Category: Miscellaneous

Though not something that I deliberately worked towards, I realise that much of the work I have done or am doing is in areas either initiated or influenced by Jaakko Hintikka.

• My honours thesis looked at game-theoretical semantics and independence-friendly logic, which Hintikka is the main architect of.
• I also work with epistemic logic quite a bit, of which Hintikka’s Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions is a seminal text.
• I am currently using Hintikka’s approach to analysing questions as requests for information in terms of epistemic modal logic for some research on informational relevance.
• The approaches to truthlikeness that I am using for information quantification make use of Hintikka’s distributive normal forms.
• The work by Bar-Hillel/Carnap on quantifying semantic information was extended by Hintikka.

Continue reading “Jaakko Hintikka and Information in Philosophy”

Just discovered this interesting site: problemata.com

From the about section: “Problemata is a question bank. It is a repository of questions on various topics, together with answers and hints for the questions.”

Here are question lists tagged philosophy of information..

Details for an upcoming talk I am giving:

Title: A Logic for Agent-Oriented Relevance

Abstract: Relevance here is taken to be agent-oriented/epistemic, where the relevance of a piece of information is determined in terms of how well it satisfies an agent’s request, how well it answers their question. A logic is given in which a relevance operator (R_a) is defined and investigated; R_ai means something like ‘the piece of information i is relevant to agent a’. The erotetic foundation for this logic is Hintikka’s approach to analysing questions as requests for information in terms of epistemic modal logic, which is then combined with a logic of intention.

Location: Melbourne University Logic Seminar Series, September 17th.

The dark side of information: overload, anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies

Was listening to the Sun, 11 Jul 10 edition of the BBC’s The Forum program, in which Physicist Vlatko Vedral was a participant. Decided to look at some of his stuff and found this: Vlatko Vedral: Everything is information

Here Vedral explains why he believes the fundamental stuff of the universe is information – and how he hopes that one day everything will be explained in this way.

He has recently published a book title Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information.

Looks interesting, but I should read my copy of Seth Lloyd’s Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos before I get another book on the matter.

Here is a cool documentary on Claude Shannon. As I became familiar with Shannon’s work, I always got the feeling that generally speaking he is an underrated figure and his contributions and influence are deserving of more acknowledgement.