Abstract
‘Information’ is a fundamental notion in the field of artificial intelligence including various sub-disciplines such as cybernetics, artificial life, robotics, etc. Practically the notion is often taken for granted and used naively in an unclarified and philosophically unreflected manner, whilst philosophical attempts at clarifying ‘information’ have not yet found much consensus within the science-philosophical community. One particularly notorious example of this lack of consensus is the recent Fetzer-Floridi dispute about what is ‘information’—a dispute which has remained basically unsettled until today in spite of a sequence of follow-up publications on this topic. In this chapter our philosophical analysis reveals with reference to Gottlob Frege’s classical semiotics that the above-mentioned Fetzer-Floridi dispute cannot come to any solution at all, because the two competing notions of ‘information’ in that dispute are basically synonyms of what Frege had called ‘sense’ (Sinn) versus what Frege had called ‘meaning’ (Bedeutung). As Frege had convincingly distinguished sense and meaning very clearly from each other, it is obvious that ‘information’ understood like ‘sense’ and ‘information’ understood like ‘meaning’ are incompatible and cannot be reconciled with each other. Moreover we also hint in this chapter at the often-forgotten pragmatic aspects of ‘information’ which is to say that ‘information’ can always only be ‘information for somebody’ with regard to a specific aim or goal or purpose. ‘Information’, such understood, is thus a teleological notion with a context-sensitive embedding into what the late Wittgenstein had called a ‘language-game’ (Sprachspiel). Shannon’s quantified notion of ‘information’, by contrast, which measures an amount of unexpected surprise and which is closely related to the number of definite yes-no-questions which must be asked in order to obtain the desired solution of a given quiz puzzle, is not the topic of this chapter—although also in Shannon’s understanding of ‘information’ the quiz puzzle scenario, within which those yes-no-questions are asked and counted, is obviously purpose-driven and Sprachspiel-dependent. We conclude our information-philosophical analysis with some remarks about which notion of ‘information’ seems particularly amenable and suitable for an autonomic mobile robotics project which one of the two co-authors is planning for future work. To separate this suitable notion of ‘information’ from other ones a new word, namely ≪enlightation≫, is coined and introduced.
Was der Philosoph schreibt, ist für den Informatiker nur zum geringen Teil akzeptabel, und umgekehrt. — Heinz Zemanek
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Notes
- 1.
The question might arise at this point whether or not all information is per-se semantic (i.e.: meaningful), such that the term ‘semantic information’ (Floridi 2016, pp. 44–49) would be a pleonasm, coming close to a tautologism like ‘wooden wood’? Due to the inherent grammatical weakness of the English language, the term ‘semantic information’ is ambiguous and could be interpreted either as ‘information with semantics’, which seems to be the above-mentioned pleonasm, or as ‘information about semantics’, i.e.: some kind of meta-information concerning purely theoretical-linguistic entities—as opposed to, for example, ‘information about birds’ or ‘information about health’. For further details see the Semantic Concepts of Information, online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For recent comments about the Bar-Hillel-Carnap paradox (presented at a reasonably high level of mathematical formality) the reader might want to look at a technical report (Gorsky and Carnielli 2013) which is available online, too.
- 2.
“Non-reductionists like myself...”
- 3.
At this point the reader might remember some classical works by Plato according to whom knowledge must necessarily be true or otherwise it would not be ‘knowledge’: false knowledge, for Plato, would be a meaningless contradiction in terms. Modern epistemologies, by contrast—such as, for example, Popper’s—have loosened the hitherto tight connection between the concepts of ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’.
- 4.
In the German original: “Was der Philosoph schreibt, ist für den Informatiker nur zum geringen Teil akzeptabel und umgekehrt.”
- 5.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to James Fetzer for an interesting exchange of e-mails on the topic of this chapter some time ago. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive remarks before the presentation of our work at the IACAP‘2016 conference in Ferrara (Italy) in June 2016. Many thanks also to the philosophical society ‘Footnotes to Plato’ at the University of Pretoria for the opportunity to present our work to them, and for their interesting and insightful feedback.
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Oberholzer, F., Gruner, S. (2019). The Notion of ‘Information’: Enlightening or Forming?. In: Berkich, D., d'Alfonso, M. (eds) On the Cognitive, Ethical, and Scientific Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 134. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01800-9_3
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