Nigel Warburton in Five Books:
NW: Can you begin by saying something about the philosophy of information? When I studied philosophy there weren’t any courses on the philosophy of information so I’m not exactly sure what it is.LF: The philosophy of information is a new area of research. We didn’t study it when we were students, partly because we didn’t realise that the glasses were on our noses. There’s a lot of philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the present day that discusses what we now think of as the philosophy of information, it’s just that it wasn’t called that, and the focus of our society, our cultural interest, wasn’t on this particular concept. But in ethics, for instance, when you discuss what it takes to make the right decision, it takes a well-grounded rational, well-informed agent. In Epistemology the foundation of knowledge requires some initial of information that you need to justify, warrant, and support. And so on. The philosophical discourse has always included an interest in what we would today call information.
When I was a graduate student, I was looking for a way of discussing some of the contemporary issues of information technology from a philosophical perspective that would be well informed by past relevant theorizing. I came across a paper by Karl Popper entitled “Epistemology without the knowing subject,” and all of a sudden I realised that if you take the knowing subject away from epistemology all you’re left with is information. If you take away Mary from ‘Mary knows that p’ all that’s left is ‘that p’, and ‘that p’ is just that piece of information. Similarly ‘Paris is the capital of France’ or ‘a piece of toast’ or ‘water is H2O' are just information. What I found wasn’t entirely unprecedented, but it was a new perspective on classic issues that could engage with the problems of our time, namely the philosophy of information.
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