Lectures of 1866, pp. 357–504 in Writings of Charles S. Peirce : A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857–1866, Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

Resources —

Inquiry Blog • Survey of Pragmatic Semiotic Information
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/01/survey-of-pragmatic-semiotic-information-8/

OEIS Wiki • Information = Comprehension × Extension
• https://oeis.org/wiki/Information_%3D_Comprehension_%C3%97_Extension

C.S. Peirce • Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension
• https://peirce.sitehost.iu.edu/writings/v2/w2/w2_06/v2_06.htm

#Peirce #Logic #Inference #Inquiry #Abduction #Induction #Deduction #LogicOfScience
#Information #Comprehension #Extension #InformationEqualsComprehensionTimesExtension
#Semiotics #SignRelations #Icon #Index #Symbol #PragmaticSemioticInformation

Information = Comprehension × Extension • Selection 2.2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/10/06/information-comprehension-x-extension-selection-2-a/

❝In the first place there are likenesses or copies — such as “statues”, “pictures”, “emblems”, “hieroglyphics”, and the like. Such representations stand for their objects only so far as they have an actual resemblance to them — that is agree with them in some characters. The peculiarity of such representations is that they do not determine their objects — they stand for anything more or less; for they stand for whatever they resemble and they resemble everything more or less.

❝The second kind of representations are such as are set up by a convention of men or a decree of God. Such are “tallies”, “proper names”, &c. The peculiarity of these “conventional signs” is that they represent no character of their objects.

❝Likenesses denote nothing in particular; “conventional signs” connote nothing in particular.❞

(Peirce 1866, pp. 467–468)

Reference —

Peirce, C.S. (1866), “The Logic of Science, or, Induction and Hypothesis”, Lowell Lectures of 1866, pp. 357–504 in Writings of Charles S. Peirce : A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857–1866, Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

#Peirce #Logic #Inference #Inquiry #Abduction #Induction #Deduction #LogicOfScience
#Information #Comprehension #Extension #InformationEqualsComprehensionTimesExtension
#Semiotics #SignRelations #Icon #Index #Symbol #PragmaticSemioticInformation

Information = Comprehension × Extension • Selection 2.1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/10/06/information-comprehension-x-extension-selection-2-a/

Re: Information = Comprehension × Extension • Selection 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/10/05/information-comprehension-x-extension-selection-1-a/

Over the course of Selection 1 Peirce introduces the ideas he needs to answer stubborn questions about the validity of scientific inference. Briefly put, the validity of scientific inference depends on the ability of symbols to express “superfluous comprehension”, the measure of which Peirce calls “information”.

Selection 2 sharpens our picture of symbols as “general representations”, contrasting them with two species of representation whose characters fall short of genuine symbols.

❝For this purpose, I must call your attention to the differences there are in the manner in which different representations stand for their objects.❞

(Peirce 1866, pp. 467–468)

Reference —

Peirce, C.S. (1866), “The Logic of Science, or, Induction and Hypothesis”, Lowell Lectures of 1866, pp. 357–504 in Writings of Charles S. Peirce : A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857–1866, Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

#Peirce #Logic #Inference #Inquiry #Abduction #Induction #Deduction #LogicOfScience
#Information #Comprehension #Extension #InformationEqualsComprehensionTimesExtension
#Semiotics #SignRelations #Icon #Index #Symbol #PragmaticSemioticInformation

Information = Comprehension × Extension • Selection 1.2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/10/05/information-comprehension-x-extension-selection-1-a/

❝Thus, let us commence with the term “colour”; add to the comprehension of this term, that of “red”. “Red colour” has considerably less extension than “colour”; add to this the comprehension of “dark”; “dark red colour” has still less [extension]. Add to this the comprehension of “non‑blue” — “non‑blue dark red colour” has the same extension as “dark red colour”, so that the “non‑blue” here performs a work of supererogation; it tells us that no “dark red colour” is blue, but does none of the proper business of connotation, that of diminishing the extension at all. Thus information measures the superfluous comprehension. And, hence, whenever we make a symbol to express any thing or any attribute we cannot make it so empty that it shall have no superfluous comprehension.

