Including Philosophy and/of Information, Logic and Epistemology
The legendary epistemologist, who was a central figure in bringing the concept of information into philosophy, has sadly passed away.
As a search for ‘Dretske’ on this blog will reveal, his work has been a major influence on my research and features heavily in my thesis.
Here is some information on Dretske at ‘New APPS’: http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/07/fred-dretske-1932-2013.html
A couple of recent articles on the Gettier case:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11023-013-9310-x
Abstract: In this paper I look at Fred Dretske’s account of information and knowledge as developed in Knowledge and The Flow of Information. In particular, I translate Dretske’s probabilistic definition of information to a modal logical framework and subsequently use this to explicate the conception of information and its flow which is central to his account, including the notions of channel conditions and relevant alternatives. Some key products of this task are an analysis of the issue of information closure and an investigation into some of the logical properties of Dretske’s account of information flow.
Towards a Framework for Semantic Information (my PhD thesis)
Abstract: This thesis addresses some important questions regarding an account of semantic information. Starting with the contention that semantic information is to be understood as truthful meaningful data, several key elements for an account of semantic information are developed. After an introductory overview of information, the thesis is developed over four chapters. ‘Quantifying Semantic Information’ looks at the quantification of semantic information as represented in terms of propositional logic. The main objective is to investigate how traditional inverse probabilistic approaches to quantifying semantic information can be replaced with approaches based on the notion of truthlikeness. In ‘Agent-Relative Informativeness’ the results of the previous chapter are combined with belief revision in order to construct a formal framework in which to, amongst other things, measure agent-relative informativeness; how informative some piece of information is relative to a given agent. ‘Environmental Information and Information Flow’ analyses several existing accounts of environmental information and information flow before using this investigation to develop a better account of and explicate these notions. Finally, ‘Information and Knowledge’ contributes towards the case for an informational epistemology, based on Fred Dretske’s information-theoretic account of knowledge.
The truth condition is embedded in the analysis of propositional knowledge; if S knows that p then p is true.
Whilst a straightforward condition given a classical bivalent system with values true and false, bringing truth value gluts into the picture raises some novel matters.
Continue reading “Knowledge and Truth Value Gluts”
I am giving a talk next Friday at my department’s logic seminar series. Here are the details:
Title: The Logic of Knowledge and the Flow of Information
Abstract: In this talk I cover some work still in development which concerns the notions of information and knowledge as exemplified in Fred Dretske’s ‘Knowledge and The Flow of Information’. In particular, I cover (1) some work on the logic of information flow and (2) the issue of developing an epistemic logic which captures Dretske’s notion of knowledge as a semi-penetrating operator.
Is this a zebra figurine or a mule figurine cleverly disguised to look like a zebra figurine?
