Machine awareness is a disputed research topic, in some circles considered a crucial step in realising Artificial General Intelligence. Understanding what that is, under which conditions such feature could arise and how it can be controlled is still a matter of speculation. A more concrete object of theoretical analysis is algorithmic iteration for computational intelligence, intended as the theoretical and practical ability of algorithms to design other algorithms for actions aimed at solving well-specified tasks. We know this ability is already (...) shown by current AIs, and understanding its limits is an essential step in qualifying claims about machine awareness and Super-AI. We propose a formal translation of algorithmic iteration in a fragment of modal logic, formulate principles of transparency and faithfulness across human and machine intelligence, and consider the relevance to theoretical research on -AI as well as the practical import of our results. (shrink)

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

The paper examines some aspects of today’s debate on trust and e-trust and, more specifically, issues of legal responsibility for the production and use of robots. Their impact on human-to-human interaction has produced new problems both in the fields of contractual and extra-contractual liability in that robots negotiate, enter into contracts, establish rights and obligations between humans, while reshaping matters of responsibility and risk in trust relations. Whether or not robotrust concerns human-to-robot or even robot-to-robot relations, there is a new (...) generation of cases involving human-to-human contractual and extra-contractual liability for robots’ behaviour because, for the first time, legal systems hold you responsible for what an artificial system autonomously decides to do. (shrink)

Contemporary medical diagnostics has a dynamic moral landscape, which includes a variety of agents, factors, and components. A significant part of this landscape is composed of information technologies that play a vital role in doctors’ decision-making. This paper focuses on the so-called Intelligent Decision-Support System that is widely implemented in the domain of contemporary medical diagnosis. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I will show that the IDSS may be considered a moral agent in the practice of medicine (...) today. To develop this idea I will introduce the approach to artificial agency provided by Luciano Floridi. Simultaneously, I will situate this approach in the context of contemporary discussions regarding the nature of artificial agency. It is argued here that the IDSS possesses a specific sort of agency, includes several agent features (e.g. autonomy, interactivity, adaptability), and hence, performs an autonomous behavior, which may have a substantial moral impact on the patient’s well-being. It follows that, through the technology of artificial neural networks combined with ‘deep learning’ mechanisms, the IDSS tool achieves a specific sort of independence (autonomy) and may possess a certain type of moral agency. Second, I will provide a conceptual framework for the ethical evaluation of the moral impact that the IDSS may have on the doctor’s decision-making and, consequently, on the patient’s wellbeing. This framework is the Object-Oriented Model of Moral Action developed by Luciano Floridi. Although this model appears in many contemporary discussions in the field of information and computer ethics, it has not yet been applied to the medical domain. This paper addresses this gap and seeks to reveal the hidden potentialities of the OOP model for the field of medical diagnosis. (shrink)

Organisations that design and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly commit themselves to high-level, ethical principles. However, there still exists a gap between principles and practices in AI ethics. One major obstacle organisations face when attempting to operationalise AI Ethics is the lack of a well-defined material scope. Put differently, the question to which systems and processes AI ethics principles ought to apply remains unanswered. Of course, there exists no universally accepted definition of AI, and different systems pose different ethical (...) challenges. Nevertheless, pragmatic problem-solving demands that things should be sorted so that their grouping will promote successful actions for some specific end. In this article, we review and compare previous attempts to classify AI systems for the purpose of implementing AI governance in practice. We find that attempts to classify AI systems proposed in previous literature use one of three mental models: _the Switch_, i.e., a binary approach according to which systems either are or are not considered AI systems depending on their characteristics; _the Ladder_, i.e., a risk-based approach that classifies systems according to the ethical risks they pose; and _the Matrix_, i.e., a multi-dimensional classification of systems that take various aspects into account, such as context, input data, and decision-model. Each of these models for classifying AI systems comes with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. By conceptualising different ways of classifying AI systems into simple mental models, we hope to provide organisations that design, deploy, or regulate AI systems with the vocabulary needed to demarcate the material scope of their AI governance frameworks. (shrink)

The proposed European Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) is the first attempt to elaborate a general legal framework for AI carried out by any major global economy. As such, the AIA is likely to become a point of reference in the larger discourse on how AI systems can (and should) be regulated. In this article, we describe and discuss the two primary enforcement mechanisms proposed in the AIA: the _conformity assessments_ that providers of high-risk AI systems are expected to conduct, and (...) the _post-market monitoring plans_ that providers must establish to document the performance of high-risk AI systems throughout their lifetimes. We argue that the AIA can be interpreted as a proposal to establish a Europe-wide ecosystem for conducting AI auditing, albeit in other words. Our analysis offers two main contributions. First, by describing the enforcement mechanisms included in the AIA in terminology borrowed from existing literature on AI auditing, we help providers of AI systems understand how they can prove adherence to the requirements set out in the AIA in practice. Second, by examining the AIA from an auditing perspective, we seek to provide transferable lessons from previous research about how to refine further the regulatory approach outlined in the AIA. We conclude by highlighting seven aspects of the AIA where amendments (or simply clarifications) would be helpful. These include, above all, the need to translate vague concepts into verifiable criteria and to strengthen the institutional safeguards concerning conformity assessments based on internal checks. (shrink)

