Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0006
L. Floridi
This chapter addresses the question: how do we know that the world really is as our informational constructs tell us it is?—the classic sceptical challenge. The chapter articulates and defends a twofold answer: either informational scepticism is radical (but epistemologically innocuous because redundant); or it is moderate (but epistemologically beneficial because useful). The first part of the chapter reconstructs a historical ‘renaissance of epistemology’ between the two world wars in light of the radical scepticism debate. The second part is entirely theoretical, seeking to solve the problem of radical scepticism. Once the problem has been established, Borel numbers are introduced as a convenient way to refer uniformly to (the data that individuate) different possible worlds. The Hamming distance between Borel numbers is adopted as a metric to calculate the distance between possible worlds. Radical and moderate informational scepticism are analysed using Borel numbers and Hamming distances to show that they are either harmless (extreme form) or fruitful (moderate form). Potential objections are dealt with in a separate section. The conclusion briefly discusses the Peircean nature of the overall approach.
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Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198833635.003.0007
L. Floridi
In this chapter, the principle of information closure (PIC) is defined and defended against a sceptical objection similar to the one discussed by Dretske in relation to the principle of epistemic closure. If successful, given that PIC is equivalent to the axiom of distribution and that the latter is one of the conditions that discriminate between normal and non-normal modal logics, one potentially good reason to look for a formalization of the logic of ‘S is informed that p’ among the non-normal modal logics, which reject the axiom, is also removed. This is not to argue that the logic of ‘S is informed that p’ should be a normal modal logic, but that it could still be, insofar as the objection that it could not be, based on the sceptical objection against PIC, has been removed. In other words, this chapter argues that the sceptical objection against PIC fails, so such an objection provides no ground to abandon the normal modal logic B (also known as KTB) as a formalization of ‘S is informed that p’, which remains plausible insofar as this specific obstacle is concerned.
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Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0002
L. Floridi
Philosophy, understood as the study or science of open questions and their answers, becomes primarily a form of conceptual design. This is what we are going to see in this chapter, which offers an account and a defence of constructionism, both as a metaphilosophical approach and as a philosophical methodology, with some references to the philosophical tradition that has inspired it, the so-called ‘maker’s knowledge’ tradition. Here, we shall see that such constructionism needs to be reconciled with naturalism (recall that philosophy as conceptual design may be critical but also respectful of the best knowledge and reasonings we may have).
{"title":"Philosophy as Conceptual Design","authors":"L. Floridi","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Philosophy, understood as the study or science of open questions and their answers, becomes primarily a form of conceptual design. This is what we are going to see in this chapter, which offers an account and a defence of constructionism, both as a metaphilosophical approach and as a philosophical methodology, with some references to the philosophical tradition that has inspired it, the so-called ‘maker’s knowledge’ tradition. Here, we shall see that such constructionism needs to be reconciled with naturalism (recall that philosophy as conceptual design may be critical but also respectful of the best knowledge and reasonings we may have).","PeriodicalId":178465,"journal":{"name":"The Logic of Information","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125754771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6973-1_4
L. Floridi
{"title":"Perception and Testimony as Data Providers","authors":"L. Floridi","doi":"10.1007/978-94-007-6973-1_4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6973-1_4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":178465,"journal":{"name":"The Logic of Information","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122195466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0011
L. Floridi
We have come to the end of this third volume. Together with the previous two, I hope it provides sufficient clarity and some designing tools for the philosophy of information to enable us to make the next step, which will be to understand and design the human project we may want to pursue in the twenty-first century. As usual, the more one explores, the more one realizes how much more work lies ahead, in terms of better understanding of the challenges we face, and efforts that we must make to devise adequate ways of thinking about our world, our society, and ourselves, in increasingly digitized contexts. By way of conclusion, in this afterword, I shall sketch the direction in which I hope we may make some progress. Many of the problems with which we are dealing and shall be dealing in the infosphere are uncharted territory, but I hope that a few points of reference may help us to get oriented. The actual navigation is left to the next volume, ...
