nucleation

LIT-1019: Information Flow: The Logic of Distributed Systems

2 min read

Properties2
StatusUnavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from its Crossref record, not read. Registered at the owner's request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for CLAIM-098, CLAIM-011 and QUESTION-005. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for on 2026-10-13, none found: OpenAlex reports it closed, with no open-access or repository location; Semantic Scholar has no record of the DOI; Crossref gives only Cambridge Core's terms licence; Cambridge Core sells the chapters behind 'Get access'; a web search found no author-posted chapter or draft, and no personal page for Jerry (Jeremy) Seligman listing one; the PhilArchive record (BARIFT) could not be opened from here (bot challenge). Seligman's later chapter on channels in Sommaruga (ed.), Formal Theories of Information (Springer 2009; Auckland ResearchSpace 2292/13632) is a separate work, not a chapter of this book, and was not read.
Tagslogic, information-theory

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Jon Barwise and Jerry Seligman (1997), Cambridge University Press — DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511895968

Key takeaways

Filed, not read. Known here by what it is standardly cited for.

  • Classifications. Tokens, types and a classifying relation: the two-sided structure of an entity-by-predicate table.
  • Infomorphisms between two classifications are a pair of maps, one on types forward and one on tokens backward, that respect classification. Classifications and infomorphisms form a category.
  • Channels connect several classifications through a core, and information flows from one part of a distributed system to another by the regularities that hold in the core. Local logics say which regularities hold, and on which tokens.

Standing in the record

Filed for the pragmatic-transport line, as a ready theory of what it means to carry structure from one system of distinctions to another. Three points of contact a reading should test:

  • CLAIM-098 holds that translations form a category or semigroup of directed transformations, not a group. Classifications with infomorphisms are such a category, with arrows that need not be invertible.
  • CLAIM-011 requires the source–target correspondence to be anchored to independently measured distinctions. A channel’s core is a worked account of a correspondence as an object of its own, through which two classifications become comparable.
  • QUESTION-005 asks how to set up the correspondence of communicative environments without building the preferred notion of fidelity into it. Channel theory makes the correspondence an object of its own, which is the separation the question wants, though it does not say how to measure one.

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