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Annals of Library and Information Studies Vol. 63, June 2016, pp. 91-102

Philosophy of information: range and tenets

Shamba Dutta

Research Scholar, Department of Library and Information Science, University of Calcutta, 87/1 College Street, Kolkata - 700073, Email: [email protected]

Received: 14 June 2015; revised: 06 April 2016; accepted: 10 April 2016

This paper highlights some related to the of information (PI). Various philosophical queries about the nature and characteristics of information and varying ideas and concepts of information as they appear in the diverse fields of study are discussed. Philosophy of Information makes relevant queries in order to understand the role of information in the physical and organic world, in the evolution, and in society by constructing various models. The paper also introduces the reader with the main queries and prominent models of the philosophy.

Keywords: Emergent information; Info-computational model (ICON): Informational structural realism (ISR); Meta theory; Philosophy of information (PI): Triple – c; Super ; Unified theory of information (UTI)

Introduction individual paper by Capurro viz. The past, present and future of informations 3. Both papers deal with the Philosophy of information is a comparatively new historical and the modern concepts of information, field of study. In a sense, Luciano Floridi’s What is and also its range of meanings in different the Philosophy of Information , published in areas. The very diverse meanings of information is in January 2002 was the foundational reflected in these papers, some of which are mutually paper in PI 1. The title phrase ‘Philosophy of inclusive to some extent, some of which are not. Information’ was coined by Floridi in 1996 and Literature of physical science especially physics, both mentioned many times since, and was offered in the quantum and classical including very common text 2002 paper to the area of studying various books like Beiser’s Concept of Modern Physics 4 freely philosophical issues about information. In his paper in uses the term information. The illumination about the 2002, Floridi argued that PI had emerged as a new intrinsic relation between the thermodynamic independent discipline of study, as ‘ philosophia concepts of entropy and its equivalence can be very prima’ or the first philosophy and made an attempt for well understod from Landauer’s The Physical Nature the first time to define the field. Although it will be of Information . Daniel Bell’s concept of information seen that researches had been advanced in all of those has been reflected in his idea of the post industrial areas covered by PI long before the field came into society and his paper Welcome to the Post Industrial existence, but the convergence of several fields to Society further explains the role of information in the understand the very nature of information was social perspective. Scanning these papers for more becoming so compelling that ultimately they had to be and more aspects and meanings for the word merged in a holistic approach to study information information leads only to a very tempting tendency to under the umbrella term philosophy of information understand the very nature of information at a higher (PI). plane of abstraction. This methodological query simply initiates further enquiry about the nature of Literature review information at a philosophical level. While Luciano The inputs for this paper about the nature and Floridi’s two papers, What is the Philosophy of 1 extent of meanings the term information carries Information and Open Problems in the Philosophy of 5 comes from a number of papers like Capurro and Information introduce the newly developed field of Hjørland’s, The Concept of Information 2 and an PI and explains what, why and how of PI, in the 92 ANN. LIB. INF. STU., JUNE 2016

