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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

The Logic of Information

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

The Logic of
Information
A Theory of Philosophy as
Conceptual Design

Luciano Floridi

1
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© Luciano Floridi 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgements xvii
List of Most Common Acronyms xix
List of Figures xxi

Part I. Philosophy’s Open Questions

1.  What is a Philosophical Question? 3
Summary 3
1. Introduction: Russell’s ‘such ultimate questions’ 3
2. The Variety of Questions 4
3. A Resource-oriented Approach to the Nature of Questions 6
4. Three Kinds of Question 7
5. Philosophical Questions as Open Questions 8
6. First Objection: There are No Open Questions 10
7. Second Objection: There are Too Many Open Questions 13
8. Third Objection: Open Questions are Unanswerable 15
9. Fourth Objection: Open Questions are Indiscriminate 20
Conclusion: Philosophy as Conceptual Design 23
2. Philosophy as Conceptual Design 27
Summary 27
1. Introduction: From the User’s Knowledge to the Maker’s Knowledge 28
2. Plato’s Wrong Step 31
3. The Maker’s Knowledge Tradition 35
4. A Constructionist Methodology 38
5. Minimalism 39
6. The Method of Levels of Abstraction 41
7. Constructionism 47
Conclusion: Against Degenerate Epistemology 49
3. Constructionism as Non-naturalism 53
Summary 53
1. Introduction: A Plea for Non-naturalism 54
2. The Nature of Naturalism 57
3. Two Indefensible Non-naturalisms: The Supernatural and the Preternatural 62
4. Two Defensible Non-naturalisms: The Normative and the Semantic 63
5. In Defence of Non-naturalism 65
Conclusion: The Artefactual Nature of the Natural 67
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

vi Contents

Part II. Philosophy as Conceptual Design

4. Perception and Testimony as Data Providers 71
Summary 71
1. Introduction: The Relationship between Knowledge and Information 71
2. A First Potential Difficulty 73
3. Some Background 73
4. Perception and the Phaedrus’ Test (Plato) 75
5. Testimony and the Parrot’s Test (Descartes) 76
6. Data Providers 77
7. A Second Potential Difficulty 79
8. More Background 80
9. The Vice Analogy 81
10. The Constructionist Interpretation of Perception and Testimony 82
11. Informational Realism: Structures, Interactions, and Causality 92
Conclusion: The Beautiful Glitch 97
5.   Information Quality 101
Summary 101
1. Big Data 101
2. The Epistemological Problem with Big Data 104
3. From Big Data to Small Patterns 104
4. Information Quality 106
5. The Epistemological Problem with Information Quality 107
6. A Bi-categorical Approach to Information Quality 110
Conclusion: Back to Fit-for-Purpose 112
6. Informational Scepticism and the Logically Possible 113
Summary 113
1. Introduction: History and Analysis of Scepticism 114
2. The Two Faces of Scepticism 117
3. Non-naturalism and the Foundational Problem in German-speaking
Philosophy 119
4. Coherentism, Naturalism, and the Refutation of Scepticism in British
Philosophy 122
5. Pragmatist Epistemologies in American Philosophy 124
6. Possible Worlds and Borel Numbers 126
7. The Edit Distance as a Modal Metrics 131
8. Informational Scepticism or the Sceptical Challenge Reconstructed 135
9. The Redundancy of Radical Informational Scepticism 137
10. The Usefulness of Moderate Informational Scepticism 141
11. Objections and Replies 142
Conclusion: From Descartes to Peirce 147
7.  A Defence of Information Closure 149
Summary 149
1. Introduction: The Modal Logic of Being Informed 149
2. The Formulation of the Principle of Information Closure 151
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