Organisations increasingly use automated decision-making systems (ADMS) to inform decisions that affect humans and their environment. While the use of ADMS can improve the accuracy and efficiency of decision-making processes, it is also coupled with ethical challenges. Unfortunately, the governance mechanisms currently used to oversee human decision-making often fail when applied to ADMS. In previous work, we proposed that ethics-based auditing (EBA)—that is, a structured process by which ADMS are assessed for consistency with relevant principles or norms—can (a) help organisations (...) verify claims about their ADMS and (b) provide decision-subjects with justifications for the outputs produced by ADMS. In this article, we outline the conditions under which EBA procedures can be feasible and effective in practice. First, we argue that EBA is best understood as a ‘soft’ yet ‘formal’ governance mechanism. This implies that the main responsibility of auditors should be to spark ethical deliberation at key intervention points throughout the software development process and ensure that there is sufficient documentation to respond to potential inquiries. Second, we frame AMDS as parts of larger sociotechnical systems to demonstrate that to be feasible and effective, EBA procedures must link to intervention points that span all levels of organisational governance and all phases of the software lifecycle. The main function of EBA should, therefore, be to inform, formalise, assess, and interlink existing governance structures. Finally, we discuss the policy implications of our findings. To support the emergence of feasible and effective EBA procedures, policymakers and regulators could provide standardised reporting formats, facilitate knowledge exchange, provide guidance on how to resolve normative tensions, and create an independent body to oversee EBA of ADMS. (shrink)

The capacity to collect and analyse data is growing exponentially. Referred to as ‘Big Data’, this scientific, social and technological trend has helped create destabilising amounts of information, which can challenge accepted social and ethical norms. Big Data remains a fuzzy idea, emerging across social, scientific, and business contexts sometimes seemingly related only by the gigantic size of the datasets being considered. As is often the case with the cutting edge of scientific and technological progress, understanding of the ethical implications (...) of Big Data lags behind. In order to bridge such a gap, this article systematically and comprehensively analyses academic literature concerning the ethical implications of Big Data, providing a watershed for future ethical investigations and regulations. Particular attention is paid to biomedical Big Data due to the inherent sensitivity of medical information. By means of a meta-analysis of the literature, a thematic narrative is provided to guide ethicists, data scientists, regulators and other stakeholders through what is already known or hypothesised about the ethical risks of this emerging and innovative phenomenon. Five key areas of concern are identified: informed consent, privacy, ownership, epistemology and objectivity, and ‘Big Data Divides’ created between those who have or lack the necessary resources to analyse increasingly large datasets. Critical gaps in the treatment of these themes are identified with suggestions for future research. Six additional areas of concern are then suggested which, although related have not yet attracted extensive debate in the existing literature. It is argued that they will require much closer scrutiny in the immediate future: the dangers of ignoring group-level ethical harms; the importance of epistemology in assessing the ethics of Big Data; the changing nature of fiduciary relationships that become increasingly data saturated; the need to distinguish between ‘academic’ and ‘commercial’ Big Data practices in terms of potential harm to data subjects; future problems with ownership of intellectual property generated from analysis of aggregated datasets; and the difficulty of providing meaningful access rights to individual data subjects that lack necessary resources. Considered together, these eleven themes provide a thorough critical framework to guide ethical assessment and governance of emerging Big Data practices. (shrink)

Mature information societies are characterised by mass production of data that provide insight into human behaviour. Analytics has arisen as a practice to make sense of the data trails generated through interactions with networked devices, platforms and organisations. Persistent knowledge describing the behaviours and characteristics of people can be constructed over time, linking individuals into groups or classes of interest to the platform. Analytics allows for a new type of algorithmically assembled group to be formed that does not necessarily align (...) with classes or attributes already protected by privacy and anti-discrimination law or addressed in fairness- and discrimination-aware analytics. Individuals are linked according to offline identifiers and shared behavioural identity tokens, allowing for predictions and decisions to be taken at a group rather than individual level. This article examines the ethical significance of such ad hoc groups in analytics and argues that the privacy interests of algorithmically assembled groups in inviolate personality must be recognised alongside individual privacy rights. Algorithmically grouped individuals have a collective interest in the creation of information about the group, and actions taken on its behalf. Group privacy is proposed as a third interest to balance alongside individual privacy and social, commercial and epistemic benefits when assessing the ethical acceptability of analytics platforms. (shrink)

This article presents the first, systematic analysis of the ethical challenges posed by recommender systems through a literature review. The article identifies six areas of concern, and maps them onto a proposed taxonomy of different kinds of ethical impact. The analysis uncovers a gap in the literature: currently user-centred approaches do not consider the interests of a variety of other stakeholders—as opposed to just the receivers of a recommendation—in assessing the ethical impacts of a recommender system.

