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This chapter addresses two questions. First, if knowledge is accounted information, how are we supposed (to apply this analysis in order) to understand perceptual knowledge and knowledge by testimony? In the first part of the chapter, I articulate an answer in terms of a re-interpretation of perception and testimony as data providers rather than fu...
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... Floridi's own version of ISR includes some Kantian motifs too. According to Floridi's (2014) restatement of a Kantian theme, the perceptual information about the world is the world. Our perceptions are informative about the nature (or at least structure) of the external causes that affect our sense-organs, and how such an effect manifests itself depends quite essentially on nature of the perceptual systems on which the causes operate (see Floridi 2014). ...
... According to Floridi's (2014) restatement of a Kantian theme, the perceptual information about the world is the world. Our perceptions are informative about the nature (or at least structure) of the external causes that affect our sense-organs, and how such an effect manifests itself depends quite essentially on nature of the perceptual systems on which the causes operate (see Floridi 2014). But CSR goes beyond the renowned versions of SR to show that the representationalist construal of PPT that is presented in this chapter supports this Kantian approach. ...
In this chapter, I draw on the resources of contemporary computational neuroscience to provide an updated version of CSR. I shall argue that the resources of the Predictive Processing Theory (PPT) can be used to account for both structuralist and realist components of CSR. I argue that PPT provides the necessary inferential links for accounting for CSR’s notion of scientific representation. Since the implemented Bayesian framework that PPT invokes has a natural propensity for being grounded, this version of CSR provides a solution to the problem of representation. But I will conclude the chapter by pointing out that the inferential nature of the invoked inferential links could still harbour the strong version of the problem of representation.
... In the manner that comprehension followed from disclosure, one way we can characterize the logs and cables is as "transparent" data: this in the sense of "transparent" referring to what is manifest, in plain sight, and easy to perceive. In the language of the field of information theory (Floridi 2014), the releases were depicted as having the status of "information," that is, as well-formed, meaningful, and truthful data. Commentators advanced positions (albeit ones offering opposing conclusions) in which the leaks were portrayed as speaking for themselves rather than any supplementary explanations and evidence being required. ...
Contests over the control of information are central to the perpetuation and critique of militarism. This article examines one of the most prominent sets of state document leaks in recent political history: the online posting of hundreds of thousands of US war logs and diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. Bold statements were advanced in 2010 and afterward regarding what these releases made visible. In contrast, this article considers how disclosure and nondisclosure came bundled together. With reference to the tensions of keeping secrets and producing transparency, I suggest that the promise attached to the released documents did not just derive from the argument that they revealed modern statecraft, nor that such knowledge was tantalizingly out of reach, but from the manner in which what had been rendered knowable could be revisited over time. Through this argument I want to explore the affective knots, conceptual tangles, and problematic story lines associated with exposing militarism. © 2018 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
... Under the circumstances, it may be possible to underscore the constructionist undertone of Floridi's philosophy of information (and ISR). On several occasions, Floridi (2011aFloridi ( , 2014Floridi ( , 2016 spelt out the constructionist commitments of his theory of semantic information. On such grounds, it may be possible to argue that Floridi's view on semantic information is not committed to the orthodox mimetic theories. ...
... This is more or less compatible with the Kantian undertone of Floridi's philosophy of information. According to Floridi's (2014) restatement of the Kantian theme, the perceptual information about the world is the world. Our perceptions are informative about the nature (or at least structure) of the external causes that affect our sense-organs, and how such an effect manifests itself depends quite essentially on nature of the perceptual systems on which the causes operate (see Floridi 2014). ...
... According to Floridi's (2014) restatement of the Kantian theme, the perceptual information about the world is the world. Our perceptions are informative about the nature (or at least structure) of the external causes that affect our sense-organs, and how such an effect manifests itself depends quite essentially on nature of the perceptual systems on which the causes operate (see Floridi 2014). Floridi, too, drew on a Helmholtzian extension of Kantian realism, so as to establish the ontic component of his view. ...