Contents vii

3. The Sceptical Objection 155

4. A Defence of the Principle 156
5. Objection and Reply 159
Conclusion: Information Closure and the Logic of Being Informed 160
8. Logical Fallacies as Bayesian Informational Shortcuts 162
Summary 162
1. Introduction: A Greener Approach to Logic 162
2. What are Logical Fallacies? 163
3. Do Formal Logical Fallacies Provide Any Information? 163
4. Formal Logical Fallacies and Their Explanations 164
5. Bayes’ Theorem 165
6. Bayes’ Theorem and the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent 166
7. Bayes’ Theorem and the Fallacy of Denying the Antecedent 167
8. Logical Formal Fallacies and Their Bayesian Interpretation 168
9. Advantages of the Bayesian Interpretation of Formal Logical Fallacies 169
Conclusion: Rationality Regained 170
9. Maker’s Knowledge, between A Priori and A Posteriori 171
Summary 171
1. Introduction: The Question about Maker’s Knowledge 172
2. Maker’s Knowledge: Same Information 174
3. Maker’s Knowledge: Different Account 177
4. Maker’s Knowledge: ab anteriori 180
Conclusion: Some Consequences of the Analysis of the Maker’s Knowledge 185
10. The Logic of Design as a Conceptual Logic of Information  188
Summary 188
1. Introduction: Two Modern Conceptual Logics of Information 189
2. Design, Contradictions, and Dialetheism 195
3. The Logic of Design as a Logic of Requirements 197
Conclusion: From Mimesis to Poiesis 204
Afterword—Rebooting Philosophy 207
Introduction 207
Scholasticism as the Philosophical Enemy of Open Questions 207
Philosophical Questions Worth Asking 209
A Philosophical Anthropology to Approach Philosophical Questions 210
How to Make Sense of the World and Design It Today 211
Conclusion: Creative Destruction in Philosophy 212

References  215
Index 231
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

Preface

The title of this book contains two words that are semantically very loaded, “logic” and
“information”. Before I say anything about its contents, I better explain how I use each
of them.
Consider “logic” first. Philosophy is often concerned with the study of structural
properties of systems—whether empirical, like political organizations, or conceptual,
like scientific theories—and their dynamics.1 Before the advent of modern mathemat-
ical logic, such structural studies might have been considered to be part of logic
broadly understood.2 Today, this would be very misleading. But so would be the use
of labels such as “informal logic”3 and “philosophical logic”,4 already appropriated by
other branches of philosophy. Thus, for lack of a better expression, I have chosen to
refer to such structural studies as “conceptual logic”. A conceptual logic is what we
have in mind when we ask questions about the abstract properties, principles, mech-
anisms, or dynamics characterizing or underpinning systems like international rela-
tions, a bureaucracy, a scientific theory, or the internal arrangement of elements in a
device to perform a specific task. A conceptual logic focuses on formal features that
are independent of specific implementations or idiosyncratic contingencies, on types
rather than tokens, on invariants and their mutual relations, and on state transitions
that are generalizable. This is the sense in which “logic” should be understood in the
title of this book.
Next, take “information”. What remains unclear in the previous explanation is
exactly what further qualifies as a conceptual logic of a system. Later in this book,
I shall use a more precise vocabulary and talk about the “model” (semantic information
about) of a “system” (the referent “abouted” by some semantic information). This
means that the overall question I address across this book, and hence its subtitle, can
be phrased more precisely by asking: what is the conceptual logic of information-
modelling (i.e. generating a description of some structural properties of) a system?
Note that, once unpacked, this question is not ontological but epistemological. It is not
about the intrinsic, conceptual logic of a system in itself, but rather about the concep-
tual logic of the model (i.e. information) of a system, and how we design5 it. If this is
1
See Alexander (1964, p. 8).
2
For an enlightening reconstruction of the late modern developments of logic between Kant and Frege
see Heis (2012).
3
See two excellent examples: Sinnott-Armstrong and Fogelin (2015), Walton and Brinton (2016).
4
See two excellent examples: Burgess (2009), Sainsbury (2001).
5
Parsons (2016) is a great source for a philosophical analysis of the debate on the concept of design. The
book is also an essential starting point to frame the proposal made in this book. It dedicates quite some
space to the debate on modernism. It is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the conceptual
nature of design together with the excellent Dunne and Raby (2013). These works, together with Barthes
(1981) and Flusser (1999), have deeply influenced my views on the topic.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