In Pensare l’infosfera La filosofia come design concettuale, Luciano Floridi states the value of a correct analysis and philosophical responses within the information age we are living in. The aim of this paper is to suggest several ideas for reflecting on some of Floridi’s topics such as the analysis of presence, relationship and semantization. In the second paragraph, after a brief introduction about the author, I will analyse philosophical insights on the relationship between being and determination. In the third paragraph, (...) I am going to suggest the importance of a correct analysis of presence. In the fourth paragraph, a possible analogy between the philosophy of information and a certain form of neo-idealism will be shown. At last, I try to show how the philosophy of information can play a key role in the way we think about reality, but also its possible conceptual risks. (shrink)

I will analyse Floridi’s rejection of digital ontologies and his positive proposal for an informational structural realism. I intend to show that ISR is still fundamentally a digital ontology, albeit with some different metaphysical commitments to those that Floridi rejects. I will argue that even though Floridi deploys the method of levels of abstraction adapted from computer science, and has established a Kantian transcendentalist conception of both information and structure, ISR still reduces to a discretised binary, and therefore digital, ontology. (...) The digital ontologies that Floridi rejects are John Wheeler’s “It from Bit” conception and computational metaphysics. They’re rejected predominantly on the basis that they rely upon a false dichotomy between digital discrete and continuous metaphysics. ISR involves a Kantian transcendentalist conception of de re relations that is intended to avoid this false dichotomy. However, I’ll argue that the binary, discrete, digital component of digital ontology is retained in ISR, and therefore ISR is still a digital ontology since its conception of information reduces to binary discrete de re relations. As such, ISR comes down on one side of the rejected ontic dichotomy of digital metaphysics, and so an informational metaphysics that is not a digital ontology is still a promissory note in the philosophy of information. (shrink)

I will analyse Floridi’s rejection of digital ontologies and his positive proposal for an informational structural realism. I intend to show that ISR is still fundamentally a digital ontology, albeit with some different metaphysical commitments to those that Floridi rejects. I will argue that even though Floridi deploys the method of levels of abstraction adapted from computer science, and has established a Kantian transcendentalist conception of both information and structure, ISR still reduces to a discretised binary, and therefore digital, ontology. (...) The digital ontologies that Floridi rejects are John Wheeler’s “It from Bit” conception and computational metaphysics. They’re rejected predominantly on the basis that they rely upon a false dichotomy between digital discrete and continuous metaphysics. ISR involves a Kantian transcendentalist conception of de re relations that is intended to avoid this false dichotomy. However, I’ll argue that the binary, discrete, digital component of digital ontology is retained in ISR, and therefore ISR is still a digital ontology since its conception of information reduces to binary discrete de re relations. As such, ISR comes down on one side of the rejected ontic dichotomy of digital metaphysics, and so an informational metaphysics that is not a digital ontology is still a promissory note in the philosophy of information. (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? And (...) what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? (2) Are there emergent properties? (3) Are higher-level descriptions reducible to lower-level ones? (4) Can the relationship between normative and non-normative domains be viewed as one involving levels? Although I use the terminology of “levels”, the proposed framework can also represent “scales”, “domains”, or “subject matters”, where these are not linearly but only partially ordered by relations of supervenience or inclusion. (shrink)

