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

[Conal Tuohy]

> From: Boniface Lau 

> > From: Ted Han
> >  
> > So, my point is that, unlike the tree that falls in the 
> woods when no 
> > one is around to hear it, inputs genuinely -don't- have 
> meaning unless 
> > there's someone there to supply the meaning
> 
> But people do not arbitrary invent a meaning regardless of 
> what they are seeing. When people see something written in a 
> recognized date format, they are not going to interpret that 
> as a person's name.
> 
> Thus, a date remains as a date even though there is nobody 
> around because that date has some attributes that will likely 
> lead the next person that sees it to interpret it as a date.

In actual fact of course, since the date is just some squiggles of ink
on a piece of paper, or something, if all humans were wiped out in some
act of bio-terrorism, it would no longer "mean" anything. So its meaning
is independent of any particular human, but not independent of humans in
general (and definitely not inherent in the written date itself!) 

The conventions for writing dates are real things with an objective
existence (which happens to be highly distributed), and it's these
social conventions that provide the context in which some individual can
interpret the written date to "mean" a particular date.