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Misinformation
Edited by Vladimir Krstic (Nazarbayev University)
About this topic
| Summary | Predominantly (but not exclusively), the contemporary philosophical analysis of information and misinformation has focused on animal signalling and specifically on contexts analogous to Lewisian signalling games. ‘Sender’ and ‘receiver’ are players in Lewisian signalling games. In their simplest version, the two players face a set of situations (‘states’), only the sender can observe these states, and each of them gets a certain payoff depending on the response given to these states. Considering his potential payoff, the sender chooses a signal, observed by the receiver, who then chooses a response (based on his potential payoff). Typically, it is considered that the sender determines the content of the signal in this situation. However, in these settings, what counts as misinformation is notoriously difficult to define. The reason is that whether a signal counts as information or misinformation depends on many factors, such as which measure of accuracy one decides to use, or which partition one uses to determine the content of the signals (in determining the content, we ‘partition’ i.e., divide the possible states of the world), or whether one understands signals as having propositional content or changing probabilities of states, and so on. It is no wonder, then, that this sets grounds for a very fruitful and interesting philosophical debate. |
| Key works | Skyrms 2010 |
| Introductions | Skyrms 2010 |
Show all references
Related
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- Conceptions of Information (528)
- The Information Economy (38)
- The Infosphere (31)
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- Information Ethics (249)
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- Information-Based Accounts of Mental Content (167)
- Ontology of Information Artifacts (16)
- Genetic Information (33)
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- Philosophy of Information, Misc (151)
Contents
34 found
Order:
- Nudging and Social Media: The Choice Architecture of Online Life.Douglas R. Campbell - forthcoming - Giornale Critico di Storia Delle Idee.This article will appear in a special issue dedicated to theme, "the human being in the digital era: awareness, critical thinking and political space in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence." In this article, I consider the way that social-media companies nudge us to spend more time on their platforms, and I argue that, in principle, these nudges are morally permissible: they are not manipulative and do not violate any obvious moral rules. The moral problem, I argue, is (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Misinformation and Intentional Deception: A Novel Account of Fake News.Michel Croce & Tommaso Piazza - forthcoming - In Maria Silvia Vaccarezza & Nancy Snow (eds.), Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media: Ethical and Epistemic Issues. Routledge.This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other definitions on the market. The account locates the fakeness of an alleged news report in two main aspects related to its production, namely that its creators do not think to have sufficient evidence in favor of what they divulge and they fail to display the appropriate attitude towards the truth of the information they share. A key feature of our analysis is that it does (...)
- The Singular Plurality of Social Goods / La singolare pluralità dei beni sociali.Marco Emilio - 2022 - Dissertation, Université de NeuchâtelAccording to some philosophers and social scientists, mainstream economic theories currently play an unprecedented role in shaping human societies. This phenomenon can be linked to the dissemination of methodological individualism, where common goods are interpreted as reducible to aggregates of individuals' well-being. Nonetheless, some emergent difficulties of economics in coping with global institutional issues have encouraged some authors to revise that paradigm. In the last three decades, there has been a parallel growing philosophical interest in investigating social sciences' epistemological and (...)
- Inconvenient Truth and Inductive Risk in Covid-19 Science.Eli I. Lichtenstein - 2022 - Philosophy of Medicine 3 (1):1-25.To clarify the proper role of values in science, focusing on controversial expert responses to Covid-19, this article examines the status of (in)convenient hypotheses. Polarizing cases like health experts downplaying mask efficacy to save resources for healthcare workers, or scientists dismissing “accidental lab leak” hypotheses in view of potential xenophobia, plausibly involve modifying evidential standards for (in)convenient claims. Societies could accept that scientists handle (in)convenient claims just like nonscientists, and give experts less political power. Or societies could hold scientists to (...)
- Wrong on the Internet: Why some common prescriptions for addressing the spread of misinformation online don’t work.Isaac Record & Boaz Miller - 2022 - Communique 105:22-27.Leading prescriptions for addressing the spread of fake news, misinformation, and other forms of epistemically toxic content online target either the platform or platform users as a single site for intervention. Neither approach attends to the intense feedback between people, posts, and platforms. Leading prescriptions boil down to the suggestion that we make social media more like traditional media, whether by making platforms take active roles as gatekeepers, or by exhorting individuals to behave more like media professionals. Both approaches are (...)
