The Computability of the World by Bernd-Olaf Küppers

The Computability of the World by Bernd-Olaf Küppers

Author:Bernd-Olaf Küppers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham


5.2 Towards a Radical Linguistic Turn

The exchange of information serves the mutual understanding between sender and recipient. For this reason, the concept of communication always contains an echo of the concept of understanding. In this important point, the concept of communication differs from that of information. This difference can even be recognised in the etymological roots of “information” and “communication”. The concept of information—completely in the sense of the Latin root informare—implies at first the formative and instructive functions of a signal, message etc. (see Chap. 4). The concept of communication (communicare: to perform collectively, to impart) emphasises rather the process whereby sender and recipient try to reach a mutual understanding.

In other words: The object of understanding is the content of the information communicated. The purpose of communication is to reach an accord in the assessment of the information that is passed from the sender to the recipient; in some cases this will also lead to joint action. In contrast, the mere instruction that is contained in a piece of information acts like a command, conveying some kind of directives from the sender to the recipient.

Since we wish to extend the concept of communication to include natural processes, we must explain the concept of mutual understanding in more detail. Intuitively, one tends to reserve the idea of communication for the exchange of information between human beings, because the idea of “mutual understanding” outside the sphere of human consciousness seems to be meaningless. However, that view should be examined critically as it could be a too narrow interpretation of the concept of understanding.

The primary purpose of communication is to enable the partners involved to reach an agreement on some issue. To achieve this, they must of course make it clear to one another that one partner is going to inform the other. However, mutual understanding does not necessarily presuppose any reflection on the issue to be communicated. Rather, it may already exhaust itself in the mere exchange of information, which may induce some co-ordinated actions without asking what the meaning of these actions is. The mutual understanding of the meaning of information reduces here to the practical or pragmatic implementation of the information being communicated.

The concept of “common understanding” can obviously be understood in different ways, with different scopes. If we are prepared to abstract from the manifold forms of human understanding and to reduce the concept of understanding to the mere fact of reaching a consensus with respect to common actions, then we can easily see how this principle can operate in living beings at all levels. In that sense molecules, cells, bacteria, plants and animals all have the ability to communicate. Here, communication is nothing more than the co-ordination and fine-tuning of processes by means of chemical, acoustic and optical signals.

With this argument, we again tread a path that some philosophers of science, in a somewhat contemptuous tone, criticise as “naïve” naturalism . This criticism is primarily directed at the idea that information exists outside the various forms of human communication , i.



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