Pragmatic theory of information

The pragmatic information content is the information content received by a recipient; it is focused on the recipient and defined in contrast to Claude Shannon's information definition, which focuses on the message. The pragmatic information measures the information received, not the information contained in the message. The determination of pragmatic information content must preceed the determination of the value of information.

The pragmatic theory of information is derived from Charles Sanders Peirce's general theory of signs and inquiry. Peirce explored a number of ideas about information throughout his career. One set of ideas is about the "laws of information" having to do with the logical properties of information. Another set of ideas about "time and thought" have to do with the dynamic properties of inquiry. All of these ideas contribute to the pragmatic theory of inquiry. Peirce set forth many of these ideas very early in his career, periodically returning to them on scattered occasions until the end, and they appear to be implicit in much of his later work on the logic of science and the theory of signs, but he never developed their implications to the fullest extent.

Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver completed the viewpoint in the seminal paper by Shannon A Mathematical Theory of Communication,^[1] with two additional viewpoints (B and C):^[2]

• A. How accurately can the symbols that encode the message be transmitted ("the technical problem")?
• B. How precisely do the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning("the semantics problem")?
• C. How effective is the received message in changing conduct ("the effectiveness problem")? ^[3]

More recently, Edward D. Weinberger formulated a quantitative theory of pragmatic information. In contrast to standard information theory that says nothing about the semantic content of information, Weinberger's theory attempts to measure the amount of information actually used in making a decision. Included in Weinberger's paper is a demonstration that his version of pragmatic information increases over the course of time in a simple model of evolution known as the quasispecies model. This is demonstrably not true for the standard measure of information.^[3]

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See also