From data to semantic information

DOI10.3390/E5020125MaRDI QIDQ1769550zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Luciano Floridi

Publication date 22 March 2005

Published in Entropy (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL http://www.mdpi.org/entropy/htm/e5020125.htm

zbMATH Keywords

BarwiseDeflationary Theories of TruthInformation TheoryPhilosophy of InformationSemantic InformationSituation LogicStandard Definition of Semantic InformationTheory of Truth

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Philosophical and critical aspects of logic and foundations (03A05) Information theory (general) (94A15)

Review text

Summary: There is no consensus yet on the definition of semantic information. This paper contributes to the current debate by criticising and revising the Standard Definition of semantic Information (SDI) as meaningful data, in favour of the Dretske-Grice approach: meaningful and well-formed data constitute semantic information only if they also qualify as contingently truthful. After a brief introduction, SDI is criticised for providing necessary but insufficient conditions for the definition of semantic information. SDI is incorrect because truth-values do not supervene on semantic information, and misinformation (that is, false semantic information) is not a type of semantic information, but pseudo-information, that is not semantic information at all. This is shown by arguing that none of the reasons for interpreting misinformation as a type of semantic information is convincing, whilst there are compelling reasons to treat it as pseudo-information. As a consequence, SDI is revised to include a necessary truth-condition. The last section summarises the main results of the paper and indicates the important implications of the revised definition for the analysis of the deflationary theories of truth, the standard definition of knowledge and the classic, quantitative theory of semantic information.

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Cited in

(5)

• Data meaning and knowledge discovery: semantical aspects of information systems
• Taking stock: arguments for the veridicality thesis
• Strongly semantic information as information about the truth
• Semantic information and the correctness theory of truth
• Challenging epistemology: Interactive proofs and zero knowledge

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