paper i.e. A Defence of Information Structural engineering where evidently, it is not mandatory for Realism ,6 Floridi launches his own line of contribution information to carry some meaning. But then, what is in the PI research in the name of Information- the significance of this added meaning when data is Structural Realism(ISR), a major PI tenet of the time. processed to information? Is meaning in any way In these papers Floridi suggested that a holistic view equivalent to the Information content of the message? of information may be our new field of study, rising We remember that information is also defined to be above, but taking into consideration, all the possible the communicated message that shapes the receiver 12 . meanings of the term in the different, immediate Thus the significance of meaning may be that it has contexts of all sciences and social sciences. In other some effects on the perception and judgment of one words, not only information is important in all fields who receives it, or makes some difference in the according to their own paradigms, but all aspects of construct of mind of one who receives it. Therefore, it information can indeed be studied under one umbrella seems that the significance of ‘meaning’ lies in its concept of PI, if not they can be unified in a grand capacity to ‘shape the receiver’ of information. But theory. Thus PI exists. Floridi’s “Open Problems in meaning is to a large extent subjective. It is possible Philosophy of Information”, Ten Years Later , is a to have more than one interpretation of a single data very useful paper by Dodig Crnkovic and set, and thus the same piece of information then can Hofkirchner 7, themselves major philosophers of have different effects on different receiver; and on information, which surveys in a nutshell the various some receiver it may have no effect at all. Therefore, advancements and potentialities hidden for further from one angle information is user specific; it is the study in the 18 open questions and other related user or receiver who decides whether what he or she questions in the range of PI. Hofkirchner’s individual has received is information or no information. paper Four Ways of Thinking about Information 8 Nowadays the concept of information presents a introduces with novel ideas of how to advance futher complex body of knowledge incorporating various in PI research, while the paper by the same author views coming from such diverse fields as natural, titled How to Achieve a Unified Theory of 9 social and computer science. Also according to van Information shows probability of unification of Bentham and Martinez, information can be different information concepts perhaps in a understood as range of possibilities (the opposite of reductionist level. Lessons learnt from the surveying uncertainty); as correlation (and thus structure), and and studying literature about the philosophy of information can be viewed as code, as in DNA 7. information are discussed in this paper. Therefore, theorising about information – aiming at What is information: difficulty with the definition a domain independent definition and conceptualization, has been a rather problematic task, It is said that information is both an and no consensus can hitherto be claimed over this. 1,2 interdisciplinary and polysemantic concept . Indeed, Moreover, it is well suggested that there should the term information as it is used today has multiple always be a crucial distinction maintained between a connotations. It is used outside library and concept and a definition as Belkin put it 13 . Belkin information science in many other different fields of pointed out rightly that a definition should say what a study-in physics, in engineering, in IT and signalling, phenomenon being defined actually is, whereas a in biology, in social sciences etc., and in each context concept is a way of looking at or interpreting, the with meanings varying from the other in some way, phenomenon. Sometimes we mistake just a concept but still similar in some other way. for a definition. On the other hand, a definition can be formulated in a persuasive manner, i.e. in order to Information has been defined in a number of ways, impress people rather than to arrive at a specification some of which are mutually inclusive in more than of the meaning 14 . While defining information this one aspect, and some are apparently contradictory. danger sometimes became predominant. For example, information has been defined as processed and meaningful data 10 , a definition after Capurro and Hjørland 2 discuss at some length about Davenport and Prusak. On the other hand, according the problems of defining information in a to Shannon, information only ‘sometimes’ has satisfactorily generalised perspective. They believe meanings, 11 a definition used in communication that the equation offered by Brookes (1977) such as: DUTTA: PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION: RANGE AND TENETS 93

