nucleation

TERM-034: fidelity, as selective preservation of decision-relevant observational information under a communication constraint, relative to an interpreter

1 min read

Properties7
StatusActive
Tagsinformation-theory, philosophy-of-language
Linepragmatic-transport
Used byCLAIM-140 — The October thesis replaces what a receiver can reconstruct with what the analyst's probe system can identify as the test of what survives, and no turn argues the change, CLAIM-225 — Blackwell's order measures what an ideal decision-maker could do, not what a given receiver can reconstruct, and the line's claims that a rendering can improve access describe garblings that real receivers do better with, which is the shape of the Blackwell thesis's own defeat condition, CLAIM-244 — The defeat tests take one holistic, task-free judgement of fidelity as ground truth, though the line's own theses say fidelity is task-relative, interpreter-relative and not a single ranking, CLAIM-199 — Blackwell's order bounds what a rendering makes possible for any receiver, and a given receiver's access is usable information relative to the rules it can apply, which a garbling can raise for that receiver but never above what the source makes possible, CLAIM-220 — For a named population of receivers and a stated family of tasks, what survives a translation, retelling or rendering is the set of task-relevant communicative distinctions those receivers can still recover from it, and measured preservation of the pragmatic observables predicts that recovery better than preservation of the wording or of the proposition, with or without its force
ComplementsTERM-064 — legibility, of a distinction to an observer for a task: whether the observer, with the rules, categories and resources it actually has, can recover the distinction from what it is given and bring it to bear on the task; a relation among a representation, an observer's rule class, its resources and a task, bounded above by what the source makes possible for an ideal receiver, and directed, since what is legible to a governing institution and what of its governing is legible to others are different relations
Cited as “complements” byTERM-097 — coherence, of a family of descriptions, transports or judgements: their agreement with one another under a stated correspondence structure (on overlaps, around cycles, between routes), distinct from fidelity to a source, from integration by dynamics, and from knowledge of the world
Cited as “uses” byCLAIM-496 — Agreement between routes of translation is a measure of coherence, not of fidelity, and the two are independent: a rendering that sends every source utterance to one output makes direct and relay transport agree exactly while a receiver who could tell a promise from a prediction with no error is left at chance, and two routes that keep the act and differ in register disagree completely while losing nothing the act-identification task needs

Graph View

Definition

A108 §12, fourth conclusion: “Fidelity is selective preservation of decision-relevant observational information under a communication constraint, relative to an interpreter and its available side information.” It combines inferential sufficiency (TERM-028), the rate constraint that TERM-010 carried at A100, and the receiver’s side information. Elsewhere the argument says “a family of operational fidelity criteria” (§24), and its one-passage summary says “graded, observer- and task-relative preservation of relational and informational structure”.

What it is not

Not the manuscript’s functional L = L_obs + λL_str + γL_dec, which has no rate constraint and no interpreter term. The manuscript relativizes fidelity to the receiver only in §5 (side information) and in its last sentence. The symmetry sense (TERM-036) is a separate notion again.

Backlinks