<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hi Malcolm Dean and colleagues,<div><br></div><div><br><div><div>On 12 Nov 2016, at 22:11, Malcolm Dean wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>To an animal about to be attacked and eaten, the meaning of an approaching predator is quite clear.</div><div><br></div><div>Obviously, meaning is produced by, within, and among Observers, and not by language.</div><div><br></div><div>Meaning may be produced *through* language, not *in* language, as a medium of interaction (aka communication).</div><div><br></div><div>I wish scientific specialists had more awareness of the effects of their specialization.</div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I wish people knew a bit more about mathematical logic, which is partially the study of the semantics (aka meaning) of formal expression. Meaning refer to a notion of reality, "modeled" by models (a bad term as physicists used "model" for what logicians call a theory). A model is a mathematical structure making a sentence (proposition) true or false, and this, in my opinion applies to meaning in the natural language, where usually some notion of reality is involved: the proposition "there is two beers in the fridge" is judged meaningful because we believe in a reality with fridge containing, or not, beers.</div><div><br></div><div>The term "information", like the term "infinite" admits many technical (and incompatible) definitions, and also some intuitive every day meaning. In the case of information, many people are unclear if they talk about something third person describable, like with Shannon, or quantum information, or if they talk about the first person interpretation of the information, which requires a subject (at least a universal machine or number) and a reality (supposed to support the subject and what he is talking about). Despite logicians work on rather simple systems, most results on models and meaning are negative. No machine can build a complete unequivocal study of its own semantics. It has to be elusive, and that elusiveness plays an important role in the unavoidable evolution of machines and collective of machines.</div><div><br></div><div>Bruno Marchal</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br></div><div>Malcolm Dean</div><div><br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2016 20:29:21 +0100<br> From: "Loet Leydesdorff" <<a href="mailto:loet@leydesdorff.net">loet@leydesdorff.net</a>><br> To: "'Alex Hankey'" <<a href="mailto:alexhankey@gmail.com">alexhankey@gmail.com</a>>, "'FIS Webinar'"<br> <<a href="mailto:Fis@listas.unizar.es">Fis@listas.unizar.es</a>><br> Subject: Re: [Fis] Is quantum information the basis of spacetime?<br><br> Dear Alex and colleagues,<br><br> Thank you for the reference; but my argument was about meaning. Meaning can only be considered as constructed in language. Other uses of the word are metaphorical. For example, the citation to Maturana.<br><br> Information, in my opinion, can be defined content-free (a la Shannon, etc.) and then be provided with meaning in (scholarly) discourses. I consider physics as one among other scholarly discourses. Specific about physics is perhaps the universalistic character of the knowledge claims. For example: "Frieden's points apply to quantum physics as well as classical physics." So what? This seems to me a debate within physics without much relevance for non-physicists (e.g., economists or linguists).<br></blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Loet Leydesdorff<br>Professor, University of Amsterdam<br> Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)<br></blockquote></div> </div></div> _______________________________________________<br>Fis mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Fis@listas.unizar.es">Fis@listas.unizar.es</a><br>http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis<br></blockquote></div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><a href="http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/">http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/</a></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></div></body></html>