Charles S. Peirce's Theory of Information: A Theory of the Growth of Symbols and of Knowledge

摘要

Charles S. Peirce had a theory of information largely ignored by contemporary information theorists. This paper gives an outline of this theory and confronts it with information theories since 1949, Shannon and Weaver's syntactic theory of information, Carnap and Bar-Hillel's logico-semantic theory, and Dretske's cognitive-pragmatic theory of information. In contrast to these more recent theories, Peirce's theory of information is not based on a calculus of probabilities but on one of logical quantities. Furthermore, it does not only study information as growth of knowledge from actual texts or utterances but also as knowledge accumulated in symbols in the course of their history. Peirce takes all three dimensions of semiotics into account without reducing information to any of them: syntax, since it calculates information from the combination of subject and predicate terms of propositions; semantics, since it studies the denotation and signification of symbols; and pragmatics insofar as it studies processes of knowledge acquisition. The specifically semiotic aspect of Peirce's information theory consists in its study of the different effects of icons, indices, and symbols on the growth of words, ideas, and knowledge.