Triplicity and codes of culture: Impact of informational regularities

Three addresses always inspire confidence, even in tradesmen. Oscar Wild Informational approach in cultural studies now puts forth, so investigations of a specific kind occur rather prospective, which establish links between different branches within this approach. The present paper is devoted to one of such links, connecting properties of human memory with the phenomenon of the threshold of perception. (Of course, both these fields are considered in the framework of the informational approach.) As a result, we shall come to some general regularities of human behavior, culture, etc., the most interesting of these regularities being related to the structure of works of art. of the information to be kept (stored) by any device of memory (let this memory belong to the human being, or let it be a computer system, and so forth). The heart of the matter is the task of the most economic 'non-motivated classification' of a set of objects (Sukhotin, 1983). Let us suppose a set of B objects described by a set of parameters (features, scales), each parameter consisting of several gradations. We shall use these parameters simply to classify objects – exactly such is the aim of non-motivated classification (in contrast to 'motivated classifications' which are applied to distinguish between useful objects and non-useful ones). If we have β α parameters with α gradations ('words'), then the number of possible classes N = Π α β α , α symbol Π designating the operation of multiplying. [For instance, when classifying persons, we use one parameter with two gradations (gender: men or women) and two parameters with three Hence, the number of possible combinations N = 2 1 × 3 2 = 18 classes.] How many gradations ('words') should we use to realize such a description? – Evidently, the number of such 'words' W = Σ α β α. α [In the previous example we should use W = 2×1 + 3×2 = 8 gradations, or 'words.'] The informational optimization in such case means nothing else than the economy of the total number of 'words' (gradations used) under quite evident condition – sufficient description of the given number of objects: