Review of Luciano Floridi, The Philosophy of Information

Abstract

The impressive and exciting project that Floridi undertakes in his book is aimed at establishing the philosophy of information as a mature subdiscipline of philosophy, with its own method and research programme. Floridi defines the philosophy of information as the philosophical field concerned with the critical investigation of the conceptual nature of infor-mation and the application of information-theoretic and computational methodologies to philosophical problems. The first three chapters of the book are meta-theoretical. Chapter one gives an enlightening analysis of the dialectic between the progressive and conservative dynamics of change in the history of philosophy. The main conservative dynamic, which Floridi calls scholasticism, is the inborn inertia of any conceptual system. Scholasticism, which represents the professionalization of philosophical discourse, is historically inevitable and useful, but after a while it becomes incapable of dealing with the ever-changing intellectual environment. The progressive dynamic that eventually leads to the formulation of a new paradigm comes mainly from the substantial novelties in the environment of a conceptual system. According to Floridi, the immense growth of informa-tion and communication technologies in the twentieth century and their widespread impact on human life have necessitated the emergence of such a new paradigm, and this new paradigm is the philosophy of information. After this historical analysis, in chapter two, Floridi suggests a research pro-gramme for the philosophy of information by listing eighteen open problems, most of which are dealt with in the rest of the book. Given the dynamic that has led to its emergence, the philosophy of infor-mation is inherently interdisciplinary. This can easily be seen in Floridi’s extensive use of the terminology and methods of computer science. For example, in chapter three, the main method of the philosophy of informa-tion, called the method of levels of abstraction (LoAs), is drawn from Formal Methods in computer science. The idea behind this method is Mind, Vol. 120 . 480 . October 2011 ß Mind Association 2012 Book Reviews 1247 quite simple: reality can be viewed from different perspectives. One may view the person Mary as a woman, as a human being, as a living organism, and so on. Different perspectives correspond to different LoAs. The higher the LoA, the more extended the scope of analysis is and the more impoverished is the depth of analysis. Commitment to certain types of (features of) objects, or ‘observables’ in Floridi’s terms, varies depending upon the LoA adopted. This is clearly a form of levelism, but an epistemological one. Floridi is quite clear in distinguishing his levelism from ontological levelism. Each LoA specifies, and is committed to, certain types of putative objects, but none of them has ontological superiority over the others, despite the fact that some LoAs may work better than others for a given purpose. The rest of the book can be categorized into two main parts. In the first part — chapters four to twelve — an informational analysis of knowledge is provided. In the second part — chapters fourteen and fifteen — Floridi presents and defends his informational ontology. The transition between these two parts is represented by chapter thirteen, in which Floridi attempts to answer Dretske’s famous question of how you know that you are not a zombie by designing a knowledge test based on a version of the so-called know-ledge game (also known as the wise-man puzzle or muddy-children puzzle). The first part starts by defining semantic information and then lays out the necessary conditions for upgrading semantic information to knowledge. Semantic information is defined as well-formed, meaningful, and truthful data. In order for semantic information to become knowledge, for Floridi, it must be relevant and correctly accounted for in a network of questions and answers. In the quite technical and lengthy journey of his informational analysis of knowledge, Floridi accomplishes several other crucial tasks as well: providing a solution for the symbol-grounding problem, constructing an action-based semantics, showing the insolubility of the Gettier problem within the traditional doxastic tripartite analysis of knowledge, and con-structing a logic of being informed that shows the feasibility of his informa-tional analysis of knowledge. In my opinion, philosophers of many kinds will benefit immensely from reading this rich part of Floridi’s book. It has the potential to initiate significant debates in the literature, and indeed some debates seem already to have begun. Within the current short review, his definition of semantic information deserves a closer look, because it is the piece that holds Floridi’s epistemology together. The truthfulness requirement placed upon semantic information, or, in Floridi’s terminology, the veridicality thesis (VT), states that information encapsulates truth. In other words, false information is not information at all; it is just semantic junk. This claim has been around since at least the 1980s and has been disputed quite extensively. The novel part of Floridi’s analysis is the two arguments that he provides in favour of VT. Neither of his argu-ments, however, seems to be strong enough to support the desired conclusion.