engleski

The notion of ‘information’ in genetics: a pragmatic model

In this paper I suggest a pragmatic model for the notion of ‘information’used in molecular biology in the description of protein synthesis. Discarding any ontological commitments of the term information’, I propose a view of information based on an analogy with communication.This view could at least supplement the existing information-metaphor that should be updated for two reasons: (i) the concept of information it presupposes, and (ii) the origin of the metaphor itself. Besides, the metaphorical nature of the notion of ‘information’ is still often overlooked, which leads to a false sense of understanding of the underlying genetic phenomena it should describe. The advantages of a model based on communication, as it is seen by the field of pragmatics, is twofold: (i) it provides a rather simple analogy between human communication and basic genetic processes, and (ii) it supplies the tools for the understanding of the non-literal use of the term ‘information’.

Information ; genes ; communication ; metaphor ; pragmatics

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