Wesley Salmon's Process Theory of Causality and the Conserved Quantity Theory

Dowe, Phil

doi:10.1086/289662

Cited by 254 publications

(109 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…In particular, causality cannot be conceived in terms of energy flow (Fair 1979, Castañeda 1984, physical processes (Russell 1948, Dowe 1992, or property transference (Ehring 1997, Kistler 1998. Perhaps good candidates for conceptualizing the informational links from a non-epistemic stance are the manipulability theories of causation, according to which causes are to be regarded as devices for manipulating effects (Price 1991, Menzies and Price 1993, Woodward 2003.…”

Section: -What Is Information?mentioning

confidence: 99%

What is Quantum Information?

Lombardi¹,

Fortín²,

Holik³

et al. 2017

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The word 'information' refers to a polysemantic concept associated with very different phenomena, such as communication, knowledge, reference and meaning (Floridi 2010(Floridi , 2011. In the discussions about this matter, the first distinction to be introduced is that between a semantic view, according to which information carries semantic content and, thus, is related to notions as reference and meaning, However, the problems of interpretation do not disappear even when the attention is restricted to a single formal concept (see Lombardi, Holik and Vanni 2014).During the last decades, new interpretive problems have arisen with the advent of quantum information, which combine the difficulties in the understanding of the concept of information with the well-known foundational puzzles derived from quantum mechanics itself. This situation contrasts with the huge development of the research field named 'quantum information', where new formal results multiply rapidly. In this context, the question 'What is quantum information?' is still far from having an answer on which the whole quantum information community agrees. In fact, the positions about the matter range from those who seem to deny the existence of quantum information (Duwell 2003), those who consider that it refers to information when it is encoded in quantum systems , and those who conceive it as a new kind of information absolutely different than Shannon information (Jozsa 1998;Brukner and Zeilinger 2001).In the present article we will address the question 'What is quantum information?' from a conceptual viewpoint. For this purpose, in Section 2 Schumacher's formalism is introduced by contrast with Shannon's theory. In Section 3 the definition of quantum information in terms of a quantum source is discussed. Section 4 is devoted to analyze the definition of information in terms of coding theorems. These tasks lead us to focus on the relationship between Shannon entropy and von Neumann entropy in Section 5, and to discuss the differences between the concepts of bit and

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Section: -What Is Information?mentioning

confidence: 99%

What is Quantum Information?

Lombardi¹,

Fortín²,

Holik³

et al. 2017

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“…These examples could, I think, easily be multiplied. I cannot, for example, see how the theory of 'conserved quantity' (Dowe 1992), Wesley C. Salmon's theory of 'mark transmission ' (1984) or any probabilistic account of causation could avoid Collingwood's criticism of sense III causation except at the cost of being flatly circular and in need of support from Collingwood's analysis of sense II causation. Cf.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Causation and reason: R. G. Collingwood and causal analysis as the essence of social thinking

Wide

2017

Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

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How are we to understand causal relations and analysis in social science? This paper takes R. G. Collingwood's writing about causation as its point of departure for the answering of this question. Two different kinds of causal relations are distinguished from pseudo-causality; of the former, one is directly connected to reason, the other to our ability to manipulate the world. Their interconnection and significance are discussed and the conclusions are drawn that (a) causality belongs to the realm of human praxis and that (b) causal analysis proper is well suited for the social sciences. It is further showed that some important explanations are not causal in any of the above-mentioned senses. These explanations could conceivably be called interpretative descriptions, but it is suggested that perhaps they can be understood as examples of causa sui, of something selfcaused.

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“…What a non-epistemic interpretation of information needs is the idea that what happens at the source causes what happens at the destination, but with a concept of causality that does not rely on physical interactions or space-time lines connecting the states of the source with the states of the destination: causality cannot be conceived in terms of energy flow (Fair 1979, Castañeda 1984, physical processes (Russell 1948, Dowe 1992, or property transference (Ehring 1997, Kistler 1998). Perhaps good candidates for conceptualizing the informational links from a non-epistemic stance are the manipulability theories of causation, according to which causes are to be regarded as devices for manipulating effects (Price 1991, Menzies and Price 1993, Woodward 2003.…”

Section: Perhaps This Feature Is What Leads Some Authors To Consider mentioning

confidence: 99%

What is Shannon information?

2015

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Although the use of the word 'information', with different meanings, can be traced back to antique and medieval texts (see Adriaans 2013), it is only in the 20 th century that the term begins to acquire the present-day sense. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of the notion of information both in our everyday life and in our scientific practice does not imply the agreement about the content of the concept. As Luciano Floridi (2010Floridi ( , 2011 stresses, it is a polysemantic concept associated with different phenomena, such as communication, knowledge, reference, meaning, truth, etc. In the second half of the 20 th century, philosophy begins to direct its attention to this omnipresent but intricate concept in an effort of unravel the tangle of significances surrounding it.According to a deeply rooted intuition, information is related with data, it has or carries content. In order to elucidate this idea, the philosophy of information has coined the concept of semantic information (Bar-Hillel and Carnap 1953, Bar-Hillel 1964, Floridi 2013, strongly related with notions such as reference, meaning and representation: semantic information has intentionality −"aboutness"−, it is directed to other things. On the other hand, in the field of science certain problems are expressed in terms of a notion of information amenable to quantification. At present, this mathematical perspective for understanding information is manifested in different formalisms, each corresponding to its own concept: Fisher information (which measures the dependence of a random variable X on an unknown parameter θ upon which the probability of X depends; see Fisher 1925), algorithmic information (which measures the length of the shortest program that produces a string on a universal Turing machine; see, e.g., Chaitin 1987), von Neumann entropy (which gives a measure of the quantum resources necessary to faithfully encode the state of the source-system; see Schumacher 1995), among others.Nevertheless, it is traditionally agreed that the seminal work for the mathematical view of information is the paper where Claude Shannon (1948) introduces a precise formalism designed to solve certain specific technological problems in communication engineering (see also Shannon 2 and Weaver 1949). Roughly speaking, Shannon entropy is concerned with the statistical properties of a given system and the correlations between the states of two systems, independently of the meaning and any semantic content of those states. Nowadays, Shannon's theory is a basic ingredient of the communication engineers training.At present, the philosophy of information has put on the table a number of open problems related with the concept of information (see Adriaans and van Benthem 2008): the possibility of unification of various theories of information, the question about a logic of information, the relations between information and thermodynamics, the meaning of quantum information, the links between information and computation, among others. In this wide panoply of open issues, it ca...

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Wesley Salmon's Process Theory of Causality and the Conserved Quantity Theory

Cited by 254 publications

References 25 publications

What is Quantum Information?

What is Quantum Information?

Causation and reason: R. G. Collingwood and causal analysis as the essence of social thinking

What is Shannon information?

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