Page 113 - Modern Spatiotemporal Geostatistics

94 Modern Spatiotemporal Geostatistics — Chapter 4

COMMENT 4.3: Being philosophical in nature, th e concept o f information

is associated with more than one interpretation (Aczel and Daroczy, 1975;

Jumarie, 1990; Baldi an d Brunak, 1998; Ebanks et al. , 1998). Indeed, th e

various meanings of information encountered in scientific investigations re-

flect the different aspects of this fundamental concept (syntactic, semantic,

pragmatic, etc. aspects). I n scientific practice, it is often more appropriate

to emphasize the epistemic features of information. Furthermore, many

researchers approach information the same way they approach other im-

portant concepts like energy and gravity (these concepts lead to powerful

scientific theories and models that have important applications, but their

existence cannot be proven ontologically from first principles). As it turns

out, while the concept of information is philosophical in nature, we are nev-
ertheless able to investigate its intriguing mathematical structure and obtain
very useful results for our scientific applications.

Meta-prior stage
At the meta-prior stage we collect and organize specificatory knowledge S in
appropriate quantitative forms that can be explicitly incorporated into the BME
formulation. S includes case-specific empirical evidence concerning, e.g., the
existence of certain physical factors associated with the natural variable under
consideration. In real-world applications, we may be dealing with various bod-
ies of case-specific knowledge (Chapter 3, p. 82 ff). The quality and quantity
of the hard and soft data collected is a matter of experimental and computa-
tional investigations, which can provide with precious feedback the theoretical
processes involved in BME analysis.
There could also be several causes for the existence of constraints on
the knowledge to be considered at this stage, like data storage limitations,
costs, and communication restrictions. In many cases, the existence of such
constraints may raise the issue of deciding "what to know."

COMMENT 4.4: A note ma y b e relevant here. Just a s an y method o f sci-

entific reasoning and prediction, the BME method relies on the continuing

communication and cooperation between theoreticians, on the one side, and
experimentalists, on the other. Indeed, good scientists on both sides will

always find ways to communicate, and it is their cooperation that has char-

acterized some of the brightest moments of scientific endeavor. As a matter
of fact, it is now widely recognized that the potentially greatest obstacle to

scientific research is not any artificial schism between theoreticians and

experimentalists, but rather the absence of inspiration, illumination, con-

structive criticism, and critical thinking, which have always been the forces

that move scientific thought and action. There is nothing inspiring or even
vaguely satisfying in the of undigested cookbook recipes, fashionable

cliches, and quick fixes that serve to obfuscate fundamental questions of sub-

stance, value, and purpose. Instead, approaches are needed that are capable