Descriptive abstraction means omission of information from descriptions of phenomena. In this paper, I introduce a distinction between vertical and horizontal descriptive abstraction. Vertical abstracts away levels of mechanism or organization, while horizontal abstracts away details within one level of organization. The distinction is implicit in parts of the literature, but it has received insufficient attention and gone mainly unnoticed. I suggest that the distinction can be used to clarify how computational descriptions are formed in some variants of the mechanistic (...) account of physical computation. Furthermore, I suggest that, if this suggestion is adopted, it can be used to resolve what I call abstraction, hierarchy, and generality problems raised against mechanistic account of physical computation. According to the abstraction problem, the mechanistic account of physical computation is conceptually confused in claiming that physical systems process computational, abstract properties. An existing solution distinguishes between descriptive and metaphysical abstraction, suggesting that the abstraction problem unnecessarily postulates metaphysically abstract entities. The solution has been criticized for leading to what I call hierarchy and generality problems: it results in two separate hierarchies, one physical and one computational, making it problematic both to account for the generality of computational descriptions and to specify how the two hierarchies are related to each other. Adopting the vertical-horizontal distinction and the view that computational descriptions are achieved by horizontal abstraction allows one to account for the generality of computational descriptions, and to form a single hierarchy in which there are no separate hierarchies in need of integration. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to examine exceptionalisms in ethics in general and in the fields of animal and technology ethics in particular. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews five sample works in animal/technology ethics it considers representative for particularly popular forms of “exceptionalism”. Findings The shared feature of the exceptionalisms exhibited by the chosen samples appears to be born out of the cultural and biological history, which provides powerful intuitions regarding the on “specialness”. Research limitations/implications As this paper is mostly a critique (...) of existing approaches, it contains only a limited amount of counter-proposed alternative approaches. Practical implications This is a discussion worth having because arguments based on exceptionalism have more chance of resulting in significantly altered theoretical conclusions and practical suggestions for normative guidance than non-exceptionalist perspectives. Social implications The approaches critiqued in this paper have a significant effect on the way the authors approach animals, machines/technologies and each other. Originality/value The paper identifies intuitive notions of exceptionalism and argues in favour of a reformist, ethical expansionist stance, which views humanity as residing on the same plane of ethical significance as any other entity regardless of its material composition. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering means to provide a method to assess and improve our concepts working as cognitive devices. But conceptual engineering still lacks an account of what concepts are (as cognitive devices) and of what engineering is (in the case of cognition). And without such prior understanding of its subject matter, or so it is claimed here, conceptual engineering is bound to remain useless, merely operating as a piecemeal approach, with no overall grip on its target domain. The purpose of this (...) programmatic paper is to overcome this knowledge gap by providing some guidelines for developing the theories of concepts and of cognition that will ground the systematic unified framework needed to effectively implement conceptual engineering as a widely applicable method for the cognitive optimization of our conceptual devices. (shrink)

Recent technological innovation has made video doctoring increasingly accessible. This has given rise to Deepfake Pornography, an emerging phenomenon in which Deep Learning algorithms are used to superimpose a person’s face onto a pornographic video. Although to most people, Deepfake Pornography is intuitively unethical, it seems difficult to justify this intuition without simultaneously condemning other actions that we do not ordinarily find morally objectionable, such as sexual fantasies. In the present article, I refer to this contradiction as the pervert’s dilemma. (...) I propose that the method of Levels of Abstraction, a philosophical mode of enquiry inspired by Formal Methods in computer science, can be employed to formulate at least one possible solution to the dilemma. From this perspective, the permissibility of some actions appears to depend on the degree to which they are abstracted from their natural context. I conclude that the dilemma can only be solved when considered at low levels of abstractions, when Deepfakes are situated in the macro-context of gender inequality. (shrink)

The fast development of synthetic media, commonly known as deepfakes, has cast new light on an old problem, namely—to what extent do people have a moral claim to their likeness, including personally distinguishing features such as their voice or face? That people have at least some such claim seems uncontroversial. In fact, several jurisdictions already combat deepfakes by appealing to a “right to identity.” Yet, an individual’s disapproval of appearing in a piece of synthetic media is sensible only insofar as (...) the replication is successful. There has to be some form of identity between the content and the natural person. The question, therefore, is how this identity can be established. How can we know whether the face or voice featured in a piece of synthetic content belongs to a person who makes claim to it? On a trivial level, this may seem an easy task—the person in the video is A insofar as he or she is recognised as being A. Providing more rigorous criteria, however, poses a serious challenge. In this paper, I draw on Turing’s imitation game, and Floridi’s method of levels of abstraction, to propose a heuristic to this end. I call it the identification game. Using this heuristic, I show that identity cannot be established independently of the purpose of the inquiry. More specifically, I argue that whether a person has a moral claim to content that allegedly uses their identity depends on the type of harm under consideration. (shrink)

Bynum (Putting information first: Luciano Floridi and the philosophy of information. NY: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) identifies Floridi’s focus in the philosophy of information (PI) on entities both as data structures and as information objects. One suggestion for examining the association between the former and the latter stems from Floridi’s Herbert A. Simon Lecture in Computing and Philosophy given at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, open problems in the PI: the transduction or transception, and how we gain knowledge about the world as (...) a complex, living, information environment. This paper addresses PI across a model of interoperating levels: perception (P)—intuition (N)—computation (C)—information (I), as factored by cognitive continuity (1), temporality (2), and constitution (3). How might we begin to characterize our experience of an abstract information object across such a matrix? Chudnoff’s rationalist distinctions between perception and intuition serve as a first rung of the ladder. Turing’s brief references to the utility of intuition, in an allied, rationalist-Cartesian sense, provide the next step up to computation. Floridi provides the final link from computation to information. (shrink)

"The Rules" are found in a collaborative document that states principles for responsibility when a computer artifact is designed, developed and deployed into a sociotechnical system. At this writing, over 50 people from nine countries have signed onto The Rules. Unlike codes of ethics, The Rules are not tied to any organization, and computer users as well as computing professionals are invited to sign onto The Rules. The emphasis in The Rules is that both users and professionals have responsibilities in (...) the production and use of computing artifacts. In this paper, we use The Rules to examine issues of trust. (shrink)