❝I am going, next, to show that inference is symbolization and that the puzzle of the validity of scientific inference lies merely in this superfluous comprehension and is therefore entirely removed by a consideration of the laws of “information”.❞

(Peirce 1866, p. 467)

Reference —

Peirce, C.S. (1866), “The Logic of Science, or, Induction and Hypothesis”, Lowell Lectures of 1866, pp. 357–504 in Writings of Charles S. Peirce : A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857–1866, Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

#Peirce #Logic #Inference #Inquiry #Abduction #Induction #Deduction #LogicOfScience
#Information #Comprehension #Extension #InformationEqualsComprehensionTimesExtension
#Semiotics #SignRelations #Icon #Index #Symbol #PragmaticSemioticInformation

Information = Comprehension × Extension • Selection 1.1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/10/05/information-comprehension-x-extension-selection-1-a/

Our first text comes from Peirce's Lowell Lectures of 1866, titled “The Logic of Science, or, Induction and Hypothesis”. I still remember the first time I read these words and the light that lit up the page and my mind.

❝Let us now return to the information. The information of a term is the measure of its superfluous comprehension. That is to say that the proper office of the comprehension is to determine the extension of the term. For instance, you and I are men because we possess those attributes — having two legs, being rational, &c. — which make up the comprehension of “man”. Every addition to the comprehension of a term lessens its extension up to a certain point, after that further additions increase the information instead.❞

(Peirce 1866, p. 467)

Reference —

Peirce, C.S. (1866), “The Logic of Science, or, Induction and Hypothesis”, Lowell Lectures of 1866, pp. 357–504 in Writings of Charles S. Peirce : A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857–1866, Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

Resources —

Inquiry Blog • Survey of Pragmatic Semiotic Information
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/01/survey-of-pragmatic-semiotic-information-8/

OEIS Wiki • Information = Comprehension × Extension
• https://oeis.org/wiki/Information_%3D_Comprehension_%C3%97_Extension

C.S. Peirce • Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension
• https://peirce.sitehost.iu.edu/writings/v2/w2/w2_06/v2_06.htm

#Peirce #Logic #Inference #Inquiry #Abduction #Induction #Deduction #LogicOfScience
#Information #Comprehension #Extension #InformationEqualsComprehensionTimesExtension
#Semiotics #SignRelations #Icon #Index #Symbol #PragmaticSemioticInformation

Constraints and Indications • 1.2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/07/02/constraints-and-indications-1-a/

Re: Peirce List • Kaina Stoicheia and the Symbol Grounding Problem
• https://web.archive.org/web/20121231182129/http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/9165

Reference —

• Ashby, W.R. (1956), Introduction to Cybernetics, Methuen, London, UK.

Resources —

Survey of Cybernetics
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/01/25/survey-of-cybernetics-4/

Survey of Inquiry Driven Systems
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/02/28/survey-of-inquiry-driven-systems-6/

Survey of Pragmatic Semiotic Information
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/01/survey-of-pragmatic-semiotic-information-8/

#Peirce #Ashby #Cybernetics #InquiryDrivenSystems #PragmaticSemioticInformation
#Constraint #ControlSystems #Indication #Information #Inquiry #IntelligentSystems
#AdaptiveSystems #ErrorControlledRegulation #Feedback #SystemsTheory #Uncertainty
#Determination #Intentionality #Learning #Reasoning #SemioticInformation #Semiotics

Pragmatic Semiotic Information • Comment 3
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/22/pragmatic-semiotic-information-comment-3/

Memories are coming back to me more through the association of ideas than ordered by time or place. I can sense, almost touch a tangle of thoughts interlaced with each other — the “information first” approach to ontology, the “arrows only”, element‑free angle on category theory, Peirce's relativity of generals and individuals dispatching nominalism once and for all — but there is at core a hard knot of ideas so tightly wound it makes it difficult to articulate the links or see the untying if there is one to make.