K(S) + δI → K(S + δS) is rather pseudo-mathematical The work of Alan Turing was particularly and a persuasive one serving little purpose to influential to the artificial intelligence research. understand the very nature of it. Floridi recognized the philosophy of AI that deals with the algorithmic information processing as a 1 Information: its meanings and significance in premature paradigm of PI . various fields of study Information matters in biology too. Genetic The polysemantic and transdisciplinary nature of information is a very common term today, so is the information is already a known fact to us; and our information in the DNA code. Biological agents understanding of the concept and our attempt to self-organize themselves (autopoesis) and in a way define the term information is mainly domain reduces entropy by capturing or generating specific. In this section, the most significant meanings information. There is constant interaction between and concepts of information will be discussed mainly an organism and its environment. Biological in some major fields of study. morphogenesis was studied by Alan Turing as an information computation process. Developments In physics the concept appears in such pure fields have been made in bioinformatics, computational as thermodynamics, and quantum physics, relativity biology, neuroscience, cognitive science and and . Information is measured by the same related fields confirming that in practice biological unit of system disorder i.e. entropy. The physical systems have been studied as natural information quantity entropy is used mainly in thermodynamics, processing systems and are modelled using but Shannon successfully used the same mathematical computation-theoretical tools 23 . form of entropy in his mathematical theory of communication. But the relation between information In psychology, information is sometimes used as a and entropy is deeper than simple mathematical variable dealing with sensory perception, formalism. Zilard and then Landauer 15-17 showed that comprehension, or other psychological processes 2. information has real physical cost taxed by nature in These senses of information are very different than form of energy equivalence. In modern physics, the one in information science. information is physical is the maxim. Vedral 18 stated about a ‘strong information theoretic flavour’ in In the social and human sciences the term quantum physics. In quantum theory it is said that the information is generally used to mean ‘knowledge probabilistic wave function contains all the communicated’ in a human sense i.e. human intellect information about the particle or of the system 4. and intelligence are involved in creating, sending and receiving and the evaluation of the message which has Quantum Information Science (QIS) is a new area significance in human life and society. When used in of study which is based on the quantum entanglement IS, it should always be kept in mind that information of particles. Information is now seen as the is what is informative for a given person; and what is basic property of the universe, as fundamental as informative depends on the interpretative needs and matter and energy. In modern cosmology Bekenstein skills of the individual 2. and Hawking’s work show that the properties of a black hole can be described in terms of Information 19 . Within the scope of social sciences, LIS included, sometimes it is as tangible as a thing; some other In mathematical science Chaitin’s Algorithmic times it is as abstract as knowledge. Sometimes it is a Information Theory 20 tries to measure how much commodity or product, especially in the information information content is there in a set of axioms and economy, and in the information industry context it is how much information is there in a theory 21 . Classical a resource too, and a very important part of an mathematical approach of Shannon to information has industry like land, labour, capital and organization. In already been mentioned. Kullback’s relative entropy the information society and information economy too, theory can be seen as a supplement to Shannon information plays the crucial role of the chief entropy. Some of the difficulties associated with economic, social and cultural motor, a role assigned Shannon entropy, in the general case, can be to Information by Bell 20,24 . By information, Bell overcome by the use of relative entropy, which is also referred to data processing “in the broadest sense”. known as Kullback-Leibler Divergence 22 . He clarified that “the storage, retrieval, and 94 ANN. LIB. INF. STU., JUNE 2016

processing of data becomes the essential resource process similar to computing or algorithmic for all economic and social exchanges” in the post Information processing 2. industrial society he envisaged 25 . Evidently, when By referring to information as a superconcept or a information is used in social science, the role of generic concept Hofkirchner, the originator of the humans engaged in the informational activities Unified Theory of Information (UTI), a prominent like storage, retrieval, and processing etc. are also branch in PI, recognizes the diversity of the concept recognised. This use differs from the pure saying that it (information) covers all different engineering sense of Shannon or the mathematical manifestations of real-world information processes sense of Kullback or in the sense it is used in regardless of the realm in which they appear 30 . physics. Hofkirchner offers a (incomplete) list of possible Belkin’s idea for the conceptualization of concepts across the various fields of study which are information was from the perspective of eight either related to or to varying degrees overlapping requirements. Based on these requirements Thellefsen with the information concept: et al. have summed up the Belkin’s concept of i. Structure, ii. Data, iii. Signal, iv. Message, Information thus: v. Signification, meaning, sense, vi. , “It must be purposeful, meaningful; it must enter vii. Sign process, semiosis, viii. Psyche, into human communication. It must be requested and ix. Intelligence, x. Perception, xi. Thought, desired. It must have an effect on the recipient. It xii. , xiii. Knowledge, xiv. Con- must the knowledge state of the recipient. It sciousness, mind, xv. Wisdom, etc. must be general and able to predict the effect of information.” 13 Similarly, Bhattacharyya has explored several definitions and identified sixteen senses that the term Machlup too, took information as the human information bears 31 . Thus it may be very easy to ask phenomenon as addressed to human minds and is what information is , but the answer to the question is received by human minds, and opposed to the view difficult to give. of signal transmission in the sense Shannon defined information. In the book The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages published What is philosophy of information (PI): the nature in 1983, he proposed that information should mean of philosophical queries ‘telling something’ or ‘something that is being Evidently, there are two basic facets involved in told’. According to Machlup, all other senses the concept of philosophy of information; one is information is used beyond the human context are philosophy and the other is information . If the phrase metaphoric 2,3 . We also observe such usage as philosophy of information is analysed it is understood ‘perfect information’ in game theory or decision that the philosophy is an operator functioning over the theory in the sense of full information of all facts concept information . While philosophy itself has been acquired by the consumer in the market etc 26 . a self consistent discipline of study from the very ancient times, comprising as its core , , In there have been attempts to apply the 32 communication model involving a source, channel , , and amongst sin qua non and receiver or information sink for natural language which epistemology is the which means communication. In case of natural language the signal “the study of the justification of claims to knowledge” 27 or in other words the constant attempt to answer the is phonetic, produced in the form of acoustic units . 32 Also there is an information theoretic approach to question “how do you know?” , a ‘philosophy of ~ *’ grammar and language which helps advancement of approach is often confronted in the scholarly canon of AI research viz. NLP and speech recognition 28 . literature e.g. the , philosophy of mathematics, , philosophy of In system theory a dynamic system can be chemistry, , philosophy of considered as an information processing machine that computation, etc. This is perhaps because of the very computes a present state as output from an initial state philosophising nature of human. But what actually is of input 29 . Cognition science also seeks to understand the fundamental nature of this philosophical query? human capacity of information processing as a Why we need philosophy at all? What are the DUTTA: PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION: RANGE AND TENETS 95

