Repository | Book | Chapter

The topic of this paper may be introduced by fast zooming in and out of the philosophy of information. In recent years, philosophical interest in the nature of information has been increasing steadily. This has led to a focus on semantic information, and then on the logic of being informed, which has attracted analyses concentrating both on the statal sense in which S holds the information that p (this is what I mean by logic of being informed in the rest of this article) and on the actional sense in which S becomes informed that p. One of the consequences of the logic debate has been a renewed epistemological interest in the principle of information closure (henceforth PIC), which finally has motivated a revival of a sceptical objection against its tenability first made popular by Dretske. This is the topic of the paper, in which I seek to defend PIC against the sceptical objection. If I am successful, this means – and we are now zooming out – that the plausibility of PIC is not undermined by the sceptical objection, and therefore that a major epistemological argument against the formalization of the logic of being informed based on the axiom of distribution in modal logic is removed. But since the axiom of distribution discriminates between normal and non-normal modal logics, this means that a potentially good reason to look for a formalization of the logic of being informed among the non-normal modal logics, which reject the axiom, is also removed. And this in turn means that a formalization of the logic of being informed in terms of the normal modal logic B (also known as KTB) is still very plausible, at least insofar as this specific obstacle is concerned. In short, I shall argue that the sceptical objection against PIC fails, so it is not a good reason to abandon the normal modal logic B as a good formalization of the logic of being informed.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-5845-2_4

Full citation: