TY - JOUR T1 - On defining library and information science as applied philosophy of information Y1 - 2002 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

This paper analyses the relations between philosophy of information (PI), library and information science (LIS) and social epistemology (SE). In the Žfirst section, it is argued that there is a natural relation between philosophy and LIS but that SE cannot provide a satisfactory foundation for LIS. SE should rather be seen as sharing with LIS a common ground, represented by the study of information, to be investigated by a new discipline, PI. In the second section, the nature of PI is outlined as the philosophical area that studies the conceptual nature of information, its dynamics and problems. In the third section, LIS is deŽ ned as a form of applied PI. The hypothesis supported is that PI should replace SE as the philosophical discipline that can best provide the conceptual foundation for LIS. In the conclusion, it is suggested that the ‘identity’ crisis undergone by LIS has been the natural outcome of a justiŽ ed but precocious search for a philosophical counterpart that has emerged only recently: namely, PI. The development of LIS should not rely on some borrowed, pre-packaged theory. As applied PI, LIS can fruitfully contribute to the growth of basic theoretical research in PI itself and thus provide its own foundation.

PB - Routledge UR - http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/publications/pdf/isaspi.pdf IS - Social Epistemology ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Semantic Capital: Its Nature, Value, and Curation Y1 - 2018 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

Uit de conclusie: 

[Semantic capital is defined] as any content understood as well-formed and meaningful data that can enhance someone’s power to semanticise something. Clearly, given its data-based nature, the management of semantic capital has always depended on information technologies, from the invention of the alphabet (recording), to Gutenberg(dissemination), to the computer revolution (manipulation). Each stage in our technological development has generated new opportunities and new challenges. Digital technologies are not an exception. They both exacerbate the risks, outlined in the previous section, and offer new forms of availability, accessibility, utilisation, and capitalisation of semantic capital. Just think of the debate on fakenews on the one hand, and the consumption of digital photographs on theother. All this may be complicated in detail but rather obvious as a general trend. What may be worth highlighting are rather two factors that will deserve an independent discussion. On the one hand, digital technologies provide an increasing reservoir of smart agency (Artificial Intelligence) that could support us in the fruitful management of our semantic capital. I am not referring just to curation think of all the bots used to edit Wikipedia entries (Tsvetkova et al.2017) - but, more importantly, to the possibility of augmenting our abilities to take advantage of the wealth of semantic capital already available, to use it and enrich it more effectively and efficiently, and hence semanticise our lives and realities better. On the other hand, the digital itself is generating new forms of semantic capital that would have been otherwise impossible, in terms of experiences, new cultural forms, scientific progress, games, music, images, fashions, and so forth. Semantic capital is no longer just analog, it is also increasingly digital, and may not be generated solely by human agents. Our digital semantic capital is beginning to make a difference in our semanticising processes as well. Think of what it means today to search for some information, the expectations about the availability of an answer to any question, or the meaning of authenticity when discussing Deepfakes (Floridi 2018). How the shift from an analog to an increasingly digital semantic capital going to affect our semanticisation of our own identities, our lives and our realities is still to be understood. It may take a while before this becomes sufficiently macroscopic to be properly assessed. But that this is happening and that it will become a progressively significant  phenomenon is indubitable. We should pay much more attention to it.

PB - Springer Netherlands VL - Philosophy & Technology UR - https://www.academia.edu/37896750/Semantic_Capital_Its_Nature_Value_and_Curation N1 -

Semantic Capital is any content that can enhance someone’s power to give meaning to and make sense of (semanticise) something.

So one could say that archives are semantic capital.

ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Afterword; LIS as Applied Philosophy of Information: A Reappraisal Y1 - 2004 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

Library information science (LIS) should develop its foundation in terms of a philosophy of information (PI). This seems a rather harmless suggestion. Where else could information science look for its conceptual foundations if not in PI? However, accepting this proposal means moving away from one of the few solid alternatives currently available in the field, namely providing LIS with a foundation in terms of social epistemology (SE). This is no trivial move, so some reasonable reluctance is to be expected. To overcome it, the proposal needs to be more than just acceptable; it must be convincing.

