[Sigia-l] Data, information, knowledge, wisdom

[Ted Han]

On 6/28/05, Boniface Lau <boniface_lau at compuserve.com> wrote:
> 010101 does have a context - the mind that perceives it. For example,
> when people are looking for a binary number and come across 010101,
> they are likely to interpret that as a binary number.

Alright this is something i'm qualified to speak to.

010101 does not have context.  Humans bring some contex to bear on the
symbol string.  The context in which the token is being interpreted
doesn't belong to the token it belongs to the interpretation device.
 
> In order for something to be truly with no context, people have to
> disengage their mind from what they perceive. But even for people who
> have learned to do that, it is not their typical way of dealing with
> sensory perception. Thus, except in some special situations,
> everything perceived has a context.

Having no context for some person simply means that there is a failure
to retreive any sailent context into which the current token can be
integrated.  This results in a faliure to communicate the orginal
intent of the item.  A related notion in the study of pragmatics is
the failure of accomodation.  There are a vast number of things that
people can say which don't make any sense in a literal fashion, but
with some minor mental gymnastics (usually having to do with hitting
some salient context) a listener can figure out what the speaker
means.  If they can't (the speaker is sufficently unclear) the
listener fails to accomodate and usually returns something like "what
on earth are you talking about?" and the speaker has to elaborate.

The relevance that this has, is that a string 010101 -doesn't-
necessarily have an immediately appropriate context, it depends on how
the interpreter is configured.  And its definitely worthwhile trying
to figure out how your target perceivers are configured, and how you
can structure your input to configure your perceivers to have the
appropriate context you desire.

-T