Information, possible worlds and the cooptation of scepticism
The article investigates the sceptical challenge from an information-theoretic perspective. Its main goal is to articulate and defend the view that either informational scepticism is radical, but then it is epistemologically innocuous because redundant; or it is moderate, but then epistemologically beneficial because useful. In order to pursue this cooptation strategy, the article is divided into seven sections. Section 1 sets up the problem. Section 2 introduces Borel numbers as a convenient way to refer uniformly to (the data that individuate) different possible worlds. Section 3 adopts the Hamming distance between Borel numbers as a metric to calculate the distance between possible worlds. In Sects. 4 and 5, radical and moderate informational scepticism are analysed using Borel numbers and Hamming distances, and shown to be either harmless (extreme form) or actually fruitful (moderate form). Section 6 further clarifies the approach by replying to some potential objections. In the conclusion, the Peircean nature of the overall approach is briefly discussed.
Item Type | Article |
---|---|
Additional information | “The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com”. Copyright Springer |
Keywords | borel numbers, hamming distance, informational scepticism, levenshtein distance, semantic information |
Date Deposited | 15 May 2025 12:06 |
Last Modified | 30 May 2025 23:44 |
-
picture_as_pdf - Information_Possible_Worlds_and_the_cooptation_of_scepticism.pdf
-
subject - Published Version
-
lock - Restricted to Repository staff only