UR - http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/publications/pdf/lapir.pdf IS - Library Trends ER - TY - JOUR T1 - What is a philosophical question? Y1 - 2013 A1 - Luciano Floridi KW - conceptualiseren KW - informatiefilosofie KW - level of abstraction AB -

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.

PB - Blackwell Publishing Ltd CY - Oxford VL - 44 UR - https://www.academia.edu/9352257/What_is_a_philosophical_question IS - Metaphilosophy ER - TY - BOOK T1 - The Logic of Information T2 - A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design Y1 - 2019 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

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.

JF - A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford SN - 9780198833635 UR - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-logic-of-information-9780198833635?cc=nl&lang=en&# ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Against digital ontology Y1 - 2009 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

The paper argues that digital ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is digital, and the universe is a computational system equivalent to a Turing Machine) should be carefully distinguished from informational ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is structural), in order to abandon the former and retain only the latter as a promising line of research. Digital vs. analogue is a Boolean dichotomy typical of our computational paradigm, but digital and analogue are only "modes of presentation" of Being (to paraphrase Kant), that is, ways in which reality is experienced or conceptualised by an epistemic agent at a given level of abstraction. A preferable alternative is provided by an informational approach to structural realism, according to which knowledge of the world is knowledge of its structures. The most reasonable ontological commitment turns out to be in favour of an interpretation of reality as the totality of structures dynamically interacting with each other. The paper is the first part (the pars destruens) of a two-part piece of research. The pars construens, entitled "A Defence of Informational Structural Realism", is developed in a separate article, also published in this journal.

PB - Springer UR - http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/376/art%253A10.1007%252Fs11229-008-9334-6.pdf?auth66=1405628981_4b0eb470db472e42f3750f85b9923dcd&ext=.pdf IS - Synthese ER - TY - BOOK T1 - Information: A Very Short Introduction Y1 - 2010 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

Explores a concept central to modern science and society, from thermodynamics and DNA to our use of the mobile phone and the Internet
- Considers concepts such as 'Infoglut' (too much information to process) and the emergence of an information society
- Addresses the meaning and value of information in science, sociology, and philosophy
- Raises the broader social and ethical issues relating to privacy, accessibility, and ownership of information

We live an information-soaked existence - information pours into our lives through television, radio, books, and of course, the Internet. Some say we suffer from 'infoglut'. But what is information? The concept of 'information' is a profound one, rooted in mathematics, central to whole branches of science, yet with implications on every aspect of our everyday lives: DNA provides the information to create us; we learn through the information fed to us; we relate to each other through information transfer - gossip, lectures, reading. Information is not only a mathematically powerful concept, but its critical role in society raises wider ethical issues: who owns information? Who controls its dissemination? Who has access to information?

Luciano Floridi, a philosopher of information, cuts across many subjects, from a brief look at the mathematical roots of information - its definition and measurement in 'bits'- to its role in genetics (we are information), and its social meaning and value. He ends by considering the ethics of information, including issues of ownership, privacy, and accessibility; copyright and open source.

For those unfamiliar with its precise meaning and wide applicability as a philosophical concept, 'information' may seem a bland or mundane topic. Those who have studied some science or philosophy or sociology will already be aware of its centrality and richness. But for all readers, whether from the humanities or sciences, Floridi gives a fascinating and inspirational introduction to this most fundamental of ideas.

PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford SN - 978-0-19-955137-8 UR - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/information-a-very-short-introduction-9780199551378?q=Information:%20A%20Very%20Short%20Introduction&lang=en&cc=nl# N1 -

Explores a concept central to modern science and society, from thermodynamics and DNA to our use of the mobile phone and the Internet
- Considers concepts such as 'Infoglut' (too much information to process) and the emergence of an information society
- Addresses the meaning and value of information in science, sociology, and philosophy
- Raises the broader social and ethical issues relating to privacy, accessibility, and ownership of information

ER - TY - JOUR T1 - On Human Dignity as a Foundation for the Right to Privacy Y1 - 2016 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

The protection of privacy should be based directly on the protection of human dignity, not indirectly, through other rights such as that to property or to freedom of expression. In other words, privacy should be grafted as a first-order branch to the trunk of human dignity, not to some of its branches, as if it were a second-order right.

PB - Springer Science+Business Media CY - Dordrecht UR - https://www.academia.edu/24779182/On_Human_Dignity_as_a_Foundation_for_the_Right_to_Privacy?auto=download IS - Philosophy & Technology ER - TY - JOUR T1 - A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society JF - Harvard Data Science Review Y1 - 2019 A1 - Luciano Floridi A1 - Josh Cowls AB -

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already having a major impact on society. As a result, many organizations have launched a wide range of initiatives to establish ethical principles for the adoption of socially beneficial AI. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of proposed principles threatens to overwhelm and confuse. How might this problem of ‘principle proliferation’ be solved? In this paper, we report the results of a fine-grained analysis of several of the highest-profile sets of ethical principles for AI. We assess whether these principles converge upon a set of agreed-upon principles, or diverge, with significant disagreement over what constitutes ‘ethical AI.’ Our analysis finds a high degree of overlap among the sets of principles we analyze. We then identify an overarching framework consisting of five core principles for ethical AI. Four of them are core principles commonly used in bioethics: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. On the basis of our comparative analysis, we argue that a new principle is needed in addition: explicability, understood as incorporating both the epistemological sense of intelligibility (as an answer to the question ‘how does it work?’) and in the ethical sense of accountability (as an answer to the question: ‘who is responsible for the way it works?’). In the ensuing discussion, we note the limitations and assess the implications of this ethical framework for future efforts to create laws, rules, technical standards, and best practices for ethical AI in a wide range of contexts.

VL - 1 UR - https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/l0jsh9d1 N1 -

Er staan een vijftal elementen centraal

ER - TY - JOUR T1 - On the intrinsic value of information objects and the infosphere JF - - Y1 - 2002 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

What is the most general common set of attributes that characterises something as intrinsically valuable and hence as subject to some moral respect, and without which something would rightly be considered intrinsically worthless or even positively unworthy and therefore rightly to be disrespected in itself? This paper develops and supports the thesis that the minimal condition of possibility of an entity’s least intrinsic value is to be identified with its ontological status as an information object. All entities, even when interpreted as only clusters of information, still have a minimal moral worth qua information objects and so may deserve to be respected.
The paper is organised into four main sections.

Section 1 models moral action as an information system using the object-oriented programming methodology (OOP).

Section 2 addresses the question of what role the several components constituting the moral system can have in an ethical analysis. If they can play only an instrumental role, then Computer Ethics (CE) is probably bound to remain at most a practical, field dependent, applied or professional ethics. However, Computer Ethics can give rise to a macroethical approach, namely Information Ethics (IE), if one can show that ethical concern should be extended to include not only human, animal or biological entities, but also information objects. The following two sections show how this minimalist level of analysis can be achieved.

Section 3 provides an axiological analysis of information objects. It criticises the Kantian approach to the concept of intrinsic value and shows that it can be improved by using the methodology introduced in the first section. The solution of the Kantian problem prompts the reformulation of the key question concerning the moral worth of an entity: what is the intrinsic value of x qua an object constituted by its inherited attributes? In answering this question, it is argued that entities can share different observable properties depending on the level of abstraction adopted, and that it is still possible to speak of moral value even at the highest level of ontological abstraction represented by the informational analysis.

Section 4 develops a minimalist axiology based on the concept of information object. It further supports IE’s position by addressing five objections that may undermine its acceptability.

