A semantic conception of mind

In an earlier post, I remarked that philosophy, including philosophy of mind, appears to be a syntactic enterprise, whereas I tend to think of the mind as primarily semantic. In this post, I want to suggest a way of thinking about the mind that better fits with the idea that it is primarily semantic.

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.

Semantics and measurement

There are many different conceptions of “information.”  The most important of those is that due to Claude Shannon, and often referred to as “Shannon Information“.  Shannon was particularly concerned with communication and with the problem of avoiding or minimizing loss of information due to transmission over an imperfect channel.

As used today, we typically think of Shannon information being transmitted as a sequence of symbols, often as a stream of binary digits. It is considered to be a theory of syntactic information, since the engineering considerations that motivated Shannon’s work are concerned with delivery of the symbols and questions of what those symbols mean is secondary and outside Shannon’s theory.

About measurement

Having suggested that cognition is measurement, it is time to say a little about what measurement is.

The most common view seems to be that we passively receive data at sensory cells, and then use logic or computation as applied to that data.  When data is received from a sensory cell, I shall call that sensing (for want of a better term).  My aim will be to draw a distinction between measurement and sensing, though in ordinary language usage the two overlap somewhat.