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Core Concepts

Abduction
Belief
Best Explanation
Cause
Certainty
Chance
Coherence
Correspondence
Decoherence
Divided Line
Downward Causation
Emergence
Emergent Dualism
ERR
Identity Theory
Infinite Regress
Information
Intension/Extension
Intersubjectivism
Justification
Materialism
Meaning
Mental Causation
Multiple Realizability
Naturalism
Necessity
Possible Worlds
Postmodernism
Probability
Realism
Reductionism
Schrödinger's Cat
Supervenience
Truth
Universals

Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
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Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
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Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
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Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
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Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
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David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
William James
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Robert Kane
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Jaegwon Kim
William King
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Christine Korsgaard
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Thomas Kuhn
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Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
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George Henry Lewes
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David Lewis
Peter Lipton
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Michael Lockwood
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Trenton Merricks
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Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
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Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
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Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
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Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
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Paul Russell
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Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
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John Searle
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Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
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J.J.C.Smart
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Michael Smith
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L. Susan Stebbing
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Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
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Roy Weatherford
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David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Gregory Bateson
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Donald Campbell
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Albert Einstein
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Hyman Hartman
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
E. T. Jaynes
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Roman Jakobson
Pascual Jordan
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
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William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
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Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
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Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
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Joseph LeDoux
Benjamin Libet
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Emmy Noether
Alexander Oparin
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Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Adolphe Quételet
Jürgen Renn
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
Tilman Sauer
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Vlatko Vedral
Heinz von Foerster
John von Neumann
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium

 
Meaning

The "meaning" of any word, concept, or object is different for different individuals, depending on the information (knowledge) about the word, concept, or object currently available to them. All meaning is "contextual" and the most important context is what is currently in the individual's mind. This obviously includes the immediate external context, for example, the word being heard or read is surrounded by text, both explicitly and implicitly - those alternative words that could substitute with little change in meaning.

The dependence of meaning on an individual's experiences was perhaps best described by the logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege.

In our information theory of mind, it is the past experiences that are reproduced (played back) from the Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR) that provide most of the meaningful context for a word or object. For example, if the agent has had no past experiences that resemble the current experience in some way, the agent may not find any meaning at all. The simplest case would be a new word, seen or heard for the very first time.

If the word is not isolated, the meanings of the familiar surrounding text will bring back their past uses clearly enough to allow the agent to guess the meaning of the new word, in that context. In any case this fresh experience with the word will be stored away along with that context for future reference.

The problem of the "Meaning of Meaning" has a rich history in the past century or two of analytic language philosophy. Gottfried Leibniz hoped for an ambiguity-free ideal language with exactly one term for each concept. It would reduce language to a kind of mathematics where the meaning of complex combinations of terms could be worked out precisely. In the middle of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill tried to simplify proper nouns by insisting that they are just names for the things we are talking about in sentences or propositions. Nouns are subjects, predicates are the attributes of the subject.

Leibniz was an inspiration for Bertrand Russell, whose logical positivism imagined "logical atoms" of meaning that could combine following strict rules to form complex concepts. But Russell and the great logician Gottlob Frege tangled over exactly how words describe, denote, or refer to concepts and objects.

Is an absolute meaning to be found in the dictionary definitions of how a word refers to an object, independent of the intentions of a speaker or inferences of the hearer? Frege distinguished between the straight reference of a word and what he called the "sense." Why does the statement "Aristotle is the author of De Anima" carry more information than the identity statement "Aristotle is Aristotle." Our information theory of meaning finds the answer in the reader's past experience (or none) of De Anima.

Frege famously distinguished intension and extension (or W. V. O. Quine's ostension) by the German words Sinn and Bedeutung (which translate usually as Sense and Reference).

Most logicians follow Frege’s distinction between the reference (denotation, name) and the sense (meaning, concept) of a word. But few know that Frege limited the “sense” to the everyday meaning attached to a word by the users of the language. Frege also described the “idea” or “representation” (Vorstellung) that would form in the mind of the message receiver. This concept or idea, he said, would be different in every mind, since it is dependent on the peculiar experiences of each person. Frege wrote

...one need have no scruples in speaking simply of the sense, whereas in the case of a conception one must precisely indicate to whom it belongs and at what time. It might perhaps be said: Just as one man connects this conception and another that conception with the same word, so also one man can associate this sense and another that sense. But there still remains a difference in the mode of connection. They are not prevented from grasping the same sense; but they cannot have the same conception. Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem. If two persons conceive the same, each still has his own conception.

It is indeed sometimes possible to establish differences in the conceptions, or even in the sensations, of different men; but an exact comparison is not possible, because we cannot have both conceptions together in the same consciousness.

This fits perfectly with our experience recorder and reproducer (ERR) as a model of mind, memory, and knowledge.

Russell's young collaborator in early logical positivism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, broke with Russell and insisted that meaning depends on the use to which a word is being put. There is no objective independent meaning for a word as the object it "stands for." This relativism became more extreme when Jacques Derrida showed how the meaning of a word can be deferred and disseminated by the words following it in time.

Charles Sanders Peirce, and the great linguist and inventor of structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure had accepted straightforward connections, like Peirce's triad object-percept-concept and Saussure's dual signifier/signified s/S for a symbol and the object. These were captured in the book, "The Meaning of Meaning," by Ogden and Richards as their "semantic triangle," symbol (word), reference (thought/concept), and object (word).

Willard van Orman Quine thought he could escape ambiguities in meaning. In his book, "Word and Object" he urged "naturalizing" epistemology by focusing on the empirical connections made by speakers when they say what they mean. Favoring extensionality over intentionality (or intensionality as he preferred), he said to look at how a speaker of another language says what a word means, or how a baby learns the meaning of new worlds, by a process of behavioral conditioning and ostension (pointing at things). He said one may not be a behaviorist in psychology, but cannot avoid being a behaviorist in linguistics.

But post-moderns like Derrida and Roland Barthes showed that fundamental ambiguities of language cannot be removed, that the dictionary definitions summarizing the past uses in a community of discourse only trap meaning in a "circle of signifiers" without a referent object (s/Z). New uses are always being created, a consequence of our theory of humans as "co-creators" of our universe.

Are we then living in a Humpty Dumpty world of "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." H. P. Grice insisted that the intentions of the "utterer" are carrying the meaning. Or do we need to consider the "reader response" to any text. In Claude Shannon's theory of the communication of information, the emphasis is on the new information at the receiver carried in the message from the sender. But Shannon never claimed the meaning was carried in the message itself. It depends on the information in the message, but only in the context of the information in the receiver's experience recorder and reproducer (ERR).

Information in an Object or Concept

The information content in a material object is independent of any human. In particular. it is independent of human language, the words, names, or descriptions that humans use to communicate about the object. This is because most language consists of symbols or signs that have an arbitrary relation to the object or concept being signified, as shown by the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and the semiology of H. P. Grice.

But both Saussure and Peirce recognized that some natural signs are not arbitrary, because they contain some information that is isomorphic with some of the information in the object or concept. These especially include icons, abstract pictures of some aspect of the object.

Information philosophy generalizes this insight well beyond two-dimensional images or "pictures," that Ludwig Wittgenstein briefly considered as a theory of meaning, atomic facts that could be shown, if not said, for example, Tractatus 2.16, "In order to be a picture a fact must have something in common with what it pictures." .

Information philosophy identifies the total information in a material object with the yes/no answers to all the questions that can be asked or with the true/false statements that can be said about the object. In modern information theory terms, information philosophy "digitizes" the object. From each answer or truth value we can, in principle, derive a "bit" of information.

While "total" information is hopelessly impractical to measure precisely, whatever information we can "abstract" from a "concrete" object gives us a remarkably simple answer to one of the deepest problems in metaphysics, the existential status of ideas, of Platonic "Forms," including the entities of logic and mathematics.

Information in Minds

The information theory of meaning starts with the information philosophy model of the mind, which asserts that the mind is the abstract information being processed by the brain, a material information structure, which works as a biological information processor.

The meaning in a message incoming to the mind, which could be just a perception of sensations from the environment and not necessarily from another human being with intentions, is found in the past experiences of the agent that are brought to mind by the Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR) based on the content of the message. This nicely captures the subjectivism or relativism of meaning.

It also gets close to answering Thomas Nagel's provocative question "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" The past experiences reproduced, complete with their feelings, depends on what has been recorded and what can be reproduced (played back). A frog cannot play back the experience of concave objects flying by, because the frog's eye has filtered them out from reaching the brain and its experience recorder.

Meaning and Knowledge
Knowledge can be defined as information in minds that is a partial isomorphism (mapping) of the information structures in the external world. Information philosophy is a correspondence theory.

Sadly, there is no isomorphism, no information in common, between words and objects. This accounts for much of the failing of analytic language philosophy in the past century.

Although language is an excellent tool for human communication, it is arbitrary, ambiguous, and ill-suited to represent the world directly. Human languages do not picture reality. Information is the lingua franca of the universe.

The extraordinarily sophisticated connection between words and objects is made in human mindsmediated by the brain's experience recorder and reproducer (ERR). Words stimulate neurons to start firing and to play back any similar experiences that include relevant objects and events.

Neurons that were wired together in our earliest experiences fire together at later times, contextualizing our new experiences, giving them meaning. And by replaying emotional reactions to those for similar earlier experiences, it makes then "subjective experiences," giving us the feeling of "what it's like to be me" and solving the "hard problem" of consciousness.

in conclusion, we can say that the meaning of a specific amount of information is subjective for each individual, dependent on their past experiences (their knowledge) and their values. But that same information may have been given an intersubjective meaning by the agreement of a cultural community, or by a scientific community of inquirers, as proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce.

As to an objective meaning of some physical entity, we can say that might be the original information content, together with any information processing being done by the entity..

Truth Tables
P Q F NOR Xq ¬p ¬q XOR NAND AND XNOR q if/then p then/if OR T
T T F F F F F F F F T T T T T T T T
T F F F F F T T T T F F F F T T T T
F T F F T T F F T T F F T T F F T T
F F F T F T F T F T F T F T F T F T
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Chapter 3.7 - The Ergod Chapter 4.2 - The History of Free Will
Part Three - Value Part Five - Problems
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