#Peirce #Logic #Inquiry #Information #Uncertainty #ScientificMethod
#Semiotics #Semiosis #RelationTheory #SignRelations #TriadicRelations
#InformationEqualsComprehensionTimesExtension #PragmaticSemioticInformation

Pragmatic Semiotic Information • Comment 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/20/pragmatic-semiotic-information-comment-2/

I was at the time working as a “scanner” in the High Energy Physics Lab at Michigan State, sitting in a darkened room measuring tracks of particle interactions projected on a lighted scanning table from reels and reels of bubble chamber photographs gathered at CERN in a massive mad dash accelerator experiment some years before. For my part it was a menial job, 4pm to midnight every worklong day, but even a minion can imagine himself sharing in a hunt for the Ω⁻ particle, or whatever the Grail or Questying Beastie was at the time.

Meanwhile, in another part of the grove, I was spending my daylight hours checking off the final boxes for my Bachelor's degree, the main thing being to get my paper on Peirce, “Complications of the Simplest Mathematics”, approved as a substitute for a field study requirement. That had taken me two years' work in MSU's media library, poring through the microfilm reels of Peirce's Nachlass in search of enlightenment about a single puzzling paragraph I tripped over in his Collected Papers.

#Peirce #Logic #Inquiry #Information #Uncertainty #ScientificMethod
#Semiotics #Semiosis #RelationTheory #SignRelations #TriadicRelations
#InformationEqualsComprehensionTimesExtension #PragmaticSemioticInformation

Pragmatic Semiotic Information • 2.1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/04/pragmatic-semiotic-information-2/

What is information that a sign may bear it?

Three more questions arise at this juncture.

• How is a sign empowered to contain information?
• What is the practical context of communication?
• Why do we care about these bits of information?

A very rough answer to these questions might begin as follows.

Human beings are initially concerned solely with their own lives but then a world obtrudes on their subjective existence and so they find themselves forced to take an interest in the objective realities of its nature.

In pragmatic terms our initial aim, concern, interest, object, or “pragma” is expressed by the verbal infinitive “to live”, but the infinitive is soon reified into the derivative substantial forms of “nature”, “reality”, “the world”, and so on. Against that backdrop we find ourselves cast as the protagonists on a “scene of uncertainty”.

The situation may be pictured as a juncture from which a manifold of options fan out before us. It may be an issue of “truth”, “duty”, or “hope”, the last codifying a special type of uncertainty as to “what regulative principle has any chance of success”, but the chief uncertainty is that we are called on to make a choice and all too often we have very little clue which of the options is most fit to pick.

#Peirce #Logic #Inquiry #Information #Uncertainty #ScientificMethod
#Semiotics #Semiosis #RelationTheory #SignRelations #TriadicRelations
#InformationEqualsComprehensionTimesExtension #PragmaticSemioticInformation

Pragmatic Semiotic Information • 1.2
• http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/03/pragmatic-semiotic-information-1/

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

A question of what's to do, 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 one might care to address.

Since information plays its role on a stage set by uncertainty, a big part of saying what information is will necessarily involve saying what uncertainty is. There is little chance the vagaries of a word like “uncertainty”, given the nuances of its ordinary, poetic, and technical uses, can be corralled by a single pen, but there do exist established models and formal theories which manage to address definable aspects of uncertainty and these do have enough uses to make them worth looking into.

#Peirce #Logic #Inquiry #Information #Uncertainty #ScientificMethod
#Semiotics #Semiosis #RelationTheory #SignRelations #TriadicRelations
#InformationEqualsComprehensionTimesExtension #PragmaticSemioticInformation

Theme One Program • Exposition 1.2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2022/06/15/theme-one-program-exposition-1-2/

The Idea↑Form Flag

The graph-theoretic data structures used by the program are built up from a basic data structure called an “idea-form flag”. That structure is defined as a pair of Pascal data types by means of the following specifications.

Figure 1. Type Idea = ^Form
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.files.wordpress.com/2022/06/theme-exposition-type-idea-5eform.png

Figure 2. Code Box
• type idea = ^form;
• form = record
• sign: char;
• as, up, on, by: idea;
• code: numb
• end;

An “idea” is a pointer to a “form”.
• A “form” is a record consisting of:
• A “sign” of type “char”;
• Four pointers, “as”, “up”, “on”, “by”, of type “idea”;
• A “code” of type “numb”, that is, an integer in [0, max integer].

