About the Concept of Information

Abstract

In the face of this situation, since the past decades philosophy has begun to address the question of the content and the role of the concept of information in different domains. The present chapter is framed in this general trend: the aim here is to discuss the technical concept of information in the communicational context, whose classical locus is the paper where Claude Shannon (1948) introduces a precise formalism designed to solve certain specific technological problems in communication engineering. For this purpose, this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 will introduce relevant distinctions that will allow us to focus on the concept of information in the context of interest. In Section 3, Shannon's formalism will be presented and some technical issues about the definition of the relevant magnitudes will be discussed. Section 4 will be devoted to interpretive matters: three interpretations of the concept of information will be introduced, stressing their differences and specific difficulties. Section 5 will contend with information in the quantum domain: the question about the existence of two qualitatively different kinds of information, classical and quantum, will be addressed. Finally, on the basis of the previous discussion, Section 6 will include some final remarks about the advantages of a theoretically neutral interpretation of information.