Poster presented at the Formal Epistemology Workshop (CMU, Pittsburgh, US)
Abstract. One of the central aims of the philosophy of information is the formulation of an epistemological theory that is based on information. On this account—and unlike Dretske’s seminal proposal—knowledge should no longer be analysed in terms of beliefs, but directly in terms of the non-doxastic factive attitude of ‘being informed’. A distinctive feature of this project is its simultaneaous investigation of information as a commodity, and the statal conditions that are necessarry and sufficient for being in a state wherein one is informed. While research on the former aspect has essentially been concerned with the veridical nature of semantic information, the research on the latter has, among others, lead to the formulation of an epistemic logic for ‘being informed’.
After a brief elaboration on the discrepancy between reductive analyses of information as a commodity (information as veridical and meaningfull well-formed data) as opposed to the alleged primeness of the statal condition for being informed, we propose a formal analysis of a small class of necessary conditions for being informed. The formulation of these conditions elaborates on previous work on the semantics for the modal logic for ‘being informed’, and uses the preferential models of adaptive logic.
