[Fis] _ Reply to Annette (A Priori Modeling)

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Pedro and colleagues, 

 

"Agency" is missing. It is factually minimized under the form of constraints
and uncertainty. Communication occurs because some kind of "emitter" agent
operates as a "source" and sends "messages" via an appropriate "channel" to
some "receiver". I have put quotations to the standard Shannonian terms. My
central question: could there be any form of non-living agency? And then,
What different forms of life could receive the "agent" label? How being
alive biases the non-at-all-free communication game?



For example: if one constructs a citation matrix with the cited papers in
the rows and the citing papers in the columns, citing can be considered as
action and cited as structure. There is a mutual information between cited
and citing, but the effect of citing on cited is different from the effect
of cited on citing. Thus, one can evaluate agency.

 

See also: 

The Production of Probabilistic Entropy in Structure/Action Contingency
Relations,  <http://www.leydesdorff.net/jses95/jses95.pdf> Journal of Social
and Evolutionary Systems 18 (1995) 339-56.

 <http://www.leydesdorff.net/jtsb93/index.htm> "Structure"/"Action"
Contingencies and the Model of Parallel Distributed Processing, Journal for
the Theory of Social Behaviour 23 (1993) 47-77.

 

A similar argument can be made for evidence (agency) in relation to theory
(structure):

 

Knowledge Representations, Bayesian Inferences, and Empirical Science
Studies,  <http://www.leydesdorff.net/ssi92/index.htm> Social Science
Information 31 (1992, nr. 2), 213-37.

 

If so wished, I can provide pdf.


These questions will be refined next days...
Best--Pedro 



Best, 

Loet

 

  _____  

Loet Leydesdorff 

Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

 <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> loet at leydesdorff.net ;
<http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Associate Faculty,  <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> SPRU, University of
Sussex; 

Guest Professor  <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/> Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou;
Visiting Professor,  <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> ISTIC,
Beijing;

Visiting Professor,  <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/> Birkbeck, University of London;


 <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en>
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

 

 

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