How information becomes knowledge

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Semantic Information and The Network Theory of Account (forthcoming in Synthese)



The article addresses the problem of how semantic information can be upgraded to knowledge. The introductory section explains the technical terminology and the relevant background. Section two argues that, for semantic information to be upgraded to knowledge, it is necessary and sufficient to be embedded in a network of questions and answers that correctly accounts for it. Section three shows that an information flow network of type A fulfils such a requirement, by warranting that the erotetic deficit, characterising the target semantic information t by default, is correctly satisfied by the information flow of correct answers provided by an informational source s. Section four illustrates some of the major advantages of such a Network Theory of Account (NTA) and clears the ground of a few potential difficulties. Section five clarifies why NTA and an informational analysis of knowledge, according to which knowledge is accounted semantic information, is not subject to Gettier-type counterexamples. A concluding section briefly summarises the results obtained.

Comments

  1. KyleSun Nov 01, 06:04:00 pm

    I can't get the link to work for me. Keeps bringing up a 404 error.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Luciano FloridiSun Nov 01, 06:34:00 pm

    sorry it should work now.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Simon D'AlfonsoMon Nov 09, 03:17:00 am

    You write
    "Regarding the first purpose, epistemic luck affects negatively only knowledge but not semantic information. To see why, one may use a classic Russellian example: if one checks a watch at time t and the watch is broken but stopped working exactly twelve hours before (t – 12) and therefore happens to indicate the right time t – 12 at t, one is still informed that the time is t, although one can no longer be said to know the time."
    Am I to gather from this that you do not share certain conditions of information flow as expressed, for example, by Dretske? In Knowledge and the Flow of Information, he expresses a theoretical definition of a signal's (structure's) informational content in the following way:
    “A signal r carries the information that s is F = The conditional probability of s's being F, given r (and k), is 1 (but, given k alone, less than 1)”
    According to this definition, the watch is not giving information about the time, so one cannot be informed of the time with this watch?
    In fact with Dretske's type of information-theoretic epistemology, the requirement of regularity for information flow is supposed to explain why knowledge is not present in this example.

    ReplyDelete

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