As software developers design artificial agents , they often have to wrestle with complex issues, issues that have philosophical and ethical importance. This paper addresses two key questions at the intersection of philosophy and technology: What is deception? And when is it permissible for the developer of a computer artifact to be deceptive in the artifact’s development? While exploring these questions from the perspective of a software developer, we examine the relationship of deception and trust. Are developers using deception to (...) gain our trust? Is trust generated through technological “enchantment” warranted? Next, we investigate more complex questions of how deception that involves AAs differs from deception that only involves humans. Finally, we analyze the role and responsibility of developers in trust situations that involve both humans and AAs. (shrink)

This paper explores the problem of knowledge in computational informational organisms, i.e. organisms that include a computing machinery at the artifact side. Although information can be understood in many ways, from the second half of the past century information is getting more and more digitised, von Neumann machines becoming dominant. Computational information is a challenge for the act of measuring, as neither purely quantitative nor totally qualitative approaches satisfy the need to explain the interplay among the agents producing and managing (...) computational information. In this paper, Floridi’s method of levels of abstraction is applied to the analysis of computational information, with a chief interest in the concepts of information measure, quantification and quality. (shrink)

From the advent of general purpose, Turing-complete machines, the relation between operators, programmers and users with computers can be observed as interconnected informational organisms (inforgs), henceforth analysed with the method of levels of abstraction (LoAs), risen within the philosophy of information (PI). In this paper, the epistemological levellism proposed by L. Floridi in the PI to deal with LoAs will be formalised in constructive terms using category theory, so that information itself is treated as structure-preserving functions instead of Cartesian products. (...) The milestones in the history of modern computing are then analysed through constructive levellism to show how the growth of system complexity lead to more and more information hiding. (shrink)

Scientific research on consciousness is attempting to gather data about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. The basic procedure is to measure consciousness through first-person reports, measure the physical world and look for correlations between these sets of measurements. While this work has focused on neural correlates of consciousness, it has also been proposed that information states in the brain might be linked to consciousness. This paper uses Floridi’s distinction between dedomena, data and information to state this claim (...) more precisely and suggests that the best starting point for this work is the potential correlation between data patterns and consciousness. Floridi’s method of levels of abstraction is used to understand how data can be measured at different levels of abstraction in the brain and the paper examines a number of problems with this work, which could make it difficult to prove that data patterns are correlated with consciousness. (shrink)

There are many ways of understanding the nature of philosophical questions. One may consider their morphology, semantics, relevance, or scope. This article introduces a different approach, based on the kind of informational resources required to answer them. The result is a definition of philosophical questions as questions whose answers are in principle open to informed, rational, and honest disagreement, ultimate but not absolute, closed under further questioning, possibly constrained by empirical and logico-mathematical resources, but requiring noetic resources to be answered. (...) The article concludes with a discussion of some of the consequences of this definition for a conception of philosophy as the study (or “science”) of open questions, which uses conceptual design to analyse and answer them. (shrink)

In this article, I shall argue that AI’s likely developments and possible challenges are best understood if we interpret AI not as a marriage between some biological-like intelligence and engineered artefacts, but as a divorce between agency and intelligence, that is, the ability to solve problems successfully and the necessity of being intelligent in doing so. I shall then look at five developments: (1) the growing shift from logic to statistics, (2) the progressive adaptation of the environment to AI rather (...) than of AI to the environment, (3) the increasing translation of difficult problems into complex problems, (4) the tension between regulative and constitutive rules underpinning areas of AI application, and (5) the push for synthetic data. (shrink)

The paper develops some of the conclusions, reached in Floridi (2007), concerning the future developments of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their impact on our lives. The two main theses supported in that article were that, as the information society develops, the threshold between online and offline is becoming increasingly blurred, and that once there won't be any significant difference, we shall gradually re-conceptualise ourselves not as cyborgs but rather as inforgs, i.e. socially connected, informational organisms. In this paper, (...) I look at the development of the so-called Semantic Web and Web 2.0 from this perspective and try to forecast their future. Regarding the Semantic Web, I argue that it is a clear and well-defined project, which, despite some authoritative views to the contrary, is not a promising reality and will probably fail in the same way AI has failed in the past. Regarding Web 2.0, I argue that, although it is a rather ill-defined project, which lacks a clear explanation of its nature and scope, it does have the potentiality of becoming a success (and indeed it is already, as part of the new phenomenon of Cloud Computing) because it leverages the only semantic engines available so far in nature, us. I conclude by suggesting what other changes might be expected in the future of our digital environment. (shrink)