questions that we do expect philosophy to answer? potentially existing contexts the term information is or And then, what does this particular “Philosophy of can be used; and also it is for analysis of various ~*” approach to a subject or discipline amount to? concepts of information along with its all the aspects Does the discipline itself not sufficiently give answers suggested above that occupy our thought. to the questions it raises so that we need to take a Floridi claimed more than a decade ago in the philosophical approach to it? John Hospers in his journal Metaphilosophy1 that PI had emerged as a bestselling book An Introduction to Philosophical ‘matured discipline’, at least as ‘ philosophia prima’ Analysis attempted to reach the kernel of the problem or the first philosophy. According to Floridi the three about the nature of the philosophical query 32 from a main criteria requiring for emergence of a new netty–netty approach (reaching the truth by negativity philosophical field are fulfilled by PI; as it is capable saying what it is not rather than what it is, an of approach used to define the Atma in the Upanishada ). Hospers enumerated the following points: a) representing an autonomous field comprising unique topics 1. A philosophical question cannot be answered b) treating old and new philosophical topics by its empirically i.e. by applying senses measurements original methodologies and perceptions or from results of experiments. c) standing beside other branches of philosophy and 2. It follows that questions which sciences can formulate new theories about its own field. satisfactorily answer are not of any philosophical But more fundamentally, what makes a field of nature. study apt to be called the ‘Philosophy of~*’? Primarily, the aim of thus philosophizing a subject or 3. Questions about the incidents in the past are not an area of study, generally speaking, seems to be to philosophical. reduce the issues or theories or concepts of that subject or discipline to the very elementarily 4. Mathematical questions are not of philosophical philosophical level of the, metaphysical, nature. epistemological, logical, aesthetic or ethical nature. In the main, ‘philosophy of ~*’ tries to put an What is the nature of the philosophical query, then, ontological query about it, or about the very nature or if we ask directly? Primarily, therefore, what remains essence of the thing itself, thus making a quest for a for philosophy to take care of is (arguably, though) theory of a theory or a metatheory. Floridi the left over kind of questions that the other branches that the very task of the ‘philosophy of ~*’ is to ask of studies cannot answer. In ’s words, the classic ti esti question or ‘what is the nature of~’ “philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such type question 1. Applying this generalization to the ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as philosophy of information we can say that PI should we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but ask the fundamental question ‘what is the nature of critically after exploring all that makes such questions information’. Floridi defines PI as the philosophical puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and field concerned with confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas. 33 ” Moreover, philosophy is the study of justification of (a) the critical investigation of the conceptual nature the claims that we make. Philosophy can also be seen and basic principles of information including its as the analysis of various concepts central to our dynamics, utilization and sciences, and 32 thought . (b) the elaboration and application of information- theoretic and computational methodologies to Following the analogy of the above argument we philosophical problems. can say that philosophy of information is there for answering, or seeking the ways of answering the left He clarifies that PI is not to be confused with the over questions about information; the study of quantitative theory of data communication or with the justifications we make about the various aspects of information theory like Shannon’s. Rather it attempts information ranging from the definitional to the to develop ‘an integrated family of theories that application-oriented, and in all the practical and analyse evaluate and explain the various principles 96 ANN. LIB. INF. STU., JUNE 2016

and concepts of information, their dynamics and The meaning approach states that the meaning utilization, with special attention to systemic issues assigned to or data is the information. We have arising from different contexts applications and seen that the mathematical, message oriented interconnections with other key concepts of approach of Shannon neglects the meaning at large. philosophy, such as being, knowledge, truth, life, and Antithetically, the meaning oriented approach equates meaning 1,34 . information to the meaning of the message. The effect approach states that information is a Early systematic approach to information and the specific effect of a specific process, range of PI usually on the part of the recipients in a process of communication. This is evidently an approach where In 2004 Floridi published another paper titled 5 the importance is shifted to the recipient from the “Open problems in the Philosophy of Information” sender of the message. based on the Herbert A. Simon Lecture in Computing and Philosophy given at Carnegie Mellon University The process approach states that information is not in 2001. In this paper he listed five of the most one of the components of processes but as a process interesting areas and formulated eighteen fundamental itself. This may be a process of human data questions which were covered by those five areas in processing or a communication process with a PI 1. These were the open problems in PI on which specific purpose 24,35 . In all the cases there are more Floridi thought the PI researches in the future should than one varieties or versions recognised by the pivot. The five areas and the appending questions are authors. mentioned below to help readers grasp the range of PI at a glance. But when we come to the term ‘philosophy of information’ it is expected that the philosophy But before that it would be useful to mention the approach should cover all the above mentioned broad other significant approach that attempts to tackle areas and any other area or approach that one may systematically the confusing and enigmatic issue of address with regard to information. information. PI approach would perhaps be more Floridi’s open problems thus happily include those easily understood in comparison to this. 35 approaches of Wersing and Neveling , and also In the early 70s, when PI was in its prenatal reserves room for many other questions, concepts and stage, Wersing and Neveling identified six approaches as is expected. But Floridi’s grouping of different approaches to information 35 . the 18 questions are not mere restructuring of any earlier approach of categorizing. Floridi’s approach i) The structure approach, ii) The knowledge shows its philosophical spirit in which he relates the approach, iii) The message approach, iv) The philosophical components: epistemology, , meaning approach, v) The effect approach, ethics, the age-old Cartesian mind-body problem vi) The process approach. etc. 5,7 as mentioned elsewhere, with the queries about The structure approach states that the structures of information. Moreover, the fundamental ti-esti about the world – whether perceived by man or not – are information is asked at a metaphysical level, a higher information. Information is independent of whether a level of abstraction than any of the existing human being gathers it or not. definitions of information. Thus PI hardly attempts to give any consolidated definition of information. The knowledge approach states that knowledge Instead, it studies the concept in various contexts and developed on the basis of perception of the structure tries to distil them at a metatheoretic level, and of the world is information. Wersing and Neveling attempts to make models with Information at its alert us against this, and call it a dangerous approach centre, recognizing the various Informational because of the very probable confusion often made activities like creating, processing, encoding and between knowledge and information. decoding, transporting, transforming etc. as the basic dynamics of the system. The message approach is the continuation of tradition of Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical Following are the 18 open problems under the 5 approach, information is the message itself. respective heads as Floridi offered them. DUTTA: PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION: RANGE AND TENETS 97

Group 1: Analysis of information and its dynamics or Prob 14: The Semantic View of Science: Is information definition Science Reducible to Information Prob 1: What is information? Modelling? Prob 2: What are the dynamics of information? Group 4: Nature of information or information and the universe Prob 3: Is a Grand Unified Theory of Infor- mation (GUTI) possible? Prob 15: Wiener’s Problem: what is the Onto- logical Category of Information? Group 2: or Meanings of information Prob 16: The Localization problem: can infor- Prob 4: The Data Grounding Problem: How can mation be naturalised? data acquire their meaning? Prob 17: The “It from Bit” Hypothesis (Wheeler Prob 5: The problem of alethization : How can 1990): can nature be information- meaningful data acquire their truth alized? value? Prob 6: Informational truth theory: can infor- Group 5: Values or ethical problems mation explain truth? Prob 18: The uniqueness debate: Do computer Prob 7: Informational semantics: can infor- ethics have a philosophical founda- mation explain meaning? tion?

Group 3: Intelligence or cognition Anyone who reads Floridi’s seminal paper and track the subsequent development in PI research Prob 8: Decarte’s problem: can cognition (C) would be amazed to see the fullness of the approach be fully analyzed in terms of applied to the concept of information. It covers almost information processing (IP) at some all fields of human’s studies ranging from level of abstraction (LoA)? How is incorporating aspects of ontology, epistemology, the triad C, IP, LoA to be interpreted? values and truth, and subjects ranging from physics to Prob 9: Dennett’s reengineering problem 1994: biology, including computation and semantics. can natural intelligence (NI) be fully and satisfactorily analyzed in terms of A brief note about semantic information in PI IP at some LoA? How is the triad NI, IP, LoA to be interpreted? A General Definition of Information (GDI) has been formulated for information as semantic content 34 Prob 10: Turing’s problem: can NI be fully and thus: satisfactorily implemented non- biologically? A piece of information would be information proper, if and only if- Prob 11: The MIB (Mind-Information-Body) Problem: Can an Informational i) it consists of n-data; n ≥ 1; Approach Solve the Mind-body Problem? ii) the data are well formed

Prob: 12: The Informational Circle: If Informa- iii) the well-formed data is meaningful. tion Cannot Be Transcended but Can Only Be Checked against Further Thus data in GDI is alethically neutral in the Information—If It Is Information All general definition ; which means even false data can the Way up and All the Way Down— constitute information if processed with meaning. But What Does This Tell Us about Our the Special Definition of Information (SDI) imposes a Knowledge of the World? fourth condition about alethic neutrality and says that the well formed data have to be truthful. Prob 13: The Continuum Hypothesis: Should Epistemology Be Based on a Theory In Floridi’s open problems the question of truth of Information? value has been handled in Group 2, problems 4 to 7. 98 ANN. LIB. INF. STU., JUNE 2016

Epistemological queries about information in PI Of the continental rationalists Descartes claims to take his inspiration from mathematics which is based Within the range of PI epistemological aspects on reason. According to Descartes the first principles related to Information need special emphasis and this are derived from reason all other knowledge is section is dedicated to the brief discussion of the deduced from there. While knowledge from reason is theory of knowledge and the human knowledge trustworthy, knowledge based on senses are often process, and its relatedness to the Informational deceptive and mislead our mind. Spinoza too believes issues. Knowledge has been most generally defined as in the supremacy of intuition or reason as a source of Justified True (JTB) 36 and information is knowledge. Spinoza argues that we cannot have believed to be unprocessed knowledge, or in other adequate ideas of the world through sensation. words, knowledge is processed information. Although he recognizes the role of senses in what he Knowledge is a belief held by someone, and that called the knowledge of the first and the second kind, belief has to be true. But to be called knowledge, this the role of senses can be excluded from his third kind knowledge must be justifiable. True belief which is of knowledge. German rationalist Kant too vindicated not justified but a lucky guess only thus cannot be the supremacy of reason as a source of knowledge. called Knowledge. Information, on the other hand, when thought of in the human context, has semantic Spencer on the other hand was the advocate of values and is processed by humans. It is mind , that the only reliable knowledge of the independent and objective, but goes into the cognitive universe can be formed from the sciences, which is a process of humans. In the semantic aspect, belief in the . information has been defined as meaningful data. In the PI approach developed by Floridi we find The defining questions of epistemology include the several older philosophical problems have been following 37: related to newer informational issues. For example, the traditional mind-body dualism of Descartes in

1. What is the nature of propositional knowledge, problem 8. Descartes proposed his theory to solve the knowledge that a particular about the problem how the physical or material body influence world is true? the non material mind 14 . Secondly, can cognition be 2. How can we gain knowledge? described or explained in terms of Information processing! Both the issues are intrinsically related 3. What are the limits of our knowledge? because cognitive organisms acquire Information as a sensory perception, a process involving the physical Two broad divisions of epistemological debate is body, as in problem 11. But cognition is believed to that one existing between and be a mental process rather. Related to this is the even , the former believing in the predominance more abstract epistemological problem reflected in of reason and the latter in experience as the source of Floridi’s question no. 12 & 13, asking what does knowledge. Rationalists virtually always assert or Information which is believed to be so ubiquitous tell imply that, in addition to knowledge of analytic us about our knowledge of the world, and can there truths, there is knowledge of synthetic a priori 36 ever be an Information theoretic approach to truths . Empiricism (or often empiricisms as there are epistemology? several forms of it) is the epistemological view that experience is the source of all our justified, true Major tenets of PI research beliefs. In the first place, they develop accounts of how experience provides the information that In 2011, a decade after Floridi’s announcement of rationalists cite, insofar as we have it in the first place. PI as a unique and self sufficient field of research, and Empiricists will at times opt for skepticism as an seven years after his launching the open problems, alternative to rationalism: if experience cannot Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic and Wolfgang Hofkirchner provide the concepts or knowledge the rationalists published a joint paper in the online journal cite, then we don't have them 36,37 . Locke, Berkeley Information titled Floridi’s “Open Problems in the and Hume are the main exponents of empiricism, Philosophy of Information”, Ten Years Later although the they advocated were revisiting those 18 open problems 5,7 and reviewing markedly different from each others. progresses in research connecting to those suggested DUTTA: PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION: RANGE AND TENETS 99

topics 7. It would be instructive for the PI enthusiasts core notion of information which is theoretically most to look into their paper to delve deep into the details poweerful, and other notions are gravitationg around and the historical development since the it 34 . inception of the field. In this section four major tenets of PI research would be mentioned and discussed in In the light of the above discussion, some current brief. PI tenets are briefly mentioned below, which to some extent seem overlapping. However, all the existing Earlier we mentioned that the fundamental ti-esti is and potential approaches to find the basic ti-esti seem the sin qua non of any philosophical query, and of the to coagulate in these PI tenets mainly. However, we PI too. And to answer the ti-esti about Information is will see that of the four main tenets mentioned below, as very much challenging as to give answer to the first three corroborate issues mainly from different questions like what is being, what is truth or what is branches of sciences including cognitive science, knowledge. However, there are three broader computational science, aspects of biology etc. and approaches to answer this ti-esti (Floridi, Information, also insights of social sciences, and their intrinsic 2004) viz. Reductionist, Anti-reductionist and philosophies, in order to formulate pseudo-scientific Nonreductionist. All these three approaches are models to explain various informational acts in the identifiable in the currrent PI tenets. various systems including biological non-cognitive, biological cognitive, natural, social, and natural- The reductionist approach preserves hope for a biological interactive systems. The fourth one that Unified Theory of Information (UTI) i.e. to arrive at a comes from Floridi himself, seems to have a much general theory to be inclusive of all the major more philosophical outlook, with possibility to be concepts of information much like a Unified Field reduced to be a more generalized and abstracted Theory in which all the physical laws will be unified. Philosophical view point of Information. What the reductionists believe is that all the concepts of Information are ultimately be reducible to a Ur- Informational Computational Model of (ICON) concept or a mother concept, conceptually, genetically, or genealogically 34 . Certainly, there is a Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic mentioned that the hierarchical structure underlying the reductionist Informational Computational Model of Reality or the concept in that one level of meaning seems to be ICON model is an approach ‘in which universe is viewed as a structure (information) in a permanent transcendent of the next level of generalization and so 38 on to reach the ultimate level of unification. But there process of change (computation) . ICON model is a probability of what is known to be the derives its strength from combining two major reductionist syndrome, i.e. the fear of ‘reducing paradigms: Floridi’s scheme of Informational human beings to an information-processing machine Structural realism mentioned in the last section, with giving up social and cultural dimensions’ 3. the pancomputationalism or naturalist computationalism propounded mainly by Zuse, The anti-reductionist approach refutes any Wolfram, Chaitin, Lloyd which takes the universe to suggestion of such unification and believes that the be a sort of digital computer 23 . different connotations of a single term and that these various meaning were not descendant of a core According to this view, information and meaning or born in the womb of the Ur-concept. computation constitute two aspects of reality, and like the wave -particle duality in quantum physics, matter The non-reductionists break the middle path. and energy, represent different facets of the same Neither they completely defend the multiplicity and physical world. Owing much to Gordana Dodig- radical irreducibility of the anti-reductionists Crnkovic, this line of thinking looks upon information approach nor do they fully support the hierarchical as a result of natural computation. It presupposes a model of the reductionists. Their approach is that of a hierarchy of levels, ‘starting from the basic proto- “hypertextual analysis” or a network of connected information as a stuff of the universe and building a concepts of Information linked by mutual and number of levels of organization in an evolutionary dynamic influences that are not necessarily genetic or way, through computational processes.’7 It is genealogical. There is a centralised and a decetralised identified as a new philosophy of nature that provides concept under this approach. In the former there is a the basis for the unification of knowledge from the 100 ANN. LIB. INF. STU., JUNE 2016

existing disparate fields like natural sciences, picture’ of the universe in which attempts would be philosophy, and computing 23 . made in order that ‘the whole variety of different manifestations of information processes in society and Emergent Information and the Triple C-model in the world at all might be understood 9. It is the view that conceives informational The unified theory of information is not simply a dynamics as processes of self-organization. Whenever case of ‘pure scientific curiosity’ 26 . Rather, UTI self-organizing systems in their behaviour relate to the considers the social aspects of information and add environment, they create information, that is, they more values to the various information processes rather generate information than process it and are involved in the way human interacts with thus information-generating systems. This concept environment and society. UTI accepts this might be called “emergent information”. The extrascientific undertaking as a social responsibility in difference between ICON and emergent information the advent of the information age when most people model lies in the background dynamics of the process. are involved in some information based activity. UTI Info-computationalism takes into account any natural thus tries to establish a connecting thread between the process that can be described by a definable model as social/societal and scientific concept of information, computation, which is equal to information and it uses the Triple C model as a tool 30 . processing. For example, the emission of a particle But UTI not only considers information as a from a radioactive creates information. In the concept applying only to humans but takes into ‘emergent information’ approach only self- account the ‘precursors of the human information organization processes are deemed to produce processes as well’. Hofkirchner writes: information 7 One major approach to this emergent information is the Cognition-Communication- Cognition is not only a process on the human Cooperation or the Triple C- model introduced by level, you will find it with other organisms as Hofkirchner 39 in 2002. The Triple C was drawn from well. The same holds for communication. And and applied primarily to information dynamics at for co-operation, too. Furthermore, it depends on societal organizational level. But attempts were made the of the “information” concept to fit this model into all self organising systems like whether or not also precursors of organismic evolutionary systems and physical and chemical self cognitive, communicative and co-operative organizing systems. It looks upon information information processes can be identified in the 30 generation by self-organizing agents in a 3 layer prebiotic world . process. First comes cognition which refers to the UTI develops a perspective from which this information generation of a self-organizing system integration can be achieved ‘without doing harm to vis-á-vis its environment that is unspecified as well as 9 7 any of the ideas in question’ . It is claimed that this less-than deterministic; the coupling of cognitive perspective is the perspective of unity-through- processes of at least two self-organizing systems diversity. Hofkirchner defines and suggests the four yields then communication; and sustainable ways of thinking: , projectivism, communicative processes lead to cooperation of co- disjunctivism and integrativism in order to yield systems for the sake of a commonly established meta- guidelines for how to conceive of information 8,9 . or suprasystem of which the co-systems are elements. Layer models for bio-cognition, bio-communication Informational Structural Realism (ISR) and bio-cooperation in living self organizing systems, Floridis informational structural realism is a new and layer model for a more complex human- philosophical approach that applies the concept of cognition, human-communication and human- information as a fundamental ontological entity in the cooperation for human systems have been proposed as scheme of structural realism. Thus ISR turns out to be an attempt to apply Triple –C model in the context of 30 a new version of Structural Realism in which he emergent information systems . fits Information as the basic ontology of being. The details of Structural Ralism (SR) and its versions UTI and the Triple-C Model cannot be dealt with in the limited scope of this paper. Primarily, a unified theory of information looks It is sufficient here just to quote a few words from like an ‘intra-scientific issue’ to grasp the ‘big Floridi here: DUTTA: PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION: RANGE AND TENETS 101

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