The Informational Turn

Semantic Information Calculator

Ten Years Later

I have recently been reading ‘A Critical Analysis of Floridi’s Theory of Semantic Information’, Pieter Adriaans’ contribution to the special issue of Knowledge, Technology & Policy titled ‘Luciano Floridi’s Philosophy of Technology: Critical Reflections’. This article is indeed quite critical of Floridi’s Theory of Semantic Information.

Floridi responded in turn, and his replies to the contributions can be found in the piece ‘The Philosophy of Information as a Conceptual Framework’.

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Towards a Theory of Semantic Communication

I have been reading over Luciano Floridi’s recently released The Philosophy of Information. Chapter 5 is basically his paper Outline of a Theory of Strongly Semantic Information (TSSI).

Under such a theory, the Bar-Hillel/Carnap CONT(s) measure, associated with a Theory of Weakly Semantic Information (TWSI) does not provide an indication of the amount of informativeness of a statement s. But rightly so, “given the usefulness of TWSI, CONT(s) should probably be salvaged, if possible”.

If so, then what does CONT(s) really purport to indicate? Floridi writes that “[CONT(s)] does not indicate the quantity of semantic information but, more precisely, the quantity of data in [s]” (pg. 128.).

I think that I agree with this point, but would qualify that it indicates the quantity of meaningful data (i.e. semantic content).

In an earlier post, I mentioned that “[CONT()] be seen as a measure of semantic content (meaningful, well-formed data), rather than a measure of semantic information”.