Knowledge, Information and Surprise

Margarita Vázquez (Facultad de Filosofía. Universidad de La Laguna, Spain)

In this paper, I analyse the paradox called “The surprise exam paradox” or “The unexpected hanging paradox”. I study some interpretations of this paradox, like Quine and Ned Hall ones, and give my own view about its solution, making some approaches from classical logic and from temporal or epistemic logic.

• Full article published in Triple C, 7(2), special issue What is really information?
• Spanