Diversity, dependence and independence

We propose a very general, unifying framework for the concepts of dependence and independence. For this purpose, we introduce the notion of diversity rank . By means of this diversity rank we identify total determination with the inability to create more diversity, and independence with the presence of maximum diversity. We show that our theory of dependence and independence covers a variety of dependence concepts, for example the seemingly unrelated concepts of linear dependence in algebra and dependence of variables in logic.