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Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Competing frameworks from the Humanities and Social Sciences |
Posted by: | Leslie Smith |
Date/Time: | 2011/10/18 22:30:31 |
Good question: knowledge and information. Knowledge has a truth value; on the standard analysis (Plato to Gettier and onwards) knowledge entails the truth of what is known. Commentators [eg: Moser in Audi's Cambridge Dictionary of?Philosophy] typically remark that this condition has rarely been challenged. For example, as Brit child I used to say (1) New York is the capital of the USA where (1) is a proposition (object of knowledge) and so true or false. Under the standard analysis, what I said as boy was something I believed, but could not know because it is false. Information is, or at least can be,?meaningful but in and of itself is devoid of truth-value. For example, if as an anglophone you read (2) Giftgas you may take this to mean a present is available; as a german speaker, it would mean poison gas; as an illiterate person, it is a scribble, even a poor drawing, or mark on the ground. Information requires an interpretant (Peirce's semiotic theory) which may be a person, or it may be some alternative means for making (2) intelligible. Thereby epistemic questions can arise such as (3) what can I do with (2) [knowing how] (4) is (2) true or false [knowing that] (5) are there any reasons for (2) [knowing why] You might say: is an item of information a proposition? Not necessarily. A proposition is either true or false. But information can be a directive such as (6) => meaning: you should go in the direction of the arrow. But a directive is neither true nor false. And too, the meaning of (6) has to be intelligible: why not the opposite direction? Try giving (6) to your dog about the direction to take as a trick or joke [false trail], when Fido is already hot on your actual trail by scent of smell...... |