Luciano Floridi’s informational structural realism (ISR) takes a constructionist attitude towards the problems of epistemology and metaphysics, but the question of the nature of the semantical component of his view remains vexing. In this paper, I propose to dispense with the semantical component of ISR completely. I outline a Syntactical version of ISR (SISR for short). The unified entropy-based framework of information has been adopted as the groundwork of SISR. To establish its realist component, SISR should be able to dissolve the latching problem. We have to be able to account for the informational structures–reality relationship in the absence of the standard semantical resources. The paper offers a pragmatic solution to the latching problem. I also take pains to account for the naturalistic plausibility of this solution by grounding it in the recent computational neuroscience of the predictive coding and the free energy principle.
... e2-e4) is 1. I have explored this point in Floridi (2014). (4) Bob and Carol are both outside the system producing s and hence making e2-e4 true. ...
Three classic distinctions specify that truths can be necessary versus contingent,analytic versus synthetic, and a priori versus a posteriori. The philosopher reading this article knows very well both how useful and ordinary such distinctions are in our conceptual work and that they have been subject to many and detailed debates, especially the last two. In the following pages, I do not wish to discuss how far they may be tenable. I shall assume that, if they are reasonable and non problematic in some ordinary cases, then they can be used in order to understand what kind of knowledge the maker’s knowledge is. By this I mean the sort of knowledge that Alice enjoys when she holds the information (true content) that Bob’s coffee is sweetened because she just put two spoons of sugar in it herself. The maker’s knowledge tradition is quite important but it is not mainstream in modern and analytic epistemology and lacks grounding in terms of exactly what sort of knowledge one is talking about. My suggestion is that this grounding can be provided by a minimalist approach, based on an information-theoretical analysis. In the article, I argue that (a) we need to decouple a fourth distinction, namely informative versus uninformative, from the previous three and, in particular, from its implicit association with analytic versus synthetic and a priori versus a posteriori; (b) such a decoupling facilitates, and is facilitated by, moving from a monoagent to a multiagent approach: the distinctions qualify a proposition, a message, or some information not just in themselves but relationally, with respect to an informational agent; (c) the decoupling and the multiagent approach enable a re-mapping of currently available positions in epistemology (Classic, Innatist, Kant’s and Kripke’s) on these four dichotomies; (d) within such a re-mapping, two positions, capturing the nature of a witness’ 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. In the conclusion, I indicate why the analysis of the maker’s knowledge has important consequences in all those cases in which the poietic (constructive) intervention on a system determines the truth of the model of that system.
... Semantic content includes fiction and other forms of material of relevance to LIS (Van der Veer Martens 2015). And in general LIS has never been concerned with the truth of information per se, but with the quality of semantic content, specifically with the accuracy, authority, and completeness of testimony (Fallis 2004(Fallis , 2016, clearly within the remit of PI (Floridi 2014B, Floridi andIllari 2014). ...
The purpose of this editorial review is to re-examine the prospect that Luciano Floridi's Philosophy of Information (PI), and information ethics (IE) may serve as the conceptual foundation for library and information science (LIS), and that LIS may thus be seen as applied PI. This re-examination is timely, fifteen years after this proposal was first made, in light of the development and wider acceptance of the PI concept itself, of advances in information technologies and changes in the information environment, and of the consequent, and continuing, need for LIS to re-evaluate its nature and role.
We first give a brief and selective account of the introduction and consequent reception of the idea of PI as the basis for LIS; more detailed account of the origins of PI, and its initial reception within LIS, have been given by Furner (2010), by Fyffe (2015), and by Van der Veer Martens (2015). Then we consider whether such a basis is, in fact, needed, and, if so, what the other possibilities might be, and then examine five particular aspects of the relation between LIS and PI. The conclusions, for those who do not make to the end, are that such a foundation is indeed needed, and that PI is the most appropriate basis.
... Floridi has a well-articulated concept of information that is very similar to Dretske and also to Mingers' theory that will be discussed later (Mingers 1995a). There is in fact much more to Floridi's work than we have so far discussed -for example the relationship between information and knowledge (Floridi 2010;Floridi 2014), the way in which receivers access information (Floridi 2008b), the existence of information structures (infosphere) (Floridi 2008a), and information as an ethical subject (Floridi 2002a). Some of these will be taken up in the later discussion. ...
Information systems, as a discipline, is concerned with the generation, storage and transmission of
information, generally by technological means. As such, it would seem to be fundamental that it has
a clear and agreed conceptualization of its core subject matter – namely “information”. Yet, we
would claim, this is clearly not the case. As McKinney and Yoos point out, in a recent survey of the
term information within information systems: “This is the IS predicament – using information as a
ubiquitous label whose meaning is almost never specified. Virtually all the extant IS literature fails to
explicitly specify meaning for the very label that identifies it.” We live in an information age and the
vast majority of information (whatever it may be) is made available through a wide range of
computer systems and one would expect therefore that information systems would in fact be one of
the leading disciplines of the times rather than one that appears to hide itself in the shadows.
Governments nowadays routinely utilize many academic experts to advise them in a whole range of
areas but how many IS professors ever get asked? So, the primary purpose of this paper is to
stimulate a debate within IS to discuss, and try to establish, a secure foundation for the discipline in
terms of its fundamental concept – information. The structure of the paper is that we will firstly
review the theories of information used (generally implicitly) within IS. Then we will widen the
picture to consider the range of theories available more broadly within other disciplines. We will
then suggest a particular approach that we consider most fruitful and discuss some of the major
contentious issues. We will illustrate the theories with examples from IS.
The field of management, generally, and the field/discipline of Information Systems share with many other fields and disciplines a strange ambivalence about a central concept in this digital age—namely that of information. In research work, and in publications, it seems perverse at the least to demand rigorous research methodology, rigorous literature reviews and rigorous reviewing procedures whilst fundamental terms—and information is just one such—are being used with quite different, and un-explicated, meanings.
This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating how social networking platforms fare as epistemic environments for human users. I begin by proposing a situated concept of epistemic agency as fundamental for evaluating epistemic environments. Next, I show that algorithmic personalisation of information makes social networking platforms problematic for users’ epistemic agency because these platforms do not allow users to adapt their behaviour sufficiently. Using the tracing principle inspired by the ethics of self-driving cars, I operationalise it here and identify three requirements that automated epistemic environments need to fulfil: (a) the users need to be afforded a range of skilled actions; (b) users need to be sensitive to the possibility to use their skills; (c) the habits built when adapting to the platform should not undermine the user’s pre-existing skills. I then argue that these requirements are almost impossible to fulfil all at the same time on current SN platforms; yet nevertheless, we need to pay attention to these whenever we evaluate an epistemic environment with automatic features. Finally, as an illustration, I show how Twitter, a popular social networking platform, will fare regarding these requirements.
Does information exist in the world independently of brains and/or organisms that can interpret it? Answering this question is important for clarifying the theoretical foundations of the sciences of mind and brain. This chapter claims that Popperian objectivity—properly modified—is sufficient for the explanatory role that information often plays in these sciences without endorsing a problematic mind-independent notion of information. There exists, however, a tension between two Popperian views about objectivity: intersubjective agreement and World 3. In order to ground the objectivity of information—as it is used in the sciences of mind and brain, the relation between Popperian intersubjectivity and World 3 objectivity is examined in this chapter. The conclusion is that mind-dependent information can be objective when it is intersubjectively agreed upon, or, to put it differently, when “actualised” information in World 3 stands in the right relation to World 1.
The idea that the brain is an information processing system raises some challenging questions about whether information exists independently of brains. Answering these questions is relevant for clarifying the theoretical foundations of the sciences of mind and brain, but also for appropriately interpreting and evaluating the evidence about how brains—and other biological systems—work. This article claims that (1) informational descriptions in the sciences of mind and brain can be genuinely explanatory, despite assuming a mind-dependent notion of information; and (2) that either Popperian objectivity or response-dependence in normal receivers is sufficient for grounding the explanatory role that information often plays in these sciences. Hierarchical predictive processing, which has become a central theoretical framework for neurocognitive research, is used as a case study for supporting these two claims.
