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”.