Foreword: What Underlies Information

摘要

Each of the articles in this issue, including the column, addresses the concept of information in some way, but not in a way which unproblematically or unreflectively uses the term. Rather, the articles show ways in which the information concept can be questioned, contextualized, and more deeply understood. The first article by John Levi Martin is entitled "Peirce and Spencer-Brown on Probability, Chance, and Lawfulness." Contemporary science depends a great deal on concepts of probability and chance, but it takes these as given. It is part of the genius of both George Spencer-Brown and Charles Sanders Peirce that they did not. Spencer-Brown's challenge to probability theory is found in a statistical work of his that predates The Laws of Form, one that explained away findings purporting to be favorable to extrasensory perception. Peirce also critiqued probability in his own earlier work on inference. The author notes that, in contrast to the unproblematic ways ordinary science uses inference, "both Peirce and Spencer-Brown...focused their attention on the necessary slippage" between "the probabilities of a generating process, and the distribution of realizations of this process" (p. 9). This slippage and its implications are described in a very close and detailed argument in the article. These are not ivory tower issues but have practical import to the very practice of science itself, particularly that which uses a concept of information-especially (but not only) any information concept (such as Luhmann's) which is ultimately, as Martin sees it, rooted in Shannon's work on negative entropy.