Represented in terms of “digraphs”, or directed graphs, the combination of an idea pointer and a form record is most easily pictured as an “arc”, or directed edge, leading to a node labeled with the other data, in this case, a letter and a number.

#ThemeOneProgram #Learning #Reasoning
#Logic #LogicalGraphs #FormalLanguages
#Algorithm #DataStructure #GraphTheory
#Peirce #PragmaticSemioticInformation
#Empiricism #Rationalism #Pragmatism

Theme One Program • Motivation 6
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2022/08/20/theme-one-program-motivation-6-2/

Comments I made in reply to a correspondent’s questions about delimiters and tokenizing in the Learner module may be worth sharing here.

In one of the projects I submitted toward a Master’s in psychology I used the Theme One program to analyze samples of data from my advisor’s funded research study on family dynamics. In one phase of the study observers viewed video-taped sessions of family members (parent and child) interacting in various modes (“play” or “work”) and coded qualitative features of each moment’s activity over a period of time.

The following page describes the application in more detail and reflects on its implications for the conduct of scientific inquiry in general.

Exploratory Qualitative Analysis of Sequential Observation Data
• https://oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey/Exploratory_Qualitative_Analysis_of_Sequential_Observation_Data

In this application a “phrase” or “string” is a fixed-length sequence of qualitative features and a “clause” or “strand” is a sequence of such phrases delimited by what the observer judges to be a significant pause in the action.

In the qualitative research phases of the study one is simply attempting to discern any significant or recurring patterns in the data one possibly can.

In this case the observers are tokenizing the observations according to a codebook that has passed enough intercoder reliability studies to afford them all a measure of confidence it captures meaningful aspects of whatever reality is passing before their eyes and ears.

#ThemeOneProgram #Learning #Reasoning
#Logic #LogicalGraphs #FormalLanguages
#Algorithm #DataStructure #GraphTheory
#Peirce #PragmaticSemioticInformation
#Empiricism #Rationalism #Pragmatism

Theme One Program • Motivation 5
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2022/08/20/theme-one-program-motivation-5-2/

Since I’m working from decades-old memories of first inklings I thought I might peruse the web for current information about Zipf’s Law. I see there is now something called the Zipf–Mandelbrot (and sometimes –Pareto) Law and that was interesting because my wife Susan Awbrey made use of Mandelbrot’s ideas about self-similarity in her dissertation and communicated with him about it. So there’s more to read up on.

Just off-hand, though, I think my Learner is dealing with a different problem. It has more to do with the savings in effort a learner gets by anticipating future experiences based on its record of past experiences than the savings it gets by minimizing bits of storage as far as mechanically possible. There is still a type of compression involved but it’s more like Korzybski’s “time-binding” than space-savings proper. Speaking of old memories …

The other difference I see is that Zipf’s Law applies to an established and preferably large corpus of linguistic material, while my Learner has to start from scratch, accumulating experience over time, making the best of whatever data it has at the outset and every moment thereafter.

#ThemeOneProgram #Learning #Reasoning
#Logic #LogicalGraphs #FormalLanguages
#Algorithm #DataStructure #GraphTheory
#Peirce #PragmaticSemioticInformation
#Empiricism #Rationalism #Pragmatism

Theme One Program • Motivation 4
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2022/08/19/theme-one-program-motivation-4-2/

From Zipf’s Law and the category of “things that vary inversely with frequency” I got my first brush with the idea that keeping track of usage frequencies is part and parcel of building efficient codes.

In its first application the environment the Learner has to learn is the usage behavior of its user, as given by finite sequences of characters from a finite alphabet, which sequences of characters might as well be called “words”, together with finite sequences of those words which might as well be called “phrases” or “sentences”. In other words, Job One for the Learner is the job of constructing a “user model”.

In that frame of mind we are not seeking anything so grand as a Universal Induction Algorithm but simply looking for any approach to give us a leg up, complexity wise, in Interactive Real Time.

#ThemeOneProgram #Learning #Reasoning
#Logic #LogicalGraphs #FormalLanguages
#Algorithm #DataStructure #GraphTheory
#Peirce #PragmaticSemioticInformation
#Empiricism #Rationalism #Pragmatism