ABSTRACT
Information is a highly ambiguous term. Thus, this name turns out to be a continuous source of misunderstandings (Bar-Hillel 1955; Tillman and Russell 1965). As Georgescu-Roegen (1977a: 189) aptly remarks, ‘the meaning of “information” shifts freely among that of “messages”, “choice”, “uncertainty”, to be finally confused with that of “knowledge” in the academic sense of this term’. This aggravated situation has led none other than C. E. Shannon to lament that the concept of information originally set out in communication engineering has been ‘ballooned to an importance beyond its actual accomplishments’ and that ‘the basic results of the subject are aimed in a very specific direction, a direction that is not necessarily relevant to such fields as psychology, economics, and other social sciences’ (Shannon: 1956).
