Information and Knowledge À La Floridi

Abstract

Luciano Floridi has impressively applied the concept of information to problems in semantics and epistemology, among other areas. In this essay, I briefly review two areas where I think one may usefully raise questions about some of Floridi's conclusions. One area is in the project to naturalize semantics and Floridi's use of the derived versus nonderived notion of semantic content. The other area is in the logic of information and knowledge and whether knowledge based on information necessarily supports closure, in every instance. I suggest that it does not and, thereby, raise a challenge to Floridi's logic of being informed. Information and MeaningIn ''Open Problems in the Philosophy of Information, '' Floridi (2004a, 560) lists five ''extensional'' approaches to the notion of information, ranging from Shannon and Weaver's and Dretske's notions of semantic information cast in terms of probability space and the inverse relation between amounts of information and probability of a proposition p, to tracking the possible transitions in state space or tracking possible valid inferences relative to a person's epistemic states. While there are differences in the approaches, there are similarities as well. In what follows, I'm going to take the path that Floridi himself charts-that of defining information in terms of a data space where information is semantic, well formed, meaningful, and truthful data. Floridi's approach is perfectly consistent with the approaches of Shannon and Weaver and of Dretske as well, and where there may be differences, those differences do not matter for the topics I discuss below. 1 In my view, information is a naturally occurring commodity. It exists independently of minds and is created and transmitted by the nomic 1 Of course, Shannon does not himself consider using information as a basis for developing semantics. Dretske (1981) does, but his use of information has modal and counterfactual properties focused upon the origin of concepts and beliefs that derive from information. Floridi is developing a semantic notion of information. See my 2004 for more.

Information closure and the sceptical objection

“…There might be a lingering doubt about the value of pic. Such doubt may turn into an objection (allied with, but different from, the sceptical objection seen above) against the previous defence of pic that can be formulated by adapting Adams (2011), who, following Dretske, argues that we should reject information closure. Here it is.…”

Extended control systems: A theory and its implications

“…To begin with, note that whatever intentionality an artifact has, it will be derived. We can, following Fred Adams (2010), distinguish between two kinds of derivation: causal and semantic. Causal derivation of content involves causing a system to have a certain symbol-meaning combination.…”