My dissertation explores the ways in which Rudolf Carnap sought to make philosophy scientific by further developing recent interpretive efforts to explain Carnap’s mature philosophical work as a form of engineering. It does this by looking in detail at his philosophical practice in his most sustained mature project, his work on pure and applied inductive logic. I, first, specify the sort of engineering Carnap is engaged in as involving an engineering design problem and then draw out the complications of design (...) problems from current work in history of engineering and technology studies. I then model Carnap’s practice based on those lessons and uncover ways in which Carnap’s technical work in inductive logic takes some of these lessons on board. This shows ways in which Carnap’s philosophical project subtly changes right through his late work on induction, providing an important corrective to interpretations that ignore the work on inductive logic. Specifically, I show that paying attention to the historical details of Carnap’s attempt to apply his work in inductive logic to decision theory and theoretical statistics in the 1950s and 1960s helps us understand how Carnap develops and rearticulates the philosophical point of the practical/theoretical distinction in his late work, offering thus a new interpretation of Carnap’s technical work within the broader context of philosophy of science and analytical philosophy in general. (shrink)

The basic problem of a theory of truth approximation is defining when a theory is “close to the truth” about some relevant domain. Existing accounts of truthlikeness or verisimilitude address this problem, but are usually limited to the problem of approaching a “deterministic” truth by means of deterministic theories. A general theory of truth approximation, however, should arguably cover also cases where either the relevant theories, or “the truth”, or both, are “probabilistic” in nature. As a step forward in this (...) direction, we first present a general characterization of both deterministic and probabilistic truth approximation; then, we introduce a new account of verisimilitude which provides a simple formal framework to deal with such issue in a unified way. The connections of our account with some other proposals in the literature are also briefly discussed. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In 1948 Hempel and Oppenheim proposed an explicatum for the concept of systematic power 1, pp. 164–167. Since that time some shortcomings have been found in this first attempt. It is the purpose of this paper to show that one can keep the basic approach of the ‘48 paper, and overcome the known disadvantages by means of changes in the details of the definition. In this improvement certain tools will be used that were not available in 1948.

This paper contrasts two information-theoretic approaches to statistical explanation: namely, (1) an analysis, which originated in my earlier research on problems of testing stochastic models of learning, based on an entropy-like measure of expected transmitted-information (and here referred to as the Expected-Information Model), and (2) the analysis, which was proposed by James Greeno (and which is closely related to Wesley Salmon's Statistical Relevance Model), based on the information-transmitted-by-a-system. The substantial differences between these analyses can be traced to the following basic (...) difference. On Greeno's view, the essence of explanation lies in the relevance relations expressed by the conditional probabilities that relate the explanans variables to the explanandum variables; on my view, in contrast, the essence of explanation lies in theories viewed as hypothetical structures which deductively entail conditional probability distributions linking the explanans variables and the explanandum variables. The explanatory power of a stochastic theory is identified with information (regarding the values of explanandum variables) which is "absorbed from" the explanans variables. While other information which is "absorbed from" the explanandum variables (through the process of parameter estimation, for example) reflects descriptive power of the theory. I prove that Greeno's measure of transmitted information is a limiting special case of the E-I model, but that the former, unlike the latter, makes no distinction between explanatory power and descriptive power. (shrink)

If the currently available theories of semantic information and utility-expectation are to be applied in a satisfactory way, they must be combined with a message-processing procedure. This paper presents a model of communication within which such a procedure can be defined. In this model the sender's messages arrive over a period of time, the receiver can reject some messages and retain others, the receiver can change his mind in various ways, and the receiver can apply various evaluation functions to a (...) "usable message total". As one example of message-evaluation, a system for evaluating news-value is presented. (shrink)

This paper examines problems of order and periodicity which arise when the attempt is made to define a confirmation function for a language containing elementary number theory as applied to a universe in which the individuals are considered to be arranged in some fixed order. Certain plausible conditions of adequacy are stated for such a confirmation function. By the construction of certain types of predicates, it is proved, however, that these conditions of adequacy are violated by any confirmation function defined (...) for the type of language in question. Various possible solutions to these difficulties are explored and found to be inadequate. In particular, a proposal which stems from the suggestion to restrict a fundamental principle of confirmation to hypotheses containing only non-positional predicates is cited. This proposal, however, is shown to prevent confirmation functions from taking periodicities into account, and so is deemed unsatisfactory. A general theorem is proved to the effect that if non-positional predicates are taken to satisfy the conditions of adequacy which have been formulated, then no periodicity predicates whatsoever (i.e., predicates used in formulating hypotheses which foretell periodicities) can be subject to these conditions, on pain of contradiction. Yet it seems that periodicity predicates must be subject to these conditions of adequacy if a confirmation function is to recognize periodic occurrences. Thus, an impasse seems to be reached. In the final sections we consider the beginnings of one possible solution to these difficulties. Our proposal involves treating sets of individuals, rather than individuals themselves, as instances of an hypothesis which predicts a periodicity. On this basis we formulate new conditions of adequacy which are free from the previous difficulties and which will permit a confirmation function that satisfies them to take periodicities into account. (shrink)

Informational semantics were first developed as an interpretation of the model-theory of substructural (and especially relevant) logics. In this paper we argue that such a semantics is of independent value and that it should be considered as a genuine alternative explication of the notion of logical consequence alongside the traditional model-theoretical and the proof-theoretical accounts. Our starting point is the content-nonexpansion platitude which stipulates that an argument is valid iff the content of the conclusion does not exceed the combined content (...) of the premises. We show that this basic platitude can be used to characterise the extension of classical as well as non-classical consequence relations. The distinctive trait of an informational semantics is that truth-conditions are replaced by information-conditions. The latter leads to an inversion of the usual order of explanation: Considerations about logical discrimination (how finely propositions are individuated) are conceptually prior to considerations about deductive strength. Because this allows us to bypass considerations about truth, an informational semantics provides an attractive and metaphysically unencumbered account of logical consequence, non-classical logics, logical rivalry and pluralism about logical consequence. (shrink)

Several logical puzzles, riddles and problems are defined based on the notion of games in informative contexts. Hintikka argues that epistemology or the theory of knowledge must be considered from the notion of information. So, knowledge cannot just be based on the notions of belief and justification. The present proposal will focus on the logical structure of information, and not only on the quantification of information as suggested by Claude A. Shannon. In many cases, the information bits, although seemingly or (...) factually contradictory, are quite relevant. The paraconsistent systems of logic offer a formalization of reasoning that can support certain contradictions. The well-known “Bar-Hillel–Carnap Paradox” causes embarrassment when it concludes that the informational content of a contradiction would be maximum, opposing the traditional notion that the semantic information must be true, and that contradictions are necessarily false. (shrink)

I present two measures of information for both consistentand inconsistent sets of sentences in a finite language ofpropositional logic. The measures of information are based onmeasures of inconsistency developed in Knight (2002).Relative information measures are then provided corresponding to thetwo information measures.

The study of information based on the approach of Shannon was detached from problems of meaning. Also, it did not allow analysis of the structural characteristics of information, nor describe the way structures carry information. An outline of a different theory of information, including its semantics, was earlier proposed by the author. This theory was using closure spaces to model information. In the present paper, structures (called syllogistics) underlying syllogistic reasoning as well as ethnoscientific classifications are identified together with the (...) conditions for the lattice of closed subsets describing information to allow its existence. The structures can be used for logical analysis outside of language at the more general level of information, which in turn can be applied to the description of semantic relations in the context of information. (shrink)