Information Quality

Knowledge, as a non-natural construction, may be based on our ability to hack the data coming from the world. Two questions now become pressing. The first, addressed in this chapter, concerns the quality of the information we are able to generate, when we are dealing with truthful contents. The second question concerns the truthfulness of such contents and is the subject of Chapter 6. This chapter generalizes the analysis and applies it to a popular topic, that of big data. It is argued that the real epistemological challenge posed by the zettabyte era is small patterns. The chapter focuses on information quality (IQ). Which data may be useful and relevant, and so worth collecting, curating, and querying, in order to exploit their valuable (small) patterns? The chapter argues that the standard way of seeing IQ in terms of being fit-for-purpose is correct but needs to be complemented by the methodology of abstraction introduced in Chapter 2, which allows IQ to be indexed to different purposes.

The Logic of Design as a Conceptual Logic of Information

This final chapter outlines a logic of design of a system as a specific kind of conceptual logic of the design of the model of a system, that is, the blueprint that provides information about the system to be created. Section 1 uses the method of levels of abstraction to clarify that we have inherited from modernity two main conceptual logics of information understood as logics of modelling systems: Kant’s transcendental logic of conditions of possibility of a system, and Hegel’s dialectical logic of conditions of in/stability of a system. A logic of design is a third conceptual logic that is still missing and needs to be developed. Thus, section 3 outlines this third conceptual logic of information and then interprets the conceptual logic of design as a logic of requirements, by introducing the relation of ‘sufficientization’. In the conclusion, it is argued that the logic of requirements is exactly what we need to make sense of, and buttress, a constructionist approach to how we model systems informationally, that is, a shift from a representationalist (mimetic) to a constructionist (poietic) understanding of knowledge.

Afterword—Rebooting Philosophy

We have come to the end of this third volume. Together with the previous two, I hope it provides sufficient clarity and some designing tools for the philosophy of information to enable us to make the next step, which will be to understand and design the human project we may want to pursue in the twenty-first century. As usual, the more one explores, the more one realizes how much more work lies ahead, in terms of better understanding of the challenges we face, and efforts that we must make to devise adequate ways of thinking about our world, our society, and ourselves, in increasingly digitized contexts. By way of conclusion, in this afterword, I shall sketch the direction in which I hope we may make some progress. Many of the problems with which we are dealing and shall be dealing in the infosphere are uncharted territory, but I hope that a few points of reference may help us to get oriented. The actual navigation is left to the next volume, ...

Logical Fallacies as Bayesian Informational Shortcuts

Information closure may help with the consistency of a database, so it is related to information quality. However, it cannot be used to expand such an information repository. For this, other forms of reasoning are needed. Bayesianism is often indicated as a classic means to upgrade a set of beliefs or indeed some bits of information, in the vocabulary of this book. Some other erroneous forms of reasoning, however, damage the same reservoir of information. Interestingly, the two dynamics are related. As argued in this chapter, the two best known formal logical fallacies, namely denying the antecedent (DA) and affirming the consequent (AC), are not just basic and simple errors, which prove human irrationality, but rather informational shortcuts, which may provide a quick and dirty (and therefore unsafe) way of extracting useful information from the same informational resources to which Alice already has access. And, in this sense, they can be shown to amount to degraded versions of Bayes’ theorem, once this is stripped of some of its probabilities. The less the probabilities count, the closer these fallacies become to a reasoning that is not only informationally useful but also logically valid.

Constructionism as Non-naturalism

Philosophical constructionism is far from being relativistic. This chapter will argue that it does not have to be naturalistic either. The discussion begins with a consideration of a strange predicament in which contemporary science seems to be caught. On the one hand, science holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology, according to which explanations of natural phenomena should never overstep the limits of the natural itself. On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication Technologies, which it exploits as well as fosters. Yet such technologies are increasingly ‘artificializing’ or ‘denaturalizing’ the world, human experiences, and interactions, as well as what qualifies as real. The search for the ultimate explanation of the natural seems to rely upon, and promote, the development of the artificial, seen here as an instantiation of the non-natural. In this chapter, I shall try and find a way out of this apparently strange predicament. I shall argue that the naturalization of our knowledge of the world is either philosophically trivial (naturalism as anti-supernaturalism and anti-preternaturalism), or mistaken (naturalism as anti-constructionism).

What is a Philosophical Question?

There are many ways of understanding the nature of philosophical questions. One may consider their morphology, semantics, relevance, or scope. This chapter introduces a different approach, based on the kind of informational resources required to answer them. The result is a definition of philosophical questions as questions whose answers are in principle open to informed, rational, and honest disagreement, ultimate but not absolute, closed under further questioning, possibly constrained by empirical and logico-mathematical resources, but requiring noetic resources to be answered. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the consequences of this definition for a conception of philosophy as the study (or ‘science’) of open questions, which uses conceptual design to analyse and answer them. That is the topic of Chapter 2.

A Defence of Information Closure

In this chapter, the principle of information closure (PIC) is defined and defended against a sceptical objection similar to the one discussed by Dretske in relation to the principle of epistemic closure. If successful, given that PIC is equivalent to the axiom of distribution and that the latter is one of the conditions that discriminate between normal and non-normal modal logics, one potentially good reason to look for a formalization of the logic of ‘S is informed that p’ among the non-normal modal logics, which reject the axiom, is also removed. This is not to argue that the logic of ‘S is informed that p’ should be a normal modal logic, but that it could still be, insofar as the objection that it could not be, based on the sceptical objection against PIC, has been removed. In other words, this chapter argues that the sceptical objection against PIC fails, so such an objection provides no ground to abandon the normal modal logic B (also known as KTB) as a formalization of ‘S is informed that p’, which remains plausible insofar as this specific obstacle is concerned.

Philosophy as Conceptual Design

Philosophy, understood as the study or science of open questions and their answers, becomes primarily a form of conceptual design. This is what we are going to see in this chapter, which offers an account and a defence of constructionism, both as a metaphilosophical approach and as a philosophical methodology, with some references to the philosophical tradition that has inspired it, the so-called ‘maker’s knowledge’ tradition. Here, we shall see that such constructionism needs to be reconciled with naturalism (recall that philosophy as conceptual design may be critical but also respectful of the best knowledge and reasonings we may have).

Maker’s Knowledge, between A Priori and A Posteriori

If Alice’s knowledge is the knowledge enjoyed by a maker how can this be qualified according to the three classic distinctions, which specify that truths can be necessary vs. contingent, analytic vs. synthetic, and a priori vs. a posteriori? This chapter argues that (a) we need to decouple a fourth distinction, namely informative vs. uninformative, from the previous three and, in particular, from its implicit association with analytic vs. synthetic and a priori vs. a posteriori; (b) such a decoupling facilitates, and is facilitated by, moving from a monoagent to a multiagent approach; (c) the decoupling and the multiagent approach enable a re-mapping of currently available positions in epistemology on these four dichotomies; (d) within such a re-mapping, two positions, capturing the nature of a witness’s knowledge and of a maker’s knowledge, can best be described as contingent, synthetic, a posteriori, and uninformative and as contingent, synthetic, weakly a priori (ab anteriori), and uninformative respectively.

Informational Scepticism and the Logically Possible

This chapter addresses the question: how do we know that the world really is as our informational constructs tell us it is?—the classic sceptical challenge. The chapter articulates and defends a twofold answer: either informational scepticism is radical (but epistemologically innocuous because redundant); or it is moderate (but epistemologically beneficial because useful). The first part of the chapter reconstructs a historical ‘renaissance of epistemology’ between the two world wars in light of the radical scepticism debate. The second part is entirely theoretical, seeking to solve the problem of radical scepticism. Once the problem has been established, Borel numbers are introduced as a convenient way to refer uniformly to (the data that individuate) different possible worlds. The Hamming distance between Borel numbers is adopted as a metric to calculate the distance between possible worlds. Radical and moderate informational scepticism are analysed using Borel numbers and Hamming distances to show that they are either harmless (extreme form) or fruitful (moderate form). Potential objections are dealt with in a separate section. The conclusion briefly discusses the Peircean nature of the overall approach.