**2. What is information?**

4 Semantics – Advances in Theories and Mathematical Models

But speaking about the spoken language and its role in human communication, we cannot avoid the inevitable, and somewhat provocative, question: "What actually is being communicated?" The first answer which comes to mind is – language. But we have just agreed that language is only a tool that has emerged to reify our ability to communicate.

I will not bother you with rhetorical questions. My answer is simple, fair and square: Semantics – that is what we communicate to our conspecies using the language as a tool for

It is perfectly right to stress that spoken language was the most ancient enabling technology evolutionary evolved for communication purposes. However, in the course of human development other means of communication have gradually emerged – cave paintings, written languages, book-printing and, in more modern times, various electrical (telegraph, telephony) and electronic (radio, television, internet) forms of communication. What were

You will possibly reject my speculations, but I will insist – Semantics that is what we are all communicating! And it does not matter if in our modern age you prefer to call it not "Semantics" but "Information". (I hope my readers would easily agree that 13,900,000 results for a Google inquiry about "information communication" (and 2,720,000 results for "communicating information") are enough convincing to justify the claim that information

You will possibly remind me that the first attempt to integrate the terms "Semantics" and "Information" was made about 60 years ago by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Rudolf Carnap (Bar-Hillel & Carnap, 1952). As to my knowledge, they were the first who coined the term "Semantic Information". They have sincerely believed that such a merging can be possible: "Prevailing theory of communication (or transmission of information) deliberately neglects the semantic aspects of communication, i. e., the meaning of the messages… Instead of dealing with the information carried by letters, sound waves, and the like, we may talk about the information carried by the sentence, 'The sequence of letters (or sound waves,

However, they were not successful in their try to unite the mathematical theory of information and semantics. The mainstream thinking of that time was determined by the famous saying of The Mathematical Theory of Communication fathers (Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver): "These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem… It is important to emphasize, at the start, that we are not concerned with the meaning or the truth of messages; semantics lies outside the scope of mathematical

I hope my readers are aware that denying any relations between semantics and information was not the most inspiring idea of that time. On the contrary, for many years it has hampered and derailed the process of understanding the elusive nature of them both, semantics and information alike (Two concepts that in course of human history have

The aim of this chapter was to avoid the historical pitfalls and not to repeat the mistakes and misconceptions so proudly preached by our predecessors. I will try to prove the existence of a firm link between semantics and information and I will make my best trying to share with

communication.

they all intended to communicate?

is the major subject that's being communicated nowadays).

etc.). .. has been transmitted' " (Bar-Hillel & Carnap, 1952).

information theory", (Shannon & Weaver, 1949).

become the most important features of human's life).

The question "What is information?" is as old and controversial as the question "What is semantics?" I will not bore you with re-examining what the most prominent thinkers of our time have thought and said about the notion of "Information". In the chapter's reference list I provide some examples of their viewpoints (Adams, 2003; Floridi, 2005; Sloman, 2011) with only one and a single purpose in mind – curious readers by themselves would decide how relevant and useful (for our discussion about semantics/information interrelations) these scholar opinions are.
