Science and scientific theories

This is partly a comment on “The Knight’s Song, or What is a [scientific] theory?” and partly a post on my own view of science and how it differs from what philosophers of science say.

If we follow the Shannon-Weaver theory of communication, then

• we start with semantic information (the natural world, as studied by science);
• we encode that in a symbolic form (syntactic information, Shannon information, linguistic representation);
• that syntactic information can then be transmitted or recorded;
• a final receiver of the syntactic information can decode it to recover the semantic information.

With science, the method we use for symbolically encoding nature is what we call “measurement”.  This process of encoding produces the data on which science very much depends.  I also discussed this way of looking at measurement in an earlier post.