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Abstract

An argument that information exists at different levels of analysis-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic-and an exploration of the implications. Although this is the Information Age, there is no universal agreement about what information really is. Different disciplines view information differently; engineers, computer scientists, economists, linguists, and philosophers all take varying and apparently disconnected approaches. In this book, Antonio Badia distinguishes four levels of analysis brought to bear on information: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and network-based. Badia explains each of these theoretical approaches in turn, discussing, among other topics, theories of Claude Shannon and Andrey Kolomogorov, Fred Dretske's description of information flow, and ideas on receiver impact and informational interactions. Badia argues that all these theories describe the same phenomena from different perspectives, each one narrower than the previous one. The syntactic approach is the more general one, but it fails to specify when information is meaningful to an agent, which is the focus of the semantic and pragmatic approaches. The network-based approach, meanwhile, provides a framework to understand information use among agents. Badia then explores the consequences of understanding information as existing at several levels. Humans live at the semantic and pragmatic level (and at the network level as a society), computers at the syntactic level. This sheds light on some recent issues, including "fake news" (computers cannot tell whether a statement is true or not, because truth is a semantic notion) and "algorithmic bias" (a pragmatic, not syntactic concern). Humans, not computers, the book argues, have the ability to solve these issues.

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Abstract

In this book, Ronald Day offers a critical history of the modern tradition of documentation. Focusing on the documentary index (understood as a mode of social positioning), and drawing on the work of the French documentalist Suzanne Briet, Day explores the understanding and uses of indexicality. He examines the transition as indexes went from being explicit professional structures that mediated users and documents to being implicit infrastructural devices used in everyday information and communication acts. Doing so, he also traces three epistemic eras in the representation of individuals and groups, first in the forms of documents, then information, then data. Day investigates five cases from the modern tradition of documentation. He considers the socio-technical instrumentalism of Paul Otlet, "the father of European documentation" (contrasting it to the hermeneutic perspective of Martin Heidegger); the shift from documentation to information science and the accompanying transformation of persons and texts into users and information; social media's use of algorithms, further subsuming persons and texts; attempts to build android robots -- to embody human agency within an information system that resembles a human being; and social "big data" as a technique of neoliberal governance that employs indexing and analytics for purposes of surveillance. Finally, Day considers the status of critique and judgment at a time when people and their rights of judgment are increasingly mediated, displaced, and replaced by modern documentary techniques.

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Abstract

This is the first volume in the tetralogy on the foundations of the philosophy of information. The reader interested in an introduction to its topics may find Information - A very Short Introduction helpful. The book fulfils three goals. The first is metatheoretical. The book describes what the philosophy of information is, its open problems, and its methods. The second goal is introductory. The book analyses the complex and diverse nature of informational concepts and phenomena, and defends the veridicality thesis and a theory of strongly semantic information. The third goal is constructive. The book tackles some classic philosophical questions in information-theoretical terms, such as how symbols acquire their semantics (the symbol-grounding problem), whether knowledge may be something different from justified true belief (the Gettier problem), or what kind of realism may be more plausible in philosophy of science (the debate on structural realism). The essential message is quite straightforward. Semantic information is well-formed, meaningful and truthful data; knowledge is relevant semantic information properly accounted for; humans are the only known semantic engines and conscious informational organisms who can develop a growing knowledge of reality; and reality is the totality of information (notice the crucial absence of "semantic").