What is Information?

Abstract

The main aim of this work is to contribute to the elucidation of the concept of information by comparing three different views about this matter: the view of Fred Dretske’s semantic theory of information, the perspective adopted by Peter Kosso in his interaction-information account of scientific observation, and the syntactic approach of Thomas Cover and Joy Thomas. We will see that these views involve very different concepts of information, each one useful in its own field of application. This comparison will allow us to argue in favor of a terminological ‘cleansing’: it is necessary to make a terminological distinction among the different concepts of information, in order to avoid conceptual confusions when the word ‘information’ is used to elucidate related concepts as knowledge, observation or entropy.