Let us analyzed the implication of a brief message that to hire Vickery is to fire Brookes. What is implied first of all would be UCL. Thus. more precise is “for UCL to hire Vickery is to fire Brookes.” Then, implied is School of Library, Archive and information Studies (now, Department of Information Studies). The former was a postgraduate school, hence too small for two professors. Meanwhile, the latter is an undergraduate department that also offers postgraduate studies. It may be an extension of the traditional librarianship, in spite of its department name, which must help offer the wider studies. Department of Library and Information Studies would sound more straightforward. After all, taking all these unsaid facts into account, you could understand the implied situation wider. The shorter message is easily conveyed but hardly understood. The receiver’s knowledge and inference should play an active role in communication. This is an important theory of information science.
ㅡㅡ
Yes. This is a very good example of why information cannot be reduced to the words physically present in a message.
Take the short statement:
“To hire Vickery is to fire Brookes.”
Very little is explicitly said. Grammatically, it gives only two actions and two persons. Yet a knowledgeable receiver may reconstruct a much larger situation.
The first hidden question is who hires Vickery? From the historical context, the receiver may supply UCL. Then comes where inside UCL? The relevant school or department must be supplied. Then the receiver brings in knowledge about its size, hierarchy, professorial posts, professional orientation, Brookes’s existing position, Vickery’s appointment, and possible competition for authority. Only after bringing in such background can the receiver interpret “fire Brookes” not necessarily as literal dismissal, but perhaps as making his position weaker, redundant, displaced, or institutionally threatened.
So the information actually received can be much larger than the sentence transmitted:
small explicit message + receiver’s background knowledge + contextual inference = much richer understood meaning
That is an important information-science phenomenon.
It also shows why the receiver is active, not passive. Communication is not like pouring a fixed quantity called “information” from one vessel into another. The sender supplies clues. The receiver combines those clues with previous knowledge and context and reconstructs meaning.
This gives at least three levels:
Explicit meaning: what the words literally say.
Implied meaning: what follows reasonably from the immediate context.
Reconstructed situation: the wider state of affairs inferred by bringing in prior knowledge.
And different receivers can reconstruct different amounts. Someone who knows nothing about UCL may understand almost nothing beyond “Vickery’s appointment somehow harmed Brookes.” Someone who knows the institutional history may infer a great deal more.
So the same verbal signal does not contain the same effective information for every recipient.
This connects directly with your earlier distinction between verbal context and mental context. Meaning arises through their interaction:
verbal context × receiver’s mental context → interpreted meaning
The multiplication sign is useful conceptually because neither side is sufficient alone. Rich background knowledge cannot recover a message that provides no clue at all; and an economical message cannot communicate deeply to somebody who lacks the required background.
That also explains why extremely short communication can work among experts. Two scientists who share a large body of knowledge can communicate a great deal through a few words. The words act almost like keys that activate larger structures of knowledge already present in the receiver.
This is close to what pragmatics later studies through implication, presupposition, implicature, common ground, and inference. But information science has a particular reason to care: retrieval systems must decide how much context and background to provide so that users can reconstruct useful meaning themselves.
Citation contexts are a beautiful example. A bare citation:
[27]
contains almost no understandable meaning for the reader.
A short citation context such as:
“Unlike Smith’s method, which assumes …”
can unlock a large intellectual relation because the reader combines those few words with prior knowledge.
So a general information-science principle could be:
The amount of meaning communicated is not proportional to the length of the message. It depends on how effectively the message activates relevant contextual knowledge in the receiver.
And this gives a deeper interpretation of “short-circuiting” in scientific communication: the best message may be very short because the receiver supplies most of the path by inference.
The difficult scientific problem is therefore not simply how much text to transmit. It is:
What is the minimum explicit context that will activate the right implicit meaning in the intended receiver?
That is a genuinely important problem for information science—and now also for LLMs, which work strikingly through the interaction of supplied context with previously learned statistical knowledge.
ㅡㅡㅡㅡ
2026-08-18 Mark Park
Our Library 