Deep controversy of the day - 2

[timelets]

Floridini (2012):

Information is one of those crucial concepts whose technical meaning we have not inherited or even adapted from ancient philosophy or theology. It is not a Greek word, and the Latin term happens to have a different meaning, largely unrelated to the way we understand information nowadays.

Be that as it may, ‘what is information?’ has received many answers in different fields. Several surveys2 do not even converge, let alone agree, on a single, unified definition of information.

unfortunately, the nature of data is not well-understood philosophically either, despite the fact that some important past debates—such as those on the given and on sense data—have provided at least some initial insights. There still remains the advantage, however, that the concept of data is less rich, obscure, and slippery than that of information, and hence is easier to handle

SEoP:

Until recently the possibility of a unification of these theories was generally doubted (Adriaans and van Benthem 2008a) but in the past decade conversions and reductions between various formal models have been studied (Cover and Thomas 2006; Grünwald and Vitányi 2008; Bais and Farmer 2008). The situation that seems to emerge is not unlike the concept of energy: there are various formal sub-theories about energy (kinetic, potential, electrical, chemical, nuclear) with well-defined transformations between them. Apart from that, the term ‘energy’ is used loosely in colloquial speech.

WTF. Why the ancients didn't provide us with a good definition?