PB - 54 UR - http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/publications/pdf/oivioi.pdf IS - Ethics and Information Technology ER - TY - BOOK T1 - The Fourth Revolution; How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality Y1 - 2014 A1 - Luciano Floridi KW - digital turn KW - digitale wende KW - hyperhistory KW - informatiefilosofie KW - onlife AB -

Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues that the explosive developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is changing the answer to these fundamental human questions.

As the boundaries between life online and offline break down, and we become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects, we are all becoming integrated into an "infosphere". Personas we adopt in social media, for example, feed into our 'real' lives so that we begin to live, as Floridi puts in, "onlife". Following those led by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, this metaphysical shift represents nothing less than a fourth revolution.

"Onlife" defines more and more of our daily activity - the way we shop, work, learn, care for our health, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships; the way we interact with the worlds of law, finance, and politics; even the way we conduct war. In every department of life, ICTs have become environmental forces which are creating and transforming our realities. How can we ensure that we shall reap their benefits? What are the implicit risks? Are our technologies going to enable and empower us, or constrain us? Floridi argues that we must expand our ecological and ethical approach to cover both natural and man-made realities, putting the 'e' in an environmentalism that can deal successfully with the new challenges posed by our digital technologies and information society.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of figures
1: Hyperhistory
2: Space: Infosphere
3: Identity: Onlife
4: Self-Understanding: The Four Revolutions
5: Privacy: Informational Friction
6: Intelligence: Inscribing the World
7: Agency: Enveloping the World
8: Politics: The Rise of the Multi-Agent System
9: Environment: The Digital Gambit
10: Ethics: E-nvironmentalism
Further Reading
References
Endnotes
Index

PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford SN - 978-0-19-960672-6 UR - http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199606726.do ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Is Semantic Information Meaningful Data? Y1 - 2005 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

There is no consensus yet on the definition of semantic information. This paper contributes to the current debate by criticising and revising the Standard Definition of semantic Information (SDI) as meaningful data, in favour of the Dretske-Grice approach: meaningful and well-formed data constitute semantic information only if they also qualify as contingently truthful. After a brief introduction, SDI is criticised for providing necessary but insufficient conditions for the definition of semantic information. SDI is incorrect because truth-values do not supervene on semantic information, and misinformation (that is, false semantic information) is not a type of semantic information, but pseudo-information, that is not semantic information at all. This is shown by arguing that none of the reasons for interpreting misinformation as a type of semantic information is convincing, whilst there are compelling reasons to treat it as pseudo-information. As a consequence, SDI is revised to include a necessary truth-condition. The last section summarises the main results of the paper and indicates some interesting areas of application of the revised definition.

VL - Vol. LXX, no. 2 UR - https://www.academia.edu/3491629/Is_Information_Meaningful_Data IS - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research ER - TY - JOUR T1 - What is data ethics? Y1 - 2016 A1 - Luciano Floridi A1 - Mariarosaria Taddeo AB -

This theme issue has the founding ambition of landscaping data ethics as a new branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing and use), algorithms (including artificial intelligence, artificial agents, machine learning and robots) and corresponding practices (including responsible innovation, programming, hacking and professional codes), in order to formulate and support morally good solutions (e.g. right conducts or right values). Data ethics builds on the foundation provided by computer and information ethics but, at the same time, it refines the approach endorsed so far in this research field, by shifting the level of abstraction of ethical enquiries, from being information-centric to being data-centric. This shift brings into focus the different moral dimensions of all kinds of data, even data that never translate directly into information but can be used to support actions or generate behaviours, for example. It highlights the need for ethical analyses to concentrate on the content and nature of computational operations—the interactions among hardware, software and data—rather than on the variety of digital technologies that enable them. And it emphasizes the complexity of the ethical challenges posed by data science. Because of such complexity, data ethics should be developed from the start as a macroethics, that is, as an overall framework that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the ethical impact and implications of data science and its applications within a consistent, holistic and inclusive framework. Only as a macroethics will data ethics provide solutions that can maximize the value of data science for our societies, for all of us and for our environments.

