REDUNDANCY (Knowledge implicit in)
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 2775 ▶ |
| Object type | Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
O.S. AKHMANOVA states: “The redundancy of a text is a consequence of the fact that the different elements — words, and also parts of words, letters are not independent from each other. There are probabilistic connections between these elements, determined by the probabilistic structure of the language. It is just the knowledge (possibly unconscious) of this structure that allows us to fill in the abbreviations of the text” (1960, p.l99).
- “Probabilistic” should be understood as “defining more or less probable connections, in accordance with the specific constraints that characterizes the language used”.
Such constraints per se are precisely “anti-probabilistic” and our knowledge of them is what allows us a significant “reading” of any text, even more or less pruned of its redundancies, by guessing “what should come now”.
Of course, redundancy exists only when there is a meta-knowledge. Who does not know Japanese cannot perceive any redundancy in a message in Japanese, even if it is perfectly present therein.