The typical mode of communication is an attempt to convey information by making true statements. One only brings up false statements in much rarer circustances, such as when one entity’s information contradicts another entity’s information. Thus, an optimized language is one where true statements are high in information.
Otherwise, to communicate efficiently, you’d have to go around making a bunch of statements with an extraneous not above the default for the language, which is wierd.
This has the potential to be trans-human, I think.
But whether a statement is true or false depends on things other than the language itself. (The sentence “there were no aces or kings in the flop” is the same length whether or not there were any aces or kings in the flop.) The typical mode of communication is an attempt to convey information by making true but non-tautological statements (for certain values of “typical”—actually implicatures are often at least as important as truth conditions). So, how would such a mechanism work?
The typical mode of communication is an attempt to convey information by making true statements. One only brings up false statements in much rarer circustances, such as when one entity’s information contradicts another entity’s information. Thus, an optimized language is one where true statements are high in information.
Otherwise, to communicate efficiently, you’d have to go around making a bunch of statements with an extraneous not above the default for the language, which is wierd.
This has the potential to be trans-human, I think.
But whether a statement is true or false depends on things other than the language itself. (The sentence “there were no aces or kings in the flop” is the same length whether or not there were any aces or kings in the flop.) The typical mode of communication is an attempt to convey information by making true but non-tautological statements (for certain values of “typical”—actually implicatures are often at least as important as truth conditions). So, how would such a mechanism work?