The Intuitive Concept of Information: An Analysis

Zbigniew Król

doi:10.2478/slgr-2020-0030

Abstract

Abstract This paper seeks to determine the intuitive meaning of the concept of information by indicating its essential (definitional) features and relations with other concepts, such as that of knowledge. The term “information” – as with many other concepts, such as “process”, “force”, “energy” and “matter” – has a certain established meaning in natural languages, which allows it to be used, in science as well as in everyday life, without our possessing any somewhat stricter definition of it. The basic aim here is thus to explicate what it amounts to in the context of its intuitive meaning as encountered in natural languages, what the subject of cognition implicitly presumes when using the term, and to which ontological situations it can be applied. I demonstrate that the essential features of the notion of information include the presence of a material medium, its transformation, the recording and reading of information encoded in the medium, and the grasp of what is recorded, coded and transmitted as an intentional object, where the latter is construed in terms broadly in line with the ontologies of Husserl and Ingarden. Along the way, a number of issues relating to the notion of information are also pointed out: the problem of informational identity, of the existence of virtual objects, and of the choice of an adequate information carrier, as well as formal-ontological problems, including those which concern relations between information carriers and intentional objects.

Highlights

Experience tells us that the term “information” can be employed by people who have never encountered any definition of it – something which implies, in turn, that it carries with it a certain intuitively graspable meaning and range of possible applications
The hermeneutical horizon – i.e. the phenomenal structure within which the understanding of, amongst other things, the meaning of intuitive concepts takes place – is a certain phenomenal fact whose presence we may come to grasp by means of phenomenological methods.1. Such a horizonal structure of connections and dependencies is manifested in our experience in the form of some sort of established structure of logical dependencies obtaining between intuitive concepts in this or that particular natural language: for example, one that concerns dependencies between more and less general concepts, concepts with intersecting scopes of reference, etc., where these are amenable to being detected, reconstructed and studied
I shall not enter into deeper methodological analysis of the issues that have arisen there, but this is hardly something that need detain us anyway, as the method of intuitive analysis of concepts is basically used by almost every scientist in a non

Summary

Introduction

Experience tells us that the term “information” can be employed by people who have never encountered any definition of it – something which implies, in turn, that it carries with it a certain intuitively graspable meaning and range of possible applications.

Results

Conclusion