Stella Fillmore-Patrick

In the middle of the twentieth century, Claude Shannon’sShannon, Claude 1948 paper “A mathematical theory of communication” incited a flurry of philosophical interest in the concept of ‘information.’ Shannon’s work was developed with applications to telecommunication systems in mind. Although Shannon’s theory was developed for a particular application in telecommunication, his use of the term ‘information’ was highly evocative to those working in other fields that employed a concept called ‘information’. Shannon himself considered his theory to be irrelevant to semantics as he only gave an account of amount of information, not content, but others imagined that ‘Shannon information’ could be applied to solve problems in semantics, psychology, and philosophy.