Word: molese
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Abraham Moles's newly translated Information Theory and Esthetic Perception is a book with one interesting idea, which emerges, crablike, from the murky burrow of Chapter Five. The idea is that realizations of a work of art--the performances of a symphony or play--are not uniquely determined by the...
In Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, the exposition of this idea requires 45 pages. The ratio of verbiage to original thought in the rest of the book is vastly higher. Moles, like many before him, has failed to see that a relabelling of old problems does not necessarily increase our...
Let us consider perception by an individual human being as communication from the external world to that human, says Moles, now a professor of philosophy in Strasbourg. Let us consider in detail artistic communications, since it is particularly easy to isolate them. Then esthetic perception, as a special kind of...
This reasoning is an example of what philosophers call the fallacy of equivocation: what Shannon and Wiener, inventors of information theory, meant by "communication" is not what Moles has in mind. However, trying to apply a theory in new domains is fair game, so we proceed.
Of course, You Can't Take It With You is still propelled by the zany character of the Sycamore family. Grandfather (Donald Moffat) is a business dropout who has devoted 35 years to raising a small colony of snakes in a goldfish tank in the living room. He is...