A Theory of Semantic Information in the Context of its Ecology

Kapitel i bok, 2020

The information really useful to humans must be the trinity comprising three aspects: the form termed syntactic information, the meaning termed semantic information, and the use termed pragmatic information. The most well-known theory of information proposed by Shannon in 1948, often considered to be “the” theory of information is a statistical theory of syntactic information. Thus, semantic and pragmatic aspects are not addressed by Shannon. Instead they are fixed to the process of communication of sender to receiver via noisy channel. In this paper a theory of semantic information will be presented. It will also be shown that the semantic information is of the unique importance for the trinity. This is why we address a theory of semantic information without mentioning the syntactic and pragmatic information.