The Philosophy of Information

and streamlined conditions of possibility of the available narratives, with a view not only to their explanation, but also their modification and innovation. How has the regress developed? The vulgata suggests that the scientific revolution made seventeenth-century philosophers redirect their attention from the nature of the knowable object to the epistemic relation between it and the knowing subject, and hence from metaphysics to epistemology. Th e subsequent growth of the information society and the appearance of the infosphere (the semantic environment which millions of people inhabit nowadays) led contemporary philosophy to privilege critical reflection on the domain represented by the memory and languages of organized knowledge, the instruments whereby the infosphere is modeled and managed – thus moving from epistemology to philosophy of language and logic (Dummett 1993) – and then on the nature of its very fabric and essence, information itself. Information has thus arisen as a concept as fundamental and important as “being,” “knowledge,” “life,” “intelligence,” “meaning,” or “good and evil” – all pivotal concepts with which it is interdependent – and so equally worthy of autonomous investigation. It is also a more basic concept, in terms of which the others can be expressed and interrelated, when not defined. In this sense, Evans was right: Evans had the idea that there is a much cruder and more fundamental concept than that of knowledge on which philosophers have concentrated so much, namely the concept of information. Information is conveyed by perception, and retained by memory, though also transmitted by means of language. One needs to concentrate on that concept before one approaches that of knowledge in the proper sense. Information is acquired, for example, without one’s necessarily having a grasp of the proposition which embodies it; the flow of information operates at a much more basic level than the acquisition and transmission of knowledge. I think that this conception deserves to be explored. It’s not one that ever occurred to me before I read Evans, but it is probably fruitful. That also distinguishes this work very sharply from traditional epistemology. (Dummett 1993: 186) This is why PI can be introduced as a forthcoming philosophia prima, both in the Aristotelian sense of the primacy of its object, information, which PI claims to be a fundamental component in any environment, and in the Cartesian-Kantian sense of the primacy of its methodology and problems, since PI aspires to provide a most valuable, comprehensive approach to philosophical investigations. PI, understood as a foundational philosophy of information modeling and design, can explain and guide the purposeful construction of our intellectual environment, and provide the systematic treatment of the conceptual foundations of contemporary society. It enables humanity to make sense of the world and construct it responsibly, reaching a new stage in the semanticization of being. If what has been suggested here is correct, the current development of PI may be delayed but remains inevitable, and it will affect the overall way in which we address both new and old philosophical problems, bringing about a substantial innovation of the philosophical system. This will represent the information turn in philosophy. Clearly, PI promises to be one of the most exciting and fruitful areas of philosophical research of our time.