Summary |
The term 'information' has become ubiquitous. In fact the notion of information is arguably amongst the most important of our `Information Age'. But just what exactly is information? This is a question without a straightforward response, particularly as information is a polysemantic concept, applied to a range of phenomena across a range of disciplines. Some of the most common formulation developed in the 20th century include: Fisher information, Shannon information, Kolmogorov complexity, quantum information, information as a state of an agent, and semantic information. Some notions of information are associated with central concerns of philosophy and have been used in various ways. Dealings with information from within philosophy include work on conceptions and analyses of information, the application of information to philosophical topics such as epistemology and logic and information ethics. Further to this, conceptions of information within other disciplines such as biology and physics can be and have been of interest within philosophy. Two conceptions of information of particular interest to philosophers are semantic information and environmental information, which can be seen as roughly correlating to the Gricean notions of non-natural and natural meaning respectively. |