Information Transfer Efficiency
I would like to draw an analogy between compression technologies (such as MP3, MPEG2(DVD), .zip Files) and human communication. The analogous element is the compression. Thoughts are compressed into words that are then sent to the recipient who decompresses them. This can be ‘lossy’ or ‘lossless’. I go into further detail below.
This above diagram shows a form of communication that is analogous to a lossy compression scheme. I have presented two claims with co-premises as ‘A + B’ and ‘X + Y’. Only A and X are communicated and it is expected that the recipient will determine the relevant co-premises from the context of the conversation and the content of claims. In an argument, the recipient may not ‘fill in’ the correct co-premises and this will lead to errors. No person will communicate every relevant premise because it would be too time consuming to do so. However, I believe that when an argument is important, it is essentially that either the claimant communicate the important or contentious premises or the recipient coax them out of the claimant through dialogue.
In theory, where all words are capable of precise definition, the form of communication in the diagram above would not result in any information being lost. In that sense it is analogous to a lossless compression scheme. In reality many (most?) words are ambiguous to some extent. In the diagram ‘A’ = 1, 2, 3 and ‘B’ = 4, 5, 6. Only A and B need to be communicated because the recipient of the information has access to the definitions of A and B. They would determine the relevant definitions by looking at the context and content of the conversation. In an argument, the fidelity of the information can be maximised by ensuring that the participants clearly define the words they have used so that confusion can be avoided.
NOTE: Unfortunately the images for this post have been lost. I apologise for that, but I hope you can get the gist of what I was saying even without the images.
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