This article is part of the themed issue ‘The ethical impact of data science’.

VL - 374 Issue 2083 UR - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2016.0360 IS - Royal Society Publishing ER - TY - JOUR T1 - A defence of informational structural realism Y1 - 2008 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

This is the revised version of an invited keynote lecture delivered at the 1st Australian Computing and Philosophy Conference (CAP@AU; the Australian National University in Canberra, 31 October - 2 November, 2003). The paper is divided into two parts.

The first part defends an informational approach to structural realism. It does so in three steps. First, it is shown that, within the debate about structural realism (SR), epistemic (ESR) and ontic (OSR) structural realism are reconcilable. It follows that a version of OSR is defensible from a structuralist-friendly position.

Second, it is argued that a version of OSR is also plausible, because not all relata (structured entities) are logically prior to relations (structures).

Third, it is shown that a version of OSR is also applicable to both sub-observable (unobservable and instrumentally-only observable) and observable entities, by developing its ontology of structural objects in terms of informational objects. The outcome is informational structural realism, a version of OSR supporting the ontological commitment to a view of the world as the totality of informational objects dynamically interacting with each other.

The paper has been discussed by several colleagues and, in the second half, ten objections that have been moved to the proposal are answered in order to clarify it further.

PB - Springer UR - http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/publications/pdf/adoisr.pdf IS - Synthese ER - TY - BOOK T1 - The onlife manifesto; Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era Y1 - 2015 A1 - Luciano Floridi KW - hyperhistory KW - informatiefilosofie KW - informatiewijsheid KW - infosphere KW - onlife AB -

What is the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the human condition? In order to address this question, in 2012 the European Commission organized a research project entitled The Onlife Initiative: concept reengineering for rethinking societal concerns in the digital transition. This volume collects the work of the Onlife Initiative. It explores how the development and widespread use of ICTs have a radical impact on the human condition.

ICTs are not mere tools but rather social forces that are increasingly affecting our self-conception (who we are), our mutual interactions (how we socialise); our conception of reality (our metaphysics); and our interactions with reality (our agency). In each case, ICTs have a huge ethical, legal, and political significance, yet one with which we have begun to come to terms only recently.

The impact exercised by ICTs is due to at least four major transformations: the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality; the blurring of the distinction between human, machine and nature; the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations, to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks.

Such transformations are testing the foundations of our conceptual frameworks. Our current conceptual toolbox is no longer fitted to address new ICT-related challenges. This is not only a problem in itself. It is also a risk, because the lack of a clear understanding of our present time may easily lead to negative projections about the future. The goal of The Manifesto, and of the whole book that contextualises, is therefore that of contributing to the update of our philosophy. It is a constructive goal. The book is meant to be a positive contribution to rethinking the philosophy on which policies are built in a hyperconnected world, so that we may have a better chance of understanding our ICT-related problems and solving them satisfactorily.

The Manifesto launches an open debate on the impacts of ICTs on public spaces, politics and societal expectations toward policymaking in the Digital Agenda for Europe’s remit. More broadly, it helps start a reflection on the way in which a hyperconnected world calls for rethinking the referential frameworks on which policies are built.

PB - Srpinger CY - Heidelberg SN - 978-3-319-04093-6 UR - http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319040929 ER - TY - BOOK T1 - The Ethics of Information Y1 - 2013 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

Luciano Floridi develops an original ethical framework for dealing with the new challenges posed by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). ICTs have profoundly changed many aspects of life, including the nature of entertainment, work, communication, education, health care, industrial production and business, social relations, and conflicts.