x Preface

unclear, compare the conceptual logic of a watch’s mechanism with the conceptual
logic of the design of a watch. The focus is really about a conceptual logic of the design
of a system, understood as a specific kind of conceptual logic of information about (the
design of the model of) a system; and not any kind of information, but that particular
kind we call semantic or factual information, that is, information about something.
Thus, “information” in the title of this book is not the sort of quantitative, probabilistic,
signal-based concept that one may find in an engineering textbook (what is sometimes
called Shannon information)—although I shall use that too in the following chapters—
but the well-formed, meaningful, and truthful kind that one may find in a tourist guide
about Rome.
Focusing on the logic of a model rather than on the logic of a system captured by a
model means that this book is closely linked with some of the epistemological ideas
I supported in a previous book, entitled The Philosophy of Information (Floridi 2011c).
However, this is not a book in the epistemological tradition. It is rather a book on the
logic of design and hence of making, transforming, refining, and improving the objects
of our knowledge. So, it is not a book about ontology either, at least not in the classic
sense. For some philosophers, it may be obvious that the conceptual logic of semantic
information is the deep, conceptual logic of the world. Or, to put it in the vocabulary
just introduced, that the logic of a model of a system is the logic of the system. In this,
Hegel, Marx, the first Wittgenstein, and the atomistic Russell appear to share the same
view. I am not so sure. Actually, I really doubt it, but, most importantly, this is not an
issue that needs to be resolved here. We can all refrain from stepping into any
­ontological discussion, and phrase anything that we need to discuss epistemologically,
and therefore more safely in terms of commitment. If, as a bonus, some readers may
believe that we pay one and get two, as it were—that is, if anyone is convinced that by
developing a conceptual logic of the model we shall also have obtained a conceptual
logic of the corresponding system—I shall not complain, but neither shall I join them.
Putting the two clarifications together, this book is a study in the conceptual logic of
semantic information. The next thing I should be candid about is that it is a construc-
tionist study.
The scientific-realist reader should not be alarmed. If anything, this is a pragmatist
book about a world that needs to be modelled correctly in order to be made meaning-
ful satisfactorily. I never seriously question for a moment the recalcitrant and often
grating presence of outside realities. Actually, I have little patience for self-indulgent
and irresponsible speculations about logically possible situations involving brains in a
vat, dreaming butterflies, or Matrix-like pills. In the best scenarios, they were once
devised to help discuss valuable philosophical questions. They have now become scho-
lastic puzzles that engage only professional academics.
At the same time, the naïve realist may rightly be a bit suspicious. Because the
constructionism I develop in this book is still of a Kantian kind (more on Kant below).
The starting point defended in this book, as in my previous works, is that we do not
have access to the world in itself, something I am not even sure one can explain in full.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

Preface xi

We always access any reality through specific interfaces, what I shall define in Chapter 2
as levels of abstraction, borrowing a conceptual framework from computer science.
The world provides the data, to be understood as constraining affordances, and we
transform them into information, like semantic engines. But such transformation or
repurposing (see Chapter 4) is not equivalent to portraying, or picturing, or photo-
graphing, or photocopying anything. It is more like cooking: the dish does not repre-
sent the ingredients, it uses them to make something else out of them, yet the reality of
the dish and its properties hugely depend on the reality and the properties of the ingre-
dients. Models are not representations understood as pictures, but interpretations
understood as data elaborations, of systems. Thus, the whole book may also be read as
an articulation and defence of the thesis that knowledge is design, and that philosophy
is the ­ultimate form of conceptual design.
There is one more clarification I should make. Shifting from representing to inter-
preting the world may be controversial. We shall see that it raises problems in terms of
quality of the outcome (Chapter 5) and scepticism about its truthfulness (Chapters 6
and 7). But it is not new and it can easily be mistaken for something that I criticize
throughout the book: a passive understanding of knowledge as being always about
something already present in the world. This Platonic view, to be found also in
Descartes, is too reductive. Modelling is not just dealing with what there is; it is often
designing what there could, or should be. Having a different word helps here: a blue-
print is a model of something that does not yet exist but that we want to design, not of
something that is already there and that we want to explain, for example. So, this book
is a constructionist study in the conceptual logic of semantic information both as a model
(mimesis) and as a blueprint (poiesis). We have reached the full description. And this
can now be used to contextualize this book within the wider project for the foundation
of the philosophy of information.
This is the third volume in a tetralogy that includes The Philosophy of Informa­tion
(volume one (Floridi 2011c)) and The Ethics of Information (volume two (Floridi 2013b)).
I began labelling the tetralogy Principia Philosophiae Informationis not as a sign of
bottomless hubris—although it may well be—but as an internal pun among some
­colleagues. In a sort of rowing-like competition, I joked that it was time for Oxford to
catch up with Cambridge on the 3–0 scoring about “principia”. Not a pun that many
find funny, or even intelligible.
Within the Principia project, this book occupies a middle ground between the first
and the second volume. However, as the reader should expect, the three volumes are
all written as stand-alone, so this book too can be read without any knowledge of
anything else I have ever published. Yet the three volumes are complementary. The
essential message from volume one is quite straightforward. Semantic information
is well-formed, meaningful, and truthful data; knowledge is relevant semantic infor-
mation properly accounted for; humans are the only known semantic engines and
conscious informational organisms who can design and understand semantic arte-
facts, and thus develop a growing knowledge of reality; and reality is the totality of
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

