Floridi on the Grice-Dretske approach

Abstract for his essay:

"There is no consensus yet on the definition of semantic information. This paper contributes to the current debate by criticizing and revising the standard definition of semantic information (SDI) as meaningful data, in favor of the Dretske-Grice approach: meaningful and well-formed data constitute semantic information only if they also qualify as contingently truthful. After a brief introduction, SDI is criticized for providing necessary but insufficient conditions for the definition of semantic information. SDI is incorrect because truth-values do not supervene on semantic information, and misinformation (that is, false semantic information) is not a type of semantic information, but pseudoinformation, that is not semantic information at all. This is shown by arguing that none of the reasons for interpreting misinformation as a type of semantic information is convincing, whilst there are compelling reasons to treat it as pseudoinformation. As a consequence, SDI is revised to include a necessary truth-condition."