They have had a radical and widespread impact on our moral lives and on contemporary ethical debates. Privacy, ownership, freedom of speech, responsibility, technological determinism, the digital divide, and pornography online are only some of the pressing issues that characterise the ethical discourse in the information society. They are the subject of Information Ethics (IE), the new philosophical area of research that investigates the ethical impact of ICTs on human life and society.

Since the seventies, IE has been a standard topic in many curricula. In recent years, there has been a flourishing of new university courses, international conferences, workshops, professional organizations, specialized periodicals and research centres.

However, investigations have so far been largely influenced by professional and technical approaches, addressing mainly legal, social, cultural and technological problems. This book is the first philosophical monograph entirely and exclusively dedicated to it. Floridi lays down, for the first time, the conceptual foundations for IE. He does so systematically, by pursuing three goals: a) a metatheoretical goal: it describes what IE is, its problems, approaches and methods; b) an introductory goal: it helps the reader to gain a better grasp of the complex and multifarious nature of the various concepts and phenomena related to computer ethics; c) an analytic goal: it answers several key theoretical questions of great philosophical interest, arising from the investigation of the ethical implications of ICTs. Although entirely independent of The Philosophy of Information (OUP, 2011), Floridi's previous book, The Ethics of Information complements it as new work on the foundations of the philosophy of information.

PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford SN - 978-0-19-964132-1 UR - http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199641321.do# ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Translating Principles into Practices of Digital Ethics: Five Risks of Being Unethical Y1 - 2019 A1 - Luciano Floridi AB -

What are the main risks to avoid when doing ethical analysis of digital technologies, including Artificial Intelligence?

Par 7 Conclusion:

I hope this short article may work as a map for those who wish to avoid or minimise some of the most obvious and significant ethical risks, when navigating from principles to practices in digital ethics. From a Socratic perspective, a malpractice is often the result of a misjudged solution or a mistaken opportunity. Understanding as early as possible that shortcuts, postponements, or quick fixes do not lead to better ethical solutions but to more serious problems, which become increasingly difficult to solvethe later one deals with them, does not guarantee that the five malpractices analysed inthis article will disappear, but it does mean that they will be reduced insofar as they are genuinely based on misunderstanding and misjudgements. Not knowing better is the source of a lot of evil.
So, the solution is often more and better information for al

PB - Philosophy & Technology UR - https://www.academia.edu/39245838/Translating_Principles_into_Practices_of_Digital_Ethics_Five_Risks_of_Being_Unethical ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Philosophical Conceptions of Information JF - - Y1 - 2009 A1 - Luciano Floridi PB - Springer UR - http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/publications/pdf/sipiat.pdf IS - Lecture Notes in Computer Science N1 -

Information is notoriously a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept so, as an explicandum, it can be associated with several explanations, depending on the level of abstraction adopted and the cluster of requirements and desiderata orientating a theory. The reader may wish to keep this in mind while reading this article, where some schematic simplifications and interpretative decisions will be inevitable.

ER - TY - JOUR T1 - The Information Society and Its Philosophy: Introduction to the Special Issue on "The Philosophy of Information, its Nature and Future Developments" JF - - Y1 - 2009 A1 - Luciano Floridi KW - fourth revolution KW - informatiefilosofie KW - infosphere KW - philosophy of information KW - philosophy of technology AB -

The article introduces the special issue dedicated to “The Phi-losophy of Information, Its Nature, and Future Developments.”It outlines the origins of the information society and then brieflydiscusses the definition of the philosophy of information, the possi-bility of reconciling nature and technology, the informational turnas a fourth revolution (after Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud), andthe metaphysics of the infosphere.

PB - Routledge VL - 25 UR - https://www.academia.edu/3491643/The_Information_Society_and_Its_Philosophy_Introduction_to_the_Special_Issue_on_The_Philosophy_of_Information_Its_Nature_and_Future_Developments IS - The Information Society N1 -

Philosophy of Information (PI): The philosophical field concerned with the critical investigation of the conceptual nature and basic principles of information, including its dynamics, utilisation and sciences.

ER -