The Logic of Information A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design

About this book

Luciano Floridi presents an innovative approach to philosophy, conceived as conceptual design. He explores how we make, transform, refine, and improve the objects of our knowledge. His starting point is that reality provides the data, to be understood as constraining affordances, and we transform them into information, like semantic engines. Such transformation or repurposing is not equivalent to portraying, or picturing, or photographing, or photocopying anything. It is more like cooking: the dish does not represent the ingredients, it uses them to make something else out of them, yet the reality of the dish and its properties hugely depend on the reality and the properties of the ingredients. Models are not representations understood as pictures, but interpretations understood as data elaborations, of systems. Thus, Luciano Floridi articulates and defends the thesis that knowledge is design and philosophy is the ultimate form of conceptual design.

Although entirely independent of Floridi's previous books, The Philosophy of Information (OUP 2011) and The Ethics of Information (OUP 2013), The Logic of Information both complements the existing volumes and presents new work on the foundations of the philosophy of information.

Contents

Part I
1: What is a Philosophical Question?
2: Philosophy as Conceptual Design
3: Constructionism as Non-Naturalism

Part II
4: Perception and Testimony as Data Providers
5: Information Quality
6: Informational Scepticism and the Logically Possible
7: A Defence of Information Closure
8: Logical Fallacies as Bayesian Informational Shortcuts
9: Maker's Knowledge, between A priori and A Posteriori
10: The Logic of Design as a Conceptual Logic of Information

Afterword: Rebooting Philosophy

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Biography

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Digital Ethics Lab of the Oxford Internet Institute and is Professorial Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He is also Turing Fellow and Chair of the Data Ethics Group of the Alan Turing Institute. He is a world-renowned expert in digital ethics, the philosophy of technology, and the philosophy of information.