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The Metaphilosophy of Information

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Abstract

This article mounts a defence of Floridi’s theory of strongly semantic information against recent independent objections from Fetzer and Dodig-Crnkovic. It is argued that Fetzer and Dodig-Crnkovic’s objections result from an adherence to a redundant practice of analysis. This leads them to fail to accept an informational pluralism, as stipulated by what will be referred to as Shannon’s Principle, and the non-reductionist stance. It is demonstrated that Fetzer and Dodig-Crnkovic fail to acknowledge that Floridi’s theory of strongly semantic information captures one of our deepest and most compelling intuitions regarding informativeness as a basic notion. This modal intuition will be referred to as the contingency requirement on informativeness. It will be demonstrated that its clarification validates the theory of strongly semantic information as a novel, and non ad hoc solution to the Bar-Hillel-Carnap semantic paradox.

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Notes

  1. This list it not meant to be anything like exhaustive, but merely indicative.

  2. And there’s probably not. To be sure, it is possible to misuse a word, but such misuse is a result of deviation from convention. In cases where convention is at odds with canonical stipulated use (such as an old edition of the OED for example) then the meaning of the word has changed (as the meaning of words is want to do). In cases where convention is at odds with a current edition of the OED, the edition requires updating. In cases where general convention is at odds with a specialized minority convention, then we are dealing with homonyms, which may or may not be accurately tracked in some lexical cannon or other, depending on its intended domain. If the use falls within the intended domain of the lexical cannon, yet the entry does not track the convention, then, to reiterate, the entry requires updating. If you think of philosophy in pragmatic as opposed to semantic terms, then think of all of this in terms of correct word usage as opposed to correct word meaning.

  3. Floridi refers to CSI as the theory of weakly semantic information (TWSI).

  4. Bar-Hillel and Carnap built CSI around a monadic predicate language. The number of possible worlds is calculated accordingly. Where there are n individual constants (standing for n individuals) and m primitive monadic predicates, the number of atomic sentences will be nm, the number of possible worlds 2nm, and the number of “Q-predicators” 2m (Q-predicators are individuations of possible types of objects given a conjunction of predicates whereby each primitive predicate occurs either negated or un-negated (but not both)). A full sentence of a Q-predicator is a Q-sentence where a predicate is attached to a term. Hence a possible world is a conjunction of n Q sentences as each Q-sentence describes a possibly existing individual. Since this article deals with nothing more fine-grained than the propositional calculus, these details will be ignored.

  5. We speak of the intension associated with a sentence as opposed to the intension associated with a proposition because, on the possible worlds understanding of propositions, a proposition just is an intension.

  6. We require ‘\(\subseteq \) ’ instead of the stronger ‘\(\subset \) ’ here because of the possibility that \(\models \neg\, s\) , in which case X = W.

  7. For a critical evaluation of Jaakko Hintikka’s approach to the issue, see Sequoiah-Grayson (2007). For a development of a metasemantic approach to logical hyperintensionality explicitly related to issues surrounding the problem of logical omniscience, see Sequoiah-Grayson (2008).

  8. For the outline of a theory of information faithful to Shannon’s Premonition that is designed to overcome this very idealisation, see Sequoiah-Grayson (2006).

  9. Barring a dialethic paraconsistentism that is. The need for weak substructural logics with respect to capturing fine-grained real-world phenomena may always be satisfied via a less radical non-dialethic paraconsistentism. One infamous example of such phenomena is the information yield of deductive inferences for resource-bounded non-idealised natural agents. See Sequoiah-Grayson (2006) for further details.

  10. If Dodig-Crnkovic means well-formed meaningful data by ‘the general definition of information’, as does Floridi, then this is also confusing. It is confusing because Floridi does not take well-formed meaningful data to correspond to TSSI either.

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Acknowledgements

My deepest gratitude is extended to Luciano Floridi, Patrick Allo, Antony Eagle, and an anonymous referee at Minds and Machines for many extremely helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. Any errors that remain are entirely my own.

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  1. Faculty of Philosophy and IEG, Computing Laboratory, The University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson

  2. Balliol College, Oxford, OX1 3BJ, UK

    Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson

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Sequoiah-Grayson, S. The Metaphilosophy of Information. Minds & Machines 17, 331–344 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-007-9072-4

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