xii Preface

information (notice the crucial absence of ‘semantic’). Against that background, volume
two investigates the foundations of the ethics of informational organisms (inforgs) like
us, which flourish in informational environments (infosphere), and are responsible for
their construction and well-being. In short, volume two is about the ethics of inforgs in
the infosphere. Thus, in a classic Kantian move, we are shifting from theoretical to
pragmatic philosophy. I already mentioned that this third volume, insofar as it focuses
on the conceptual logic of semantic information as a model, is linked with the epistemo-
logical analysis provided in The Philosophy of Information. And insofar as it focuses on
the conceptual logic of semantic information as a blueprint, it offers a bridge towards the
normative analysis provided in The Ethics of Information. This discusses, among other
things, what duties, rights, and responsibilities are associated with the poietic practices
that characterize our existence, from making sense of the world to changing it according
to what we consider normatively right or morally good. By working like a hinge between
the two previous books, this third one prepares the basis for volume four, on The Politics
of Information. There, the epistemological, conceptual, and normative constructionism
supports the study of the design opportunities we have in understanding and shaping
what I like to call “the human project” in our information societies.
The three volumes may be understood as seeking to invert four misconceptions,
easily explainable by using the classic communication model introduced by Shannon:
sender, message, receiver, channel. Epistemology focuses too much on the passive
receiver/consumer of knowledge, when it should be concerned with the active sender/
producer, because knowing is constructing. Ethics focuses too much on the sender/
agent, when it should be concerned with the receiver/patient, because the keys to being
good are care, respect, and tolerance. Metaphysics focuses too much on the relata,
the sender/producer/agent/receiver/consumer/patient, which it conceives as entities,
when it should be concerned with the message/relations, because dynamic structures
constitute the structured. And logic focuses too much on channels of communication
as justifying or grounding our conclusions, when it should be concerned with channels
that enable us to extract (and transfer) information from a variety of sources reliably,
because the logic of information design is a logic of relata and clusters of relations,
rather than a logic of things as bearers of predicates. I will be utterly amazed if even one
of these u-turns in our philosophical paradigms will be successful.
Let me now turn to a quick overview of the contents. The task of this third volume is
still that of contributing to the development of a philosophy of our time for our time, as
I have written more than once. As in the previous two volumes, it does so ­systematically
(conceptual architecture is pursued as a valuable feature of philosophical thinking)
rather than exhaustively, by pursuing two goals.
The first goal is meta-theoretical and is fulfilled by Part I. This comprises the first
three chapters. There, I offer an interpretation of philosophical questions as open
questions (Chapter 1), of philosophy as the conceptual design of such questions and of
their answers (Chapter 2), and of constructionism as the best way of approaching such
a way of doing philosophy (Chapter 3).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

