Abstract
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 the important implications of the revised definition for the analysis of the deflationary theories of truth, the standard definition of knowledge and the classic, quantitative theory of semantic information.
Highlights
Recent surveys have shown no consensus on a single, unified definition of semantic information
The dependence of information on the occurrence of syntactically well-formed clusters, strings or patterns of data, and of data on the occurrence of physically implementable differences, explains why information can be decoupled from its physical support
According to standard definition of information (SDI), alethic values are not embedded in, but supervene on semantic information: AN) meaningful and well-formed data qualify as information, no matter whether they represent or convey a truth or a falsehood or have no alethic value at all
Summary
The concept of information has become central in most contemporary philosophy. recent surveys have shown no consensus on a single, unified definition of semantic information. This is hardly surprising. It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account for the numerous possible applications of this general field [54]. Polysemantic concepts such as information can be fruitfully defined only in relation to a wellspecified context of application. Following this localist principle, in this paper only one crucial aspect of a specific type of information will be analysed, namely the alethic nature of declarative, objective and semantic (DOS) information (more on these qualifications ). Three important implications of the revised definition are briefly discussed in the last section
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