Patrick Allo

In this paper I reassess Floridi's solution to the Bar-Hillel-Carnap paradox (the information-yield of inconsistent propositions is maximal) by questioning the orthodox view that contradictions cannot be true. The main part of the paper is devoted to showing that the veridicality thesis (semantic information has to be true) is compatible with dialetheism (there are true contradictions), and that unless we accept the additional non-falsity thesis (information cannot be false) there is no reason to presuppose that there is no such thing like contradictory information.

As Vincent Hendricks remarks early on in this book, the formal and mainstream traditions of epistemic theorising have mostly evolved independently of each other. This initial impression is confirmed by a comparison of the main problems and methods practitioners in each tradition are concerned with. Mainstream epistemol- ogy engages in a dialectical game of proposing and challenging definitions of knowledge. Formal epistemologists proceed differently, as they design a wide variety of axiomatic and model-theoretic methods whose consequences they investigate independently of the need of giving counterexample-free definitions of knowledge. Or at least, this is a common way to explain where both disciplines stand in the larger landscape of epistemic theorising, and why interactions between them remain scarce. The main ambition of this book is to show that the distinction between formal and mainstream approaches should not preclude a fruitful interaction, and that it only takes the right outlook on their respective practices to disclose plenty of room for interaction.

Substructural pluralism about the meaning of logical connectives is best understood as the view that natural language connectives have all (and only) the properties conferred by classical logic, but that particular occurrences of these connectives cannot simultaneously exhibit all these properties. This is just a more sophisticated way of saying that while natural language connectives are ambiguous, they are not so in the way classical logic intends them to be. Since this view is usually framed as a means to resolve paradoxes, little attention is paid to the logical properties of the ambiguous connectives themselves. The present paper sets out to fill this gap. First, I argue that substructural logicians should care about these connectives; next, I describe a consequence relation between a set of ambiguous premises and an ambiguous conclusion, and review the logical properties of ambiguous connectives; and finally, I highlight how ambiguous connectives can explain our intuitions about logical rivalry.

One of the basic principles of the general definition of information is its rejection of dataless information, which is reflected in its endorsement of an ontological neutrality. In general, this principles states that “there can be no information without physical implementation” (Floridi (2005)). Though this is standardly considered a commonsensical assumption, many questions arise with regard to its generalised application. In this paper a combined logic for data and information is elaborated, and specifically used to investigate the consequences of restricted and unrestricted data-implementation-principles.