Workshop on "Logic and Information"

Workshop at the Fifth World Conference on Universal Logic

25-30 June 2015

University of Istanbul

Description

The juxtaposition of ‘logic’ and ‘information’ is popular as well as controversial: It is clear that there must be a connection between both, but there is hardly any agreement about the precise nature of the connection. When we focus on how information can clarify what logic is about, it is natural to say that valid arguments are just those arguments where the content of the conclusion does not exceed the combined content of the premises. Yet, such explanations do not have the same status as more entrenched truth-conditional and inferential conceptions of logical consequence, which suggests that information-talk about logic is simply redundant. When, by contrast, we focus on how logic can clarify the nature and dynamics of information, we turn our attention to specific developments in philosophical logic, like logics of knowledge and belief and their many dynamic extensions. While this opens up an entirely new field of formal investigations — often dubbed the dynamic and interactive turn in logic — it is less clear whether such developments establish a special connection between logic and information (after all, there are plenty of logics of X whose existence and usefulness does not imply a special connection between logic and what it is used for).

At least since Carnap and Bar-Hillel's theory of semantic information, many closer connections between logic and information have been developed by, amongst others, Barwise & Perry, Corcoran, and Hintikka. More recently, the simultaneaous rise of the philosophy of information and the dynamic and interactive turn in logic has led to a revival of the question of how information and logic can be related. In this workshop we want to approach the subject from the perspective of the philosophy of information, as well as from a logical perspective, and draw attention to a number of questions that have received more attention, or have only been individuated in recent years. These include the possibility of a genuine informational conception of logical consequence, the relation between informational and computational approaches, the relation between information and logics of questions, and the difference between (what van Benthem calls) implicit informational stances in logic like that of intuitionist logic and explicit stances like that of epistemic logic.

Keynote speaker

Luciano Floridi (OII, Oxford University)

Call for abstracts

Extended abstracts (1000-1500 words) should be sent via e-mail before November 15th 2014 to: workshop@logicandinformation.be

Organisers

The workshop is hosted by Universal Logic 2015 and organised in collaboration with the Society for the Philosophy of Information.

Workshop chairs are: Patrick Allo and Giuseppe Primiero