- Everybody lies: deception levels in various domains of life.Kristina Šekrst - 2022 - Biosemiotics (2).The goal of this paper is to establish a hierarchical level of deception which does not apply only to humans and non-human animals, but also to the rest of the living world, including plants. We will follow the hierarchical categorization of deception, set forth by Mitchell (1986), in which the first level of deception starts with mimicry, while the last level of deception includes learning and intentionality, usually attributed to primates. We will show how such a hierarchy can be attributed (...)
- Animal deception and the content of signals.Don Fallis & Peter J. Lewis - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 87 (C):114-124.In cases of animal mimicry, the receiver of the signal learns the truth that he is either dealing with the real thing or with a mimic. Thus, despite being a prototypical example of animal deception, mimicry does not seem to qualify as deception on the traditional definition, since the receiver is not actually misled. We offer a new account of propositional content in sender-receiver games that explains how the receiver is misled by mimicry. We show that previous accounts of deception, (...)
- Sharing (mis) information on social networking sites. An exploration of the norms for distributing content authored by others.Lavinia Marin - 2021 - Ethics and Information Technology 23 (3):363-372.This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe as infrastructures for forms of life (...)
- Three contextual dimensions of information on social media: lessons learned from the COVID-19 infodemic.Lavinia Marin - 2021 - Ethics and Information Technology 23:79–86.The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied on social media by an explosion of information disorders such as inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures adopted thus far to curb these informational disorders have had limited success because these did not account for the diversity of informational contexts on social media, focusing instead almost exclusively on curating the factual content of user’s posts. However, content-focused measures do not address the primary causes of the infodemic itself, namely the user’s need to post content (...)
- Strategies of Deception: Under‐Informativity, Uninformativity, and Lies—Misleading With Different Kinds of Implicature.Michael Franke, Giulio Dulcinati & Nausicaa Pouscoulous - 2020 - Topics in Cognitive Science 12 (2):583-607.
- In the beginning there was information?Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 80:101239.
- The Need for Stricter Control of Social Media by the US Government During the COVID-19 Epidemic.Jiseop Kim - 2020 - Voices in Bioethics 6.“Spraying chlorine or alcohol on skin kills viruses in the body!” “Hand dryers kill coronavirus.” “Coronavirus kills everyone.”[i] These are just some examples of misleading content that are being spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. With fear around the virus building as the number of cases grows, people are taking advantage of the internet for research. Many posts are drowning out the scientific facts and evidence that others depend on for essential health information, such as prevention methods or symptoms of the (...)
- Consequences of a Functional Account of Information.Stephen Francis Mann - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (3):1-19.This paper aims to establish several interconnected points. First, a particular interpretation of the mathematical definition of information, known as the causal interpretation, is supported largely by misunderstandings of the engineering context from which it was taken. A better interpretation, which makes the definition and quantification of information relative to the function of its user, is outlined. The first half of the paper is given over to introducing communication theory and its competing interpretations. The second half explores three consequences of (...)
- Beyond Fake News: Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation.Justin P. McBrayer - 2020 - New York, NY, USA: Routledge.The world is swimming in misinformation. Conflicting messages bombard us every day with news on everything from politics and world events to investments and alternative health. The daily paper, nightly news, websites, and social media each compete for our attention and each often insist on a different version of the facts. Inevitably, we have questions: Who is telling the truth? How would we know? How did we get here? What can we do? Beyond Fake News answers these and other queries. (...)
- Bilgi Kirliliği ve Bireysel Sorumluluk: Salgın Deneyimimiz.Alper Yavuz - 2020 - MSGSÜ Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 2 (22):203-217.Özet: Bilgi kirliliği eski bir sorun olsa da sosyal medya ve Internet tabanlı mesajlaşma uygulamalarının yaygınlaşmasıyla daha sık gündeme gelmeye başladı. Salgın hastalık gibi kriz dönemlerinde kirli bilginin etkinliğinin tehlikeli olabilecek boyutta arttığı görüldü. Bu yazıda bilgi kirliliği sorununu felsefi açıdan inceleyeceğim. Bilgi kirliliğinin ne olduğu sorusunu tartıştıktan sonra bilgi kirliliğinin üç türü arasındaki ayrımları ele alacağım. Son olarak bilgi kaynağı ve bilgi aktarıcısı olarak bir öznenin sorumluluklarının neler olduğu konusunu inceleyeceğim. Tartışmanın pratik sonuçlarını salgın hastalık konusuyla bağlantılı örnekler seçerek (...)
- Toward a formal analysis of deceptive signaling.Don Fallis & Peter J. Lewis - 2019 - Synthese 196 (6):2279-2303.Deception has long been an important topic in philosophy. However, the traditional analysis of the concept, which requires that a deceiver intentionally cause her victim to have a false belief, rules out the possibility of much deception in the animal kingdom. Cognitively unsophisticated species, such as fireflies and butterflies, have simply evolved to mislead potential predators and/or prey. To capture such cases of “functional deception,” several researchers Machiavellian intelligence II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 112–143, 1997; Searcy and Nowicki, The (...)
- Deception (Under Uncertainty) as a Kind of Manipulation.Vladimir Krstić & Chantelle Saville - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):830-835.In his 2018 AJP paper, Shlomo Cohen hints that deception could be a distinct subset of manipulation. We pursue this thought further, but by arguing that Cohen’s accounts of deception and manipulation are incorrect. Deception under uncertainty need not involve adding false premises to the victim’s reasoning but it must involve manipulating her response, and cases of manipulation that do not interfere with the victim’s reasoning, but rather utilize it, also exist. Therefore, deception under uncertainty must be constituted by covert (...)
- Propositional content in signals.Brian Skyrms & Jeffrey A. Barrett - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 74 (C):34-39.Propositional content arises from the practice of signaling with information transfer when a signaling process settles into some sort of a pattern, and eventually what we call meaning or propositional content crystallizes out. We give an evolutionary account of this process.
- A unified account of information, misinformation, and disinformation.Sille Obelitz Søe - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5929-5949.In this paper I develop and present a unified account of information, misinformation, and disinformation and their interconnections. The unified account is rooted in Paul Grice’s notions of natural and non-natural meaning Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, pp 213–223, 1957) and a corresponding distinction between natural and non-natural information :313–330, 2010). I argue that we can specify at least three specific kinds of non-natural information. Thus, as varieties of non-natural information there is intentionally non-misleading information, (...)
- Ambiguous signals, partial beliefs, and propositional content.Rafael Ventura - 2019 - Synthese 196 (7):2803-2820.As the content of propositional attitudes, propositions are usually taken to help explain the behavior of rational agents. However, a closer look at signaling games suggests otherwise: rational agents often acquire partial beliefs, and many of their signals are ambiguous. Signaling games also suggest that it is rational for agents to mix their behavior in response to partial beliefs and ambiguous signals. But as I show in this paper, propositions cannot help explain the mixing behavior of rational agents: to explain (...)
- Deception: a functional account.Marc Artiga & Cédric Paternotte - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (3):579-600.Deception has recently received a significant amount of attention. One of main reasons is that it lies at the intersection of various areas of research, such as the evolution of cooperation, animal communication, ethics or epistemology. This essay focuses on the biological approach to deception and argues that standard definitions put forward by most biologists and philosophers are inadequate. We provide a functional account of deception which solves the problems of extant accounts in virtue of two characteristics: deceptive states have (...)
- Content in Simple Signalling Systems.Nicholas Shea, Peter Godfrey-Smith & Rosa Cao - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (4):1009-1035.Our understanding of communication and its evolution has advanced significantly through the study of simple models involving interacting senders and receivers of signals. Many theorists have thought that the resources of mathematical information theory are all that are needed to capture the meaning or content that is being communicated in these systems. However, the way theorists routinely talk about the models implicitly draws on a conception of content that is richer than bare informational content, especially in contexts where false content (...)
- Making Sense of Lies, Deceptive Propaganda, and Fake News.Bonnie Brennen - 2017 - Journal of Media Ethics 32 (3):179-181.
- Behavioural Deception and Formal Models of Communication.Gregory McWhirter - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (3):757-780.Having a satisfactory definition of behavioural deception is important for understanding several types of evolutionary questions. No definition offered in the literature so far is adequate on all fronts. After identifying characteristics that are important for a definition, a new definition of behavioural deception is offered. The new definition, like some other proposed attempts, relies on formal game-theoretic models of signalling. Unlike others, it incorporates explicit consideration of the population in which the potentially deceptive interactions occur. The general structure of (...)
- Skyrms on the Possibility of Universal Deception.Don Fallis - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (2):375-397.In the Groundwork, Immanuel Kant famously argued that it would be self-defeating for everyone to follow a maxim of lying whenever it is to his or her advantage. In his recent book Signals, Brian Skyrms claims that Kant was wrong about the impossibility of universal deception. Skyrms argues that there are Lewisian signaling games in which the sender always sends a signal that deceives the receiver. I show here that these purportedly deceptive signals simply fail to make the receiver as (...)
- What is Disinformation?Don Fallis - 2015 - Library Trends 63 (3):401-426.Prototypical instances of disinformation include deceptive advertising (in business and in politics), government propaganda, doctored photographs, forged documents, fake maps, internet frauds, fake websites, and manipulated Wikipedia entries. Disinformation can cause significant harm if people are misled by it. In order to address this critical threat to information quality, we first need to understand exactly what disinformation is. This paper surveys the various analyses of this concept that have been proposed by information scientists and philosophers (most notably, Luciano Floridi). It (...)
- Propositional Content in Signalling Systems.Jonathan Birch - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 171 (3):493-512.Skyrms, building on the work of Dretske, has recently developed a novel information-theoretic account of propositional content in simple signalling systems. Information-theoretic accounts of content traditionally struggle to accommodate the possibility of misrepresentation, and I show that Skyrms’s account is no exception. I proceed to argue, however, that a modified version of Skyrms’s account can overcome this problem. On my proposed account, the propositional content of a signal is determined not by the information that it actually carries, but by the (...)
- Firefly Femmes Fatales: A Case Study in the Semiotics of Deception.Charbel N. El-Hani, João Queiroz & Frederik Stjernfelt - 2010 - Biosemiotics 3 (1):33-55.Mimicry and deception are two important issues in studies about animal communication. The reliability of animal signs and the problem of the benefits of deceiving in sign exchanges are interesting topics in the evolution of communication. In this paper, we intend to contribute to an understanding of deception by studying the case of aggressive signal mimicry in fireflies, investigated by James Lloyd. Firefly femmes fatales are specialized in mimicking the mating signals of other species of fireflies with the purpose of (...)
- Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information.Brian Skyrms - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.Brian Skyrms offers a fascinating demonstration of how fundamental signals are to our world. He uses various scientific tools to investigate how meaning and communication develop. Signals operate in networks of senders and receivers at all levels of life, transmitting and processing information. That is how humans and animals think and interact.
- Disinformation: The use of false information. [REVIEW]James H. Fetzer - 2004 - Minds and Machines 14 (2):231-240.The distinction between misinformation and disinformation becomes especially important in political, editorial, and advertising contexts, where sources may make deliberate efforts to mislead, deceive, or confuse an audience in order to promote their personal, religious, or ideological objectives. The difference consists in having an agenda. It thus bears comparison with lying, because lies are assertions that are false, that are known to be false, and that are asserted with the intention to mislead, deceive, or confuse. One context in which disinformation (...)
- Information: Does it Have To Be True?James H. Fetzer - 2004 - Minds and Machines 14 (2):223-229.Luciano Floridi (2003) offers a theory of information as a “strongly semantic” notion, according to which information encapsulates truth, thereby making truth a necessary condition for a sentence to qualify as “information”. While Floridi provides an impressive development of this position, the aspects of his approach of greatest philosophical significance are its foundations rather than its formalization. He rejects the conception of information as meaningful data, which entails at least three theses – that information can be false; that tautologies are (...)
- The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life.Ralph Keyes - 2004 - St. Martin's Press."Dishonesty inspires more euphemisms than copulation or defecation. This helps desensitize us to its implications. In the post-truth era we don't just have truth and lies but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall just short of a lie. Enhanced truth it might be called. Neo-truth . Soft truth . Faux truth . Truth lite ." Deception has become the modern way of life. Where once the boundary line between truth and lies was (...)
- Research crimes, misdemeanors, and tolerated deceptions.M. Alfino - 1996 - Journal of Information Ethics 5 (1):5-8.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Misinformation.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 1989 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19 (4):533-550.It is well known that informational theories of representation have trouble accounting for error. Informational semantics is a family of theories attempting a naturalistic, unashamedly reductive explanation of the semantic and intentional properties of thought and language. Most simply, the informational approach explains truth-conditional content in terms of causal, nomic, or simply regular correlation between a representation and a state of affairs. The central work is Dretske, and the theory was largely developed at the University of Wisconsin by Fred Dretske, (...)
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