Luciano Floridi

In this article, I argue for an interpretive approach to digitalization research that analyzes the concepts, narratives, and belief systems in digitalization debates. I illustrate this methodological proposal by assessing the spread of network ideas. Many political actors and digitalization researchers follow network ideas, e.g. by claiming that the rise of a network society must lead to network governance. In contrast to this narrative, I argue that there are multiple visions of the digital society, each of which follows a specific pattern of epistemology, social imaginary, and political proposals. These competing self-interpretations must be investigated by digitalization research in order to map and evaluate different pathways into a digital society. For doing so, critical conceptual analysis draws on political theory, critical conceptual history, and the sociology of knowledge. It offers two major benefits for digitalization research. Firstly, it provides a systematic overview of competing governance rationalities in the digital society, enabling a critical evaluation of their potentials and proposals. Secondly, it enhances the methodological rigor of digitalization research by reviewing the narratives researchers themselves tell. I substantiate these claims by analyzing and historicizing the above network narrative. Tracing it back to cybernetics, I show that it has been used multiple times in efforts to reshape the way we think about society and politics, including our concepts of subjectivity, power, and governance.

The evolution of human cognition has corresponded to the technological expansion of its state-space, increasing its degrees of freedom by tracking invariances and conjunctions in its relations with the world. This process has two aspects. First, the human has progressively broken up the unified whole that was the ‘magical unity’ (Simondon) of our pre-human ancestors into convenient and workable objects of knowledge that can be named, numbered, displaced, and exchanged. This is the abstract process of discretization (Stiegler),  and it has gone step in step with hominization. Discretization corresponds to a process of dividing the world’s continuous fluxes and vague unities into ever smaller, countable parts and pieces. But there is a second, complimentary process: that of synthesis, concrescence, or integration, which has also followed the expansion of the human Umwelt. Humans have extended their criticality not only by breaking the world up into smaller pieces, but by correlating these parts according to principles of symmetry and invariance, sequence and order. It is the organism’s capacity to encapsulate, to envelop an indefinite series or to mark a horizon (Châtelet). This process can be thought of as complimentary to discretization: instead of a breaking-things-apart, it is process of enveloping, or of the constitution of a provisional whole (holon). All ‘extended critical’ systems may be said to produce such integrations corresponding to their stabilization upon a perpetual phase transition, a state of constant renormalization (Bailly and Longo). It is at the root of speculations about the eventual convergence of human knowledge upon an attractor, an omega point, or a singularity, as the ultimate end of a noölogical process. Teilhard de Chardin called this the ‘noösphere’. Beyond his speculative scheme, science and mathematics permit us to speak of a singularity of cognition and life that could also be considered noölogical. But today, the big data environment that tracks our interactions and displacements, that pulverizes the world as an abstract set of indexed variables, has been more appropriately described as an ‘infosphere’. It has been called a ‘fourth revolution’ (Floridi) in human thought, the most recent step in the Copernican displacement of the human from the world stage. Turing is held to follow Freud, Darwin and Copernicus in the infliction of yet another wound to human narcissism. It is as though the prospect of a noösphere has been displaced by that of the infosphere, as though the organism’s process of cognitive synthesis had become obsolete, replaced by the lonely acts of sampling and sequence matching, tireless iteration, measurement and calculation. The present article proposes a different framework for thinking the emergence of the infosphere: it results from human technoevolution having been nefariously overtaken by a runaway process of discretization. We problematize this line of thought from a noötechnical and ‘epistemo-aesthetic’ standpoint, by considering the shared aesthetic evolution of life, cognition and technè.

Luciano Floridi has proposed that we are on the cusp of a fourth revolution in human self-understanding. The information revolution and the prospect of digitally enhancing human beings opens the door to the prospect of engineering human nature. Floridi has emphasized the importance of making this "transition" as "ethically smooth" as possible. He is quite right to worry about ethics after the fourth revolution. For the coming revolution, if it unfolds as he envisions, spells the demise of traditional ethical theorizing.

The following review explores Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE) in terms of comparative philosophy, supporting IIE as the most relevant and significant development of the field of Information Ethics (IE). The focus of the review is threefold. First, it will review the core presumption of the field of IIE, that being the demand for an inter- mission in the pursuit of a founding philosophy for IE in order to first address the philosophical biases of IE by western philosophy. Second, a history of the various philosophical streams of IIE will be outlined, including its literature and pioneering contributors. Lastly, a new synthesis of comparative philosophies in IIE will be offered, looking towards a future evolution of the field. Examining the interchange between contemporary information ethicists regarding the discipline of IIE, the review first outlines the previously established presumptions of the field of IIE that posit the need for an IE as grounded in western sensibilities. The author then addresses the implications of the foregoing presumption from several non-western viewpoints, arguing that IIE does in fact find roots in non-western philosophies as established in the concluding synthesis of western and eastern philosophical traditions.

Philosophers of information, according to Luciano Floridi (2010, 32), study how information should be “adequately created, processed, managed, and used.” It is unlikely that we can do this without linking that study to the epistemic purposes of creating, processing, managing, and using information. Doing so, we claim with Floridi, requires attention to the epistemic value of information. In particular, our interest in information has a number of purposes, one of which is to acquire knowledge.

Some authors, most notably Luciano Floridi, have recently argued for a notion of " strongly " semantic information, according to which information " encapsulates " truth (the so-called " veridicality thesis "). We propose a simple framework to compare different formal explications of this concept and assess their relative merits. It turns out that the most adequate proposal is that based on the notion of " partial truth " , which measures the amount of " information about the truth " conveyed by a given statement. We conclude with some critical remarks concerning the veridical-ity thesis in connection with the role played by truth and information as relevant cognitive goals of inquiry.

To introduce Luciano Floridi’s theses, I will start from what I believe is his own starting point: defining the role and the challenges of philosophy in the contemporary world. In his writings, Floridi presents to his readers a scenario that is very familiar to any human being who is a member of the contemporary society and pursues everyday all the typical activities of that society. It is before our eyes: in the last decades, the world has changed dramatically and so fast that also relatively young people have witnessed some of these changes in person. The metamorphosis is still in progress: it is easy to predict that in the following years the world will continue changing and evolving. The question now is: towards what will these changes bring our world and us? Moreover, are we ready for such a new world and are we aware of what is happening at all?

This paper discusses differing perspectives relevant to library and information studies (LIS) regarding the philosophy of information, primarily disparate accounts of ontology. The perspectives include, but are not limited to, those of Luciano Floridi, Raphael Capurro, Michael Eldred, applied ontologists like Pierre Grenon and Barry Smith, Fred Fonseca, and Bernd Frohmann. Slavoj Žižek’s parallax ontology is used as a leitmotif and theoretical frame to provide a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of differing standpoints on ontological issues within LIS and the philosophy of information. Parallax ontology is presented not as a replacement for any particular perspective but rather as a means to utilize the differing points of view. The antinomies within and between these perspectives are not overcome through some kind of synthesis but instead disclose the fundamentally irreconcilable nature of the topic of ontology itself, particularly within LIS and the philosophy of information. The paper concludes with an assessment of the importance of this type of research, and the topics of ontology and the philosophy of information in particular.

Resumo: O artigo apresenta, de forma introdutória, a Filosofia da Informação, abordagem teórico-metodológica desenvolvida por Luciano Floridi como uma fundamentação epistemológica adequada à sociedade da informação, termo proposto como representativo do atual cenário socio-histórico. Por meio de um estudo com características exploratórias, discute conceitos cruciais do pensamento de Floridi, como informação semântica e veridicalidade da informação, para demonstrar como esse pensamento trata da questão da desinformação. Relaciona, por fim, as ideias de Floridi com a noção de 'confiabilidade informacional', conceito a ser desenvolvido no contexto contemporâneo visando ao combate à desinformação. Palavras-chave: Filosofia da informação. Luciano Floridi. Informação semântica. Desinformação. Confiabilidade informacional. 1 Introdução O surgimento da chamada sociedade da informação tem trazido novas formas de pensar sobre as atividades humanas e sua relação com a informação e o conhecimento. Como Castells (1999) indica, há uma transição do industrialismo para um informacionalismo, proveniente principalmente do desenvolvimento das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC). Luciano Floridi (2010b) afirma que, por meio da revolução da informação, as TIC promoveram uma nova organização da sociedade, que passou a funcionar em torno de serviços e produtos informacionais.

Recent proposals to think about philosophy as conceptual design (Floridi, 2019) fail to understand the
scope and method of philosophical thinking. The goal of philosophy is truth, but truth has a double
direction: towards theory and towards practice. The design is in the middle and it lacks the criteria in
order to evaluate itself, since its truth depends on the theory on which it is based and on the practical use
of its functions. Furthermore, design lacks critical ability, since only the horizon of existence, in social and
political terms, offers the possibility to judge about the validity of a project.

This paper starts by acknowledging the growing popularity of the idea that living in the infosphere is producing a reontologization of the world (§ 0), and aims to test such a belief by examining the problem of an ontology of information machines. After explaining the sense in which I use the term “ontology” (§ 1), I discuss the main features of digital ontology and informational ontology: on the one hand, I present the ontological status that information has in digital ontology (§ 2.1) and informational ontology (§ 3.1); on the other hand, I identify the basic characteristics of ICTs that digital ontology (§ 2.2) and informational ontology (§ 3.2) put at the centre of their operation of “symbolic doubling”. Finally, through a comparison with some issues of the continental philosophical tradition, I claim that informational ontology can be considered an ontology at the same time more radical than digital ontology but also weaker, and I conclude by highlighting the difficulties that its conceptual elaboration seems to entail (§ 4).

O artigo aborda o atual cenário da desinformação presente na web com o surgimento de terminologias como 'fake news', 'pós-verdade', 'deepfake', entre outros. Para tanto, primeiramente remete às discussões sócio-históricas que caracterizam o período de transformação da modernidade (pós-modernidade, alta modernidade, modernidade líquida). Apresenta também noções teóricas sobre a sociedade da informação e a cibercultura. Tal contextualização serve de fundamento para algumas definições sobre informação e desinformação. Objetivo: Apresentar o atual contexto informacional envolvendo a desinformação para sugerir novas dinâmicas no papel do profissional da informação e no campo de atuação da Ciência da Informação. Metodologia: Utiliza como modelo epistemológico, a teoria e o mapa conceitual de Luciano Floridi, por meio de uma pesquisa bibliográfica exploratória. Resultados e conclusão: Conclui que, perante este novo cenário, é imprescindível um olhar crítico na forma de lidar com a informação, buscando formas de assegurar a confiabilidade informacional. Tal cenário também propõe novos desafios e paradigmas aos profissionais da informação e à Ciência da Informação enquanto área do conhecimento. Descritores: Desinformação. Disseminação da informação. Confiabilidade informacional. Fake news. Sociedade da informação.

While the whole world is trying to get its bearings in the face of the radical changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, two prevailing attitudes or approaches have emerged: (1) a yearning for a return to pre-COVID-19 normalcy typified by what I call the "typhoon-shelter approach" and (2) recognizing the irreversibility of the current condition and seeking to establish a "new normal." The biopolitical analysis employed in this paper reveals unintended consequences that slip through the mesh of traditional forms of critique centered on capital, ideology, or class conflict. Specifically, the "new normal" project prevents the free movement of peoples while ensuring the continuous flow of data through what Luciano Floridi calls the "infosphere." This politics instills a xenophobia in which the other is construed as a disease while migrating the population to the realm of virtual reality.

Starting from a theoretical recognition of the classical positions on identity, we propose an integrated concept of human identity. It assumes the relationship between man and technology as an unavoidable feature. This hypothesis-based on the paradigm of the informa-tional society-focuses on the consequences of the constant interaction between human beings and information and communication technologies (ICT), showing several effects on habits and on formation of human identity determined by digital technologies. According to an axiological point of view, we intend to identify potentialities and risks of this interaction , recovering a humanistic orientation at the basis of education. I. L'IDENTITÀ UMANA ALLA RICERCA DI UNA DEFINIZIONE La questione dell'identità umana ha radici filosofiche profonde e diretta attinenza con di-lemmi dell'antropologia e della filosofia della mente, che rimandano agli orizzonti metafisico, etico ed epistemologico, solo sfiorati in questo intervento. Tali interrogativi possono essere sin-tetizzati nelle seguenti domande: chi sono e che cosa sono? 1 Quesiti centrali all'interno della filo-sofia occidentale, 2 specie a partire dalla modernità. A mio avviso, si può rintracciare un'evolu-zione delle risposte in merito a tali questioni, che riflette sempre più un'apertura di sguardo e di 1 Ovviamente si possono rintracciare ulteriori livelli d'indagine sottesi ad ulteriori do-mande: a titolo esemplificativo, la questione de lla persistenza, ovvero della 'durata' dell'identità, e la questione inerente la personalità, ovvero la determinazione d elle caratteristiche che rendono un soggetto 'persona'. 2 Ma non solo. Si veda T. J INPA, Self, Reality and Reason in Tibetan Philosophy, Routledge, Lon-don 2002.

This series of essays offers a critique of Information Studies, taken as a discipline largely concerned with informational objects and their representations on the one hand and the control of these same by means of other informational objects and their representations on the other. Specifically, the critique put forward here attends to the ways that the common practices of Information Studies may reinforce representationalist ideologies that are historically problematic and that are likely to continue to be so into the future if allowed to persist. Such ideologies are bound up with histories of oppression, colonialism, and cognitive injustice in ways that seem likely to be undesirable to most practitioners upon consideration. The critique offered seeks to point out this conjunction of aesthetic and ethical issues in our practical epistemological constructs, opening out largely untried avenues of exploration with regard to our axiological habits—axiology being defined here as the inquiry that includes ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology—and the architectonic structures of meaning and understanding that we deploy with ever increasing density in (and occasionally as) the world.

In the related field of semiotics, an assumption, bordering on a principle, obtains that meaning has structure and that that structure is intelligible. The work of semiotic theorists has shown that this is not likely to be exclusively a logocentric prejudice. The works of Gilles Deleuze and his sometimes partner Felix Guattari, along with those of C.S. Peirce and Justus Buchler, each postulate in their own way that meaning and its structure are continuous with the world, and, going further, that the structures of meaning that exist in the world have no intrinsic limit to their complexity in a general sense other than the availability of resources to build that complexity. This is not equivalent to saying that the forms of such complexity are unlimited in the sense that they could take all possible forms, though the number of possible form-states may be infinite in principle when the availability of resources is bracketed off as a concern. That indicates to us the likelihood that no single ideology gives us a complete picture of all possible semiotic modalities and that, with sufficient resources, multiple modalities may coexist and interact in a single system, event, or order. All of this places semiosis in a thermodynamic milieu between complex systems theory and computation theory, even while suggesting analogies to ecophenomenology and ecosystems thinking as an interpretation of Peircean "infinite semiosis."

While semiotics, as an architectonic discipline, traces continuities with the Kantian paradigm, the Deleuzean approach represents a turn in philosophy both in expressive style and ways of doing philosophy, such that both a reinvestigation of semiotic structures and the production of new rhetorical modes are suggested in light of it—though Deleuze is a threshold for such matters, not a container. Making use of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Luciano Floridi, and François Laruelle (as well as Patrick Wilson, Marcia Bates, and Jonathan Furner) to construct an ordinal semiotic compatible with various structural realisms, the arguments here commit to a pataphysical and hermetic swerve that aligns with the "Dark Deleuzean" aesthetics of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani, exploring the metaphor of darkness itself by way of the immanence theories of Timothy Morton and Eugene Thacker. The argument pattern described can be seen as an affirmation of possibly novel values of global, transspecies cognitive justice and "cognitive veganism" at least partially consistent with the ethical concerns and images of thought of such thinkers as Richard Kahn and Stephen David Ross.

Due to the emphasis on continuity with the world, the above motivates us to take seriously various posthumanistic rhetorics' priorities: cybernetics, informatics, thermodynamics, complex and autopoietic systems, codality, cognitive and neuro-diversity, enhanced and artificial intelligence, postvitalist ecology, and perhaps even Singularity. Because of that same continuity, each of these should be necessarily thought in relation to planetarity and global history. Through that thought we can understand semiotic processes and ecologies as bound up with what Land has called a "terraprocess." Information Studies, as a discipline emerging into full fruition within the context of a posthumanistic moment, situated in turn within the Anthropocene Era, should understand and engage with this terraprocess as the architectonic syntax for a more fundamental informatic and metainformatic axiology.

Information flows and communicative interactions on social media, the Web and the expanding Internet of things are changing the possibilities, the actual methods and models of interaction between human beings, objects and life environments. As a result, an unprecedented landscape of structural and functional connections emerge that can be described, at least in part, in terms of connectivity graphs. In borrowing the term «connectome» from the neurosciences, the author suggests that the network-like structure emerging from the combination of the Internet of things and the human usage of social media can be regarded as a third degree connectome (connettoma-3), that is to say as a dynamic and evolutionary system that modifies the organization of the activities in the human nervous system (connettoma-1) and in the social networks defined as connectomes of connectomes (connettoma-2). To regard the infosphere as an expanding third degree connectome means to ask questions about the material structures and the dynamics of the connections to be mapped, in order to study how shared sensemaking and behaviours change or become established. From such a perspective, it is possible to resume, update and reformulate both the actor-network theory, which claims that social actors emerge in the large network of attachments to which they belong, and the question of the alternative between being free from bonds (impossible) and well-attached.

The attempt to establish a unified taxonomy for the field of Information Ethics is both unattainable and unwarranted. The categorization of Information Ethics as a defined discipline, an applicable practice, a philosophy and a worldview remains constantly in flux due to, what Luciano Floridi terms, ‘philosophical naturalism’. As such, a broadening understanding of the field will only serve to further collapse categorization. The following paper will outline, using a discourse analysis methodology, how the nature of the field of Information Ethics at a foundational level must necessarily defy classification. The assumptions behind the current classifications of the field will be questioned. Beginning with the history of the inception of the field through Librarianship and Cybernetics and questioning the yet unresolved ontological debates between information philosophers such as Rafael Capurro and Floridi, this paper will explicate how any such attempt to develop an agreed upon taxonomy will and should always remain incomplete.

The following paper will trace the recently established field of Information Ethics through it’s various evolutions, from it’s origins in Librarianship to it’s role as a global player in areas as diverse as technology, media, global humanitarianism, and the philosophy of information. The praxis of the field will be outlined for the uninitiated reader, followed by an intimate history of the founding players and their continued contribution to this ever-evolving field. The current evolutions of Information Ethics will then be explored in the context of their application to the viral global phenomena of Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE), and finally, the paper will conclude with projections towards future evolutions in Information Ethics, as well as an exploration of potential definitions for the field.

This paper discusses whether a naturalistic account of persons is possible. My general claim is that, if we conceive of persons in terms of a first-person perspective, nothing can prevent an eliminativist attitude towards them.  Firstly, I present two different but connected solutions offered by Edmund Runggaldier and Lynne Baker. According to these authors, an indexical account of persons can escape from any effort of naturalization. Secondly, however, I argue that an adequate employment of the philosophy of information can provide a framework able to reduce the first-person perspective in terms completely analyzable in a scientific fashion. In this peculiar kind of naturalization, what I am tends to be reduced to what I share with other users. Therefore, what builds up the personal identity of any user tends to be reduced to the more public and impersonal aspects of each user. This kind of paradox suggests that the first-person perspective is insufficient to avoid a naturalization of persons.