Three classic distinctions specify that truths can be necessary versus contingent,analytic versus synthetic, and a priori versus a posteriori. The philosopher reading this article knows very well both how useful and ordinary such distinctions are in our conceptual work and that they have been subject to many and detailed debates, especially the last two. In the following pages, I do not wish to discuss how far they may be tenable. I shall assume that, if they are reasonable and non problematic (...) in some ordinary cases, then they can be used in order to understand what kind of knowledge the maker’s knowledge is. By this I mean the sort of knowledge that Alice enjoys when she holds the information that Bob’s coffee is sweetened because she just put two spoons of sugar in it herself. The maker’s knowledge tradition is quite important but it is not mainstream in modern and analytic epistemology and lacks grounding in terms of exactly what sort of knowledge one is talking about. My suggestion is that this grounding can be provided by a minimalist approach, based on an information-theoretical analysis. In the article, I argue that we need to decouple a fourth distinction, namely informative versus uninformative, from the previous three and, in particular, from its implicit association with analytic versus synthetic and a priori versus a posteriori; such a decoupling facilitates, and is facilitated by, moving from a monoagent to a multiagent approach: the distinctions qualify a proposition, a message, or some information not just in themselves but relationally, with respect to an informational agent; the decoupling and the multiagent approach enable a re-mapping of currently available positions in epistemology on these four dichotomies; within such a re-mapping, two positions, capturing the nature of a witness’ knowledge and of a maker’s knowledge, can best be described as contingent, synthetic, a posteriori, and uninformative and as contingent, synthetic, weakly a priori, and uninformative respectively. In the conclusion, I indicate why the analysis of the maker’s knowledge has important consequences in all those cases in which the poietic intervention on a system determines the truth of the model of that system. (shrink)

The article contains the replies to the collection of contributions discussing my research on the philosophy of information.

In this paper, I present an informational approach to the nature of personal identity. In “Plato and the problem of the chariot”, I use Plato’s famous metaphor of the chariot to introduce a specific problem regarding the nature of the self as an informational multiagent system: what keeps the self together as a whole and coherent unity? In “Egology and its two branches” and “Egology as synchronic individualisation”, I outline two branches of the theory of the self: one concerning the (...) individualisation of the self as an entity, the other concerning the identification of such entity. I argue that both presuppose an informational approach, defend the view that the individualisation of the self is logically prior to its identification , and suggest that such individualisation can be provided in informational terms. Hence, in “A reconciling hypothesis: the three membranes model”, I offer an informational individualisation of the self, based on a tripartite model, which can help to solve the problem of the chariot. Once this model of the self is outlined, in “ICTs as technologies of the self” I use it to show how ICTs may be interpreted as technologies of the self. In “The logic of realisation”, I introduce the concept of “realization” (Aristotle’s anagnorisis ) and support the rather Spinozian view according to which, from the perspective of informational structural realism, selves are the final stage in the development of informational structures. The final “Conclusion: from the egology to the ecology of the self” briefly concludes the article with a reference to the purposeful shaping of the self, in a shift from egology to ecology. (shrink)

In this article, I outline a logic of design of a system as a specific kind of conceptual logic of the design of the model of a system, that is, the blueprint that provides information about the system to be created. In section two, I introduce the method of levels of abstraction as a modelling tool borrowed from computer science. In section three, I use this method to clarify two main conceptual logics of information inherited from modernity: Kant’s transcendental logic (...) of conditions of possibility of a system, and Hegel’s dialectical logic of conditions of in/stability of a system. Both conceptual logics of information analyse structural properties of given systems. Strictly speaking, neither is a conceptual logic of information about the conditions of feasibility of a system, that is, neither is a logic of information as a logic of design. So, in section four, I outline this third conceptual logic of information and then interpret the conceptual logic of design as a logic of requirements, by introducing the relation of “sufficientisation”. In the conclusion, I argue that the logic of requirements is exactly what we need in order to make sense of, and buttress, a constructionist approach to knowledge. (shrink)

One of the pressing challenges we face today—in a post-Westphalian order and post-Bretton Woods world —is how to design the right kind of MAS that can take full advantage of the socio-economic and political progress made so far, while dealing successfully with the new global challenges that are undermining the best legacy of that very progress. This is the topic of the article. In it, I argue that in order to design the right kind of MAS, we need to design (...) the right kind of norms that constitute them; in order to design the right kind of constitutive norms, we need to identify and adopt the right kind of principles of normative design; toleration is one of those principles; unfortunately, its role as a foundation for the design of norms has been undermined by the “paradox of toleration”; however, the paradox can be solved; so toleration can be re-instated as the right kind of foundational principle for the design of the right kind of norms that can constitute the right kind of MAS that can operate across cultures, societies and states, to help us to tackle the new global challenges facing us. (shrink)

Semantic information is usually supposed to satisfy the veridicality thesis: p qualifies as semantic information only if p is true. However, what it means for semantic information to be true is often left implicit, with correspondentist interpretations representing the most popular, default option. The article develops an alternative approach, namely a correctness theory of truth (CTT) for semantic information. This is meant as a contribution not only to the philosophy of information but also to the philosophical debate on the nature (...) of truth. After the introduction, in Sect. 2, semantic information is shown to be translatable into propositional semantic information (i). In Sect. 3, i is polarised into a query (Q) and a result (R), qualified by a specific context, a level of abstraction and a purpose. This polarization is normalised in Sect. 4, where [Q + R] is transformed into a Boolean question and its relative yes/no answer [Q + A]. This completes the reduction of the truth of i to the correctness of A. In Sects. 5 and 6, it is argued that (1) A is the correct answer to Q if and only if (2) A correctly saturates Q by verifying and validating it (in the computer science’s sense of verification and validation ); that (2) is the case if and only if (3) [Q + A] generates an adequate model (m) of the relevant system (s) identified by Q; that (3) is the case if and only if (4) m is a proxy of s (in the computer science’s sense of proxy ) and (5) proximal access to m commutes with the distal access to s (in the category theory’s sense of commutation ); and that (5) is the case if and only if (6) reading/writing (accessing, in the computer science’s technical sense of the term) m enables one to read/write (access) s. Sect. 7 provides some further clarifications about CTT, in the light of semantic paradoxes. Section 8 draws a general conclusion about the nature of CTT as a theory for systems designers not just systems users. In the course of the article all technical expressions from computer science are explained. (shrink)

In previous works, I defined ourselves as informational organisms, or inforgs for short, who forage for, produce, cultivate, curate, process, and consume information (Floridi 2013). Yet, we may also be understood as interfaces, who inhabit and interact with, an environment also made up of data and computational processes. By describing ourselves in such terms, this paper argues that we can better understand several crucial phenomena that characterise our digital age, including marketing and the “marketisation” of political communication. The article concludes (...) by discussing some of the implications for this in political theory. -/- . (shrink)

Information, and information and communication technologies (ICTs) are critical for most developed post-industrial societies. It follows, therefore, that the better the quality of the information exchanged, the more likely such societies and their members may prosper. But what is information quality (IQ) exactly? This paper discusses current definitions, problems and approaches to IQ and the question of how we should, and could, evaluate IQ in the future.

In this article, I define and then defend the principle of information closure (pic) against a sceptical objection similar to the one discussed by Dretske in relation to the principle of epistemic closure. If I am successful, given that pic is equivalent to the axiom of distribution and that the latter is one of the conditions that discriminate between normal and non-normal modal logics, a main result of such a defence is that one potentially good reason to look for a (...) formalization of the logic of “ $S$ is informed that $p$ ” among the non-normal modal logics, which reject the axiom, is also removed. This is not to argue that the logic of “ $S$ is informed that $p$ ” should be a normal modal logic, but that it could still be insofar as the objection that it could not be, based on the sceptical objection against pic, has been removed. In other word, I shall argue that the sceptical objection against pic fails, so such an objection provides no ground to abandon the normal modal logic B (also known as KTB) as a formalization of “ $S$ is informed that $p$ ”, which remains plausible insofar as this specific obstacle is concerned. (shrink)

The phenomenon of distributed knowledge is well-known in epistemic logic. In this paper, a similar phenomenon in ethics, somewhat neglected so far, is investigated, namely distributed morality. The article explains the nature of distributed morality, as a feature of moral agency, and explores the implications of its occurrence in advanced information societies. In the course of the analysis, the concept of infraethics is introduced, in order to refer to the ensemble of moral enablers, which, although morally neutral per se, can (...) significantly facilitate or hinder both positive and negative moral behaviours. (shrink)

Contemporary science seems to be caught in a strange predicament. On the one hand, it holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology, according to which explanations of natural phenomena should never overstep the limits of the natural itself. On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication Technologies, which it exploits as well as fosters. Yet such technologies are increasingly “artificialising” or “denaturalising” the (...) world, human experiences and interactions, as well as what qualifies as real. So the search for the ultimate explanation of the natural seems to rely upon, and promote, the development of the artificial, seen here as an instantiation of the non-natural. In this article, I would like to try and find a way out of this apparently strange predicament. I shall argue that the naturalisation of our knowledge of the world is either philosophically trivial, or mistaken. First, I shall distinguish between different kinds of naturalism. Second, I shall remind the reader that the kinds of naturalism that are justified today need to be protected and supported pragmatically, but they are no longer very interesting conceptually. We know how to win the argument. We just have to keep winning it. Whereas the kind of naturalism that is still interesting today is now in need of revision in order to remain acceptable. Such a kind of naturalism may be revised on the basis of a realistic philosophy of information, according to which knowing is a constructive activity, through which we do not merely represent the phenomena we investigate passively, but create more or less correct informational models of them, proactively and interactively. I shall conclude that the natural is in itself artefactual, and that the information revolution is disclosing a tension not between the natural and the non-natural, but a deeper one between a user’s and a producer’s interpretation of knowledge. The outcome is a philosophical view of knowledge and science in the information age that may be called constructionist and a revival of philosophy as a classic, foundationalist enterprise. (shrink)

This article offers an account and defence of constructionism, both as a metaphilosophical approach and as a philosophical methodology, with references to the so-called maker's knowledge tradition. Its main thesis is that Plato's “user's knowledge” tradition should be complemented, if not replaced, by a constructionist approach to philosophical problems in general and to knowledge in particular. Epistemic agents know something when they are able to build (reproduce, simulate, model, construct, etc.) that something and plug the obtained information into the correct (...) network of relations that account for it. Their epistemic expertise increases with the scope and depth of the questions that they are able to ask and answer. Thus, constructionism deprioritises mimetic, passive, and declarative knowledge that something is the case, in favour of poietic, interactive, and practical knowledge of something being the case. Metaphilosophically, constructionism suggests adding conceptual engineering to conceptual analysis as a fundamental method. (shrink)

A socio-cognitive approach to trust can help us envisage a notion of networked trust for multi-agent systems (MAS) based on different interacting agents. In this framework, the issue is to evaluate whether or not a socio-cognitive analysis of trust can apply to the interactions between human and autonomous agents. Two main arguments support two alternative hypothesis; one suggests that only reliance applies to artificial agents, because predictability of agents’ digital interaction is viewed as an absolute value and human relation is (...) judged to be a necessary requirement for trust. The other suggests that trust may apply to autonomous agents because predictability of agents’ interaction is viewed only as a relative value since the digital normativity that grows out of the communication process between interacting agents in MAS has always deal with some unpredictable outcomes (_reduction of uncertainty_). Furthermore, human touch is not judged to be a necessary requirement for trust. In this perspective, a diverse notion of trust is elaborated, as trust is no longer conceived only as a relation between interacting agents but, rather, as a relation between cognitive states of control and lack of control (_double bind_). (shrink)

In my paper I will focus my attention on some philosophical aspects of the Information Ethics displayed by Luciano Floridi. Floridi’s Information Ethics has the methodological merit of providing the interpretation of the Informational Turn with a solid philosophical basis, the roots of which deserve a careful investigation. In this perspective, I will analyse a key question, which is essential not only from a theoretical but also from a practical (moral, political and legal) point of view, i.e. whether or not (...) Floridi’s construction of information is consistent with a pluralistic conception of Being. (shrink)

In my paper I will focus my attention on some philosophical aspects of the Information Ethics displayed by Luciano Floridi. Floridi’s Information Ethics has the methodological merit of providing the interpretation of the Informational Turn with a solid philosophical basis, the roots of which deserve a careful investigation. In this perspective, I will analyse a key question, which is essential not only from a theoretical but also from a practical point of view, i.e. whether or not Floridi’s construction of information (...) is consistent with a pluralistic conception of Being. (shrink)

The paper examines how the current evolution and growth of ICTs enables a greater number of individuals to communicate and interact with each other on a larger scale: this phenomenon enables people to cross the conventional boundaries set up across modernity. The presence of diverse barriers does not however disappear, and we therefore still experience cultural, political, legal and moral boundaries in the globalised Information Society. The paper suggests that the issue of boundaries is to be understood, primarily, in philosophical (...) terms, in order to explain in what sense the fundamental historicity and situatedness of human beings does not necessarily prevent them from being able to cross the boundaries of their own experiences and to communicate with other human beings. Our line of reasoning is based on the idea that the epistemic and moral subject is neither a pure universal subject always transcending the limits of its experience nor the mere product of the context in which it find itself embedded. By virtue of its continued existence and experience of any given context, the epistemic and moral subject is asked to respond to the constraining affordances of data and to account for the moral calls of the other. This intertwinement of responsiveness and accountability towards what is "over there" confers us an original understanding of what is "here". (shrink)

This expository paper presents a general framework for representing levels and inter-level relations. The framework is intended to capture both epistemic and ontological notions of levels and to clarify the sense in which levels of explanation might or might not be related to a levelled ontology. The framework also allows us to study and compare different kinds of inter-level relations, especially supervenience and reduction but also grounding and mereological constitution. This, in turn, enables us to explore questions such as whether (...) supervenience implies explanatory reducibility and whether there can be irreducible higher-level explanations or even “emergent” higher-level properties. The paper finally discusses some further philosophical applications: to the free-will debate, the determinism-indeterminism distinction, indexicality and consciousness, and the relationship between positive and normative facts. (shrink)

This paper is intended to sketch the definition of a methodological tool -- the notion of a format of representation -- for the study of scientific theorising. One of its main assumption is that a philosophical study of theorising needs to pay attention to other types of units of analysis than the traditional ones, namely, theories and models approached in a logical and structural way, since scientific reasoning is always led on concrete representational devices and depends upon their specific properties. (...) The notion of a format is intended to characterise the differences between various types of representational devices, in terms of the inferences they enable cognitive agents to draw. (shrink)