This seminar is conceived as an introductory course into the theory of semantic information. Semantic Information Theory is concerned with the meaning or information content of messages and the like.


Content of the Lectures
The structure of the course is mainly historical.
We will start with a comparison of early syntactical theory of information (as developed by Hartley or Shannon) and early semantical approaches (Bar-Hillel/Carnap). In a next step we will follow the development of possible world semantics (Hintikka) and its application to information content and to the semantics of intensional contexts. Can we use possible world semantics to measure the information content of mathematical truths (rather than ascribing zero content)? The third step will take us to Situation Semantics (Barwise/Perry), the foundation of many modern approaches in information theory. From here we will go on to explain and present "state of the art" theories like Barwise/Seligman, Perry/Israel and Floridi. Finally we shall discuss the applicability of modern information theory to practical (Perry/Israel, Devlin, Kikuchi) and philosophical (Perry, Barwise, Cohnitz) problems.

The seminar will take place in the first week, August 5-9, 2002, 11:00am-12:30pm. At the left you'll find the PowerPoint-Slides in PDF for each of the five days. In addition to this you might want to buy our reader with all central texts from the ESSLLI.

Course Prerequisites
General knowledge (undergraduate level) of First Order Logic.
General knowledge of analytic philosophy of language.
 

Daniel Cohnitz
      Philosophy Department
      Duesseldorf (Germany)
      cohnitz@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de
      http://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/philo/cohnitz.htm

Manuel Bremer
      Philosophy Department
      Duesseldorf (Germany)
      Manuel.Bremer@arcormail.de
      http://manuel.bremer.bei.t-online.de/