{"title":"Afterword—Rebooting Philosophy","authors":"L. Floridi","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"We have come to the end of this third volume. Together with the previous two, I hope it provides sufficient clarity and some designing tools for the philosophy of information to enable us to make the next step, which will be to understand and design the human project we may want to pursue in the twenty-first century. As usual, the more one explores, the more one realizes how much more work lies ahead, in terms of better understanding of the challenges we face, and efforts that we must make to devise adequate ways of thinking about our world, our society, and ourselves, in increasingly digitized contexts. By way of conclusion, in this afterword, I shall sketch the direction in which I hope we may make some progress. Many of the problems with which we are dealing and shall be dealing in the infosphere are uncharted territory, but I hope that a few points of reference may help us to get oriented. The actual navigation is left to the next volume, ...","PeriodicalId":178465,"journal":{"name":"The Logic of Information","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124995805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0003
L. Floridi
Philosophical constructionism is far from being relativistic. This chapter will argue that it does not have to be naturalistic either. The discussion begins with a consideration of a strange predicament in which contemporary science seems to be caught. On the one hand, science holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology, according to which explanations of natural phenomena should never overstep the limits of the natural itself. On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication Technologies, which it exploits as well as fosters. Yet such technologies are increasingly ‘artificializing’ or ‘denaturalizing’ the world, human experiences, and interactions, as well as what qualifies as real. The search for the ultimate explanation of the natural seems to rely upon, and promote, the development of the artificial, seen here as an instantiation of the non-natural. In this chapter, I shall try and find a way out of this apparently strange predicament. I shall argue that the naturalization of our knowledge of the world is either philosophically trivial (naturalism as anti-supernaturalism and anti-preternaturalism), or mistaken (naturalism as anti-constructionism).
{"title":"Constructionism as Non-naturalism","authors":"L. Floridi","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Philosophical constructionism is far from being relativistic. This chapter will argue that it does not have to be naturalistic either. The discussion begins with a consideration of a strange predicament in which contemporary science seems to be caught. On the one hand, science holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology, according to which explanations of natural phenomena should never overstep the limits of the natural itself. On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication Technologies, which it exploits as well as fosters. Yet such technologies are increasingly ‘artificializing’ or ‘denaturalizing’ the world, human experiences, and interactions, as well as what qualifies as real. The search for the ultimate explanation of the natural seems to rely upon, and promote, the development of the artificial, seen here as an instantiation of the non-natural. In this chapter, I shall try and find a way out of this apparently strange predicament. I shall argue that the naturalization of our knowledge of the world is either philosophically trivial (naturalism as anti-supernaturalism and anti-preternaturalism), or mistaken (naturalism as anti-constructionism).","PeriodicalId":178465,"journal":{"name":"The Logic of Information","volume":"33 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134035200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0009
L. Floridi
If Alice’s knowledge is the knowledge enjoyed by a maker how can this be qualified according to the three classic distinctions, which specify that truths can be necessary vs. contingent, analytic vs. synthetic, and a priori vs. a posteriori? This chapter argues that (a) we need to decouple a fourth distinction, namely informative vs. uninformative, from the previous three and, in particular, from its implicit association with analytic vs. synthetic and a priori vs. a posteriori; (b) such a decoupling facilitates, and is facilitated by, moving from a monoagent to a multiagent approach; (c) the decoupling and the multiagent approach enable a re-mapping of currently available positions in epistemology on these four dichotomies; (d) within such a re-mapping, two positions, capturing the nature of a witness’s knowledge and of a maker’s knowledge, can best be described as contingent, synthetic, a posteriori, and uninformative and as contingent, synthetic, weakly a priori (ab anteriori), and uninformative respectively.
{"title":"Maker’s Knowledge, between A Priori and A Posteriori","authors":"L. Floridi","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198833635.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"If Alice’s knowledge is the knowledge enjoyed by a maker how can this be qualified according to the three classic distinctions, which specify that truths can be necessary vs. contingent, analytic vs. synthetic, and a priori vs. a posteriori? This chapter argues that (a) we need to decouple a fourth distinction, namely informative vs. uninformative, from the previous three and, in particular, from its implicit association with analytic vs. synthetic and a priori vs. a posteriori; (b) such a decoupling facilitates, and is facilitated by, moving from a monoagent to a multiagent approach; (c) the decoupling and the multiagent approach enable a re-mapping of currently available positions in epistemology on these four dichotomies; (d) within such a re-mapping, two positions, capturing the nature of a witness’s knowledge and of a maker’s knowledge, can best be described as contingent, synthetic, a posteriori, and uninformative and as contingent, synthetic, weakly a priori (ab anteriori), and uninformative respectively.","PeriodicalId":178465,"journal":{"name":"The Logic of Information","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131748765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-02-28DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198833635.003.0008
L. Floridi
Information closure may help with the consistency of a database, so it is related to information quality. However, it cannot be used to expand such an information repository. For this, other forms of reasoning are needed. Bayesianism is often indicated as a classic means to upgrade a set of beliefs or indeed some bits of information, in the vocabulary of this book. Some other erroneous forms of reasoning, however, damage the same reservoir of information. Interestingly, the two dynamics are related. As argued in this chapter, the two best known formal logical fallacies, namely denying the antecedent (DA) and affirming the consequent (AC), are not just basic and simple errors, which prove human irrationality, but rather informational shortcuts, which may provide a quick and dirty (and therefore unsafe) way of extracting useful information from the same informational resources to which Alice already has access. And, in this sense, they can be shown to amount to degraded versions of Bayes’ theorem, once this is stripped of some of its probabilities. The less the probabilities count, the closer these fallacies become to a reasoning that is not only informationally useful but also logically valid.
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