A
venerable rule of predication is that certain words—or, at least, certain homonymous terms—admit of univocal, equivocal, and analogical acceptations. That is to say, there are times when a term has precisely the same meaning in two or more discrete instances of its use: say, “blue” as applied to two different visible objects situated in the same range of the chromatic spectrum. Then there are times when a single term has altogether different meanings: say, perhaps, “blue” as applied both to the color of an object and also to a private mood (assuming there is no actual affective connection there). And then there are times when a term retains some sort of proportional relation of meaning—though not a synonymy—across discrete usages: say, “blues” as describing both a subjective mood and also the objective structure of a particular chord progression (assuming there is an affective connection there, whether neurological or cultural). And, of course, there are times when it is not immediately clear precisely which of these relations obtains.
For instance, a word in great currency these days—in the “hard” sciences, philosophy, computational theory, and so on—is “information,” and many of its uses are remarkably nebulous in meaning. But at least two senses of the word can easily be isolated: sometimes, “information” means simply “data,” objective facts given “out there,” things, processes, brute events; at other times, however, it means the cognitive contents of subjective knowledge “in here” about things, processes, events, and so on. And it is not entirely clear whether these two uses should be viewed as analogous or merely equivocal. Perhaps the former: mental information being the word’s primary reference and empirical “information” its analogical extension. Or perhaps the latter: given the total qualitative difference between the active, directed mental “intentionality” exhibited in conscious cognition (that is to say, the “aboutness” of thought and perception, the “meaningfulness” of reality as apprehended under finite phenomenal, conceptual, and semiotic aspects) and the passive, undirected indeterminacy of any reality that might exist independent of mental acts. But, analogous or equivocal, it is beyond question that the two usages are definitely not univocal. Objective “information” and subjective “information” are distinct realities whose nature, structure, and logic are radically dissimilar. Yet, curiously, a vast quantity of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive scientific theory depends almost entirely on a failure to observe this elementary and obvious distinction.
