 For example, for us to access the distal information that there is fire from the proximal information that there is smoke, we must be aware of the correlation between smoke and fire. That we do is marked by maxims such as ”smoke means fire”. Such correlations of natural meaning between events in the world is studied by the Mathematical Theory of Communication (MTC) due to Shannon and Weaver (see the entry on  information).  This is the “industry standard” account of information, as analysed by communications engineers. What of the information encoded by natural language however? What of information in this more concretely semantic sense? A semantic conception of information will not investigate the mere surprise value of a signal given the likelihood of the signal itself (as does MTC). Instead, it will investigate the nature of the information carried by, or encoded by the messages transmitted themselves. Another way of approaching the issue is to understand such semantic conceptions of information to be concerned with the investigation of the informational content of a piece of language of some sort. Such pieces of language might be propositions, singular terms, descriptions, and so on.