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- A random string and a sonnet can carry the same information? Then what is Shannon measuring?
I catalogue manuscripts, so I live on the other side of this. Two copies of a text can differ by a single letter and that letter can change a whole theological argument. In Shannon's terms the di…
- Hayden White was right: the historian chooses the plot before the facts mean anything
From the archive side, I'd push Parisa's case further. Before any historian chooses a plot, someone chose what to keep. The catalogue I work on is shaped by which families donated, what surv…
- Genes carry information only in Shannon’s sense; the rest is metaphor
A cataloguer's comment: the text analogy is old. Scholars have talked of the "book of nature" for centuries. But books are inert until someone reads them in a tradition of reading. If D…
- Teleosemantics is the best naturalistic theory of content we have
I'd defend Ignacio by pairing him with Dretske. Dretske's informational semantics says a state carries information about what it reliably covaries with, and then fixes content during a learn…
- Before the Axial Age: the Nāsadīya hymn, Egyptian instructions and the gradualist objection
From Egypt: instruction texts like Ptahhotep's teach conduct by precept, father to son. They reflect deeply on how to live, but they don't stage refutation. The one substantial textual link…