Preface xiii

On the basis of this first part, the second part pursues not a meta-theoretical but a
theoretical investigation. In Chapter 4, I investigate how a constructionist philosophy
as conceptual design can interpret perception and testimony as data providers. This
leads to the discussion of two further issues: the quality of the information that we
are able to elaborate on the basis of such data (Chapter 5); and the truthfulness of
the information constructed, namely the sceptical challenge faced by a construc-
tionist interpretation of semantic information, and its related modelling processes
(Chapter 6). In Chapters 7 and 8 I return to the features of a constructionist logic to
analyse the value of information closure for the consistency of our models of the world,
and the possibility of expanding such models even through fallacious reasoning. In
Chapter 9, I finally define what the maker’s knowledge could be, once we interpret our-
selves as the designers responsible for our own understanding of the world. The book
ends with a detailed analysis of what conceptual logic may underpin our designing
activities, seen as depending on constraints and a relation of “a makes b a sufficient
solution” (Chapter 10). The ten chapters are strictly related, so I have added internal
references whenever it might be useful. They could be read in a slightly different order,
as one of the anonymous referees pointed out. I agree. I offer here the structure that
I find more helpful, but, for example, some readers may wish to go to the end of the
story first, and learn about the logic of design as a conceptual logic of information
before approaching any other chapter.
In terms of its philosophical roots, like volumes one and two, this too is a German
book, written from a post-analytic continental-divide perspective, which I have the
impression is increasingly fading away. The careful reader will easily place this work in
the tradition linking pragmatism, especially Charles Sanders Peirce, with the philoso-
phy of technology, especially Herbert Simon.6 Unlike volume one, and even more than
volume two, this third volume is much less neo-Kantian than I expected it to be. And
contrary to volume two, it is also less Platonic and Cartesian. In short, writing it has
made me aware that I may be moving out of the shadows of my three philosophical
heroes. Not a plan, but this is what happens when you follow your reasoning wherever
it leads you. Amici Plato, Cartesius et Kant, sed magis amica veritas. In The Ethics of
Information, I wrote that “some books write their authors”. I now have the impression
that only bad books are fully controlled by their authors. They are called airport novels
and telenovelas. Let me illustrate this with an anecdote.
One day, when I was a boy, my mother found me distressed because I had just read
about the death of Porthos, one of the four musketeers, in Dumas’ The Man in the Iron
Mask (1847–50, now (Dumas 2008)). There was not much she could do, but she tried
to console me by pointing out that I was not alone. Dumas himself had been deeply
upset by the death of his character. She recounted the story according to which a
maiden had found Dumas crying because Porthos was dead. This seemed to me perfectly

6
The reader interested in exploring these connections may wish to consult Allo (2010) and Durante
(2017).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/2019, SPi

xiv Preface

reasonable. It was a very sad moment indeed. But what struck me at the time, and
made me forget my sadness, was the alleged explanation that Dumas offered when
asked why he, the omnipotent author, could not change the story of his own literary
character. He said that Porthos had to die. That seemed to me to express, better than
anything else I had experienced at the time, the force of a theorem, the strength of
­logical coherence, the inescapable, constraining grip of dynamic structures, which
have features and interact in ways that are utterly independent of our wills and desires.
You can choose the if, but not the then. Dumas was a great writer because he felt
powerless. Porthos’ death was the inexorable conclusion, given the development of the
plot. That evening I thanked my mother for the lesson in logical thinking, and felt a
bit less upset: necessity is somewhat soothing. Many years later, I went to check the
episode again. It still saddens me. But I found a line that seems very appropriate to
conclude this anecdote. “ ‘Parbleu!’ said Porthos again, with laughter that he did not
even attempt to restrain, ‘when a thing is explained to me I understand it; begone, and
give me the light.’ ”
Regarding the style and structure of this book, as I wrote in the preface of volumes
one and two, I remain painfully aware that this third volume too is not a page-turner, to
put it mildly, despite my attempts to make it as interesting and reader-friendly as pos-
sible. I remain convinced that esoteric (in the technical sense) research in philosophy is
the only way of developing new ideas. But exoteric philosophy has its crucial place. It is
like the more accessible and relevant tip of the more obscure and yet necessary part of
the iceberg under the surface of everyday life. The reader interested in a much lighter
reading may wish to check The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping
Human Reality (Floridi 2014a) or perhaps the even easier (Floridi 2010b).
This book will require not only graduate-level knowledge of philosophy, patience,
and time but also an open mind. The last three are scarce resources. For in the last two
decades or so of debates, I have been made fully aware—sometimes in ways less
friendly than I wish—that some of the ideas I defend in the following pages are contro-
versial. I have also seen how often mistakes are made by relying on “systemic ­attractors”:
if a new idea looks a bit like an old idea we already have, then the old one is a magnet to
which the new one is powerfully attracted, almost irresistibly. We end up thinking that
“that new” is really just like “this old”, and if we do not like “this old” then we dislike
“that new” as well. Bad philosophy indeed, but it takes mental strength and exercise to
resist such a powerful shift. In the case of this book, I am sure some readers will be
tempted to conclude that it is an anti-realist, anti-naturalist attempt to let the sceptic
and the relativist have the final word about logic, knowledge, and science. So, let me say
this as clearly as I can, quoting Margaret Thatcher: no, no, no. There are many ways of
being anti-sceptic and anti-relativist, and being a realist constructionist is one of them.
I actually believe that it is the best option we have today. The reader does not have to
follow me that far. But no mistake should be made about the direction I am taking.
As in the previous two volumes, two features that I thought might help the reader to
access the contents of this book more easily are the summaries and conclusions at the
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