Percis of Knowledge and the Flow of Information
Percis of Knowledge and the Flow of Information
This work ( as it is said in it ) is an attempt to develop theory that might be philosophically useful. Firstly Dretske talks about the way that the theory should look like. It is pretty obvious but I think it is vital to point out those things. For the first thing he says that the theory has to contain some pieces of information that also must be understable for us. Secondly it should make sense with other cognitive theories. And also it should of course deepen our understanding. It is important for him to make communication between scientists and philosophers because he thinks that both of them have common or even the same subject.
As the most interesting part I have chosen the Information part because as for me it is the one that show those first expressions that are carried by some channels from the observed subject right to the beholder’s brain. Dretske says that the information is largely independent of the beholders that he calls conscious agents. Although when he talks of it he sees it as a flow (of information) that goes from point S (source) to point R (receiver ) . Sources are called here the generators of information. This point of view is interesting for me because I like the idea of those generators as an ensembles of possibilities and probabilities that are reduced to get those proper information. I think that this dice experiment is giving very clear view of what Dretske had in mind but I don’t have a clue where that 2.6 bits ( the value as a result of the die throw) of information came from.
Author bring back some experiments that say us the value of dependence between S and R. They may be totally independent just like in his example with two rings in two independent telephones. In that way no information are carries between those two point. It is totally different when two points ( S and R ) are somehow linked together and one depends on the other. For this kind of connection Dretske used an example of somebody calling my phone and (when he actually does so) the ringing of that phone. This gives me information about that someone is calling me at the moment. This kind of dependence has some information and it carries it from S to R.
It is worth to say that Fred Dretske also warns about the false facts we can take as Information but the are really just coincidences. He explains it very well by giving an example of four ringing phones. Also he takes for an example the tea leaves used for predicting future. Dretske says that opinion (about future) took out from the shape of those leaves can be true just when those leaves depend on what one is going to do (as the mercury in thermometers depends