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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.
List of 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
About the author
Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford and Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bologna, where he is the Director of the Centre for Digital Ethics. He is a world-renowned expert in digital ethics, the ethics of AI, the philosophy of technology, and the philosophy of information.
Summary
Luciano Floridi presents an innovative approach to philosophy, conceived as conceptual design. His starting-point is that reality provides the data which we transform into information. He explores how we make, transform, refine, and improve the objects of our knowledge, and defends the radical idea that knowledge is design.
Report
for those familiar with Floridi's work, this latest volume offers a cogent, consistent, and coherent culmination of more than two decades of his theorizing about PI. ...Recommended CHOICE
