ABSTRACT
But, in fact, information can make do with fewer presuppositions and is less complicated than the picture just sketched. It’s certainly true that intelligent agents are capable of relaying information among themselves by using language. But the core idea underlying information is quite a bit simpler. We can see this by examining human language use and noting an essential feature of it. Suppose Alice tells Bob, “It’s raining outside or it’s not raining outside.” Alice has clearly made a statement and it clearly has a meaning. And yet, we would likely say that Alice hasn’t really told Bob anything, that her statement is uninformative. Why? Because her statement is tautological. And why are tautologies a problem for conveying information? Because, by being necessarily true, they don’t rule out anything. We don’t need to be informed of tautologies because we can figure them out on our own. Bob could know it was either raining or not raining outside without being told so by Alice.
