Abstract
We ordinarily think of induction as ‘learning from experience’, and the question naturally arises how to make such learning proceed most rapidly. The answer, in rough and ready terms, is to ask searching questions, and experimentation is conceived, in this spirit, as the art of asking such questions or probing Nature for her secrets. Now searching questions are those which promise to shed most light on the problem of interest, in a word, to deliver the highest expected yield of information. This already suggests the relevance of information theory, but it does not establish it, for information theory was developed by communication theorists and engineers to solve problems whose connection with efficient experimentation is less than obvious. Yet, as we will see, the connections are there all right, and it is part of our task in this chapter to articulate them.
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© 1977 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Rosenkrantz, R.D. (1977). Information. In: Inference, Method and Decision. Synthese Library, vol 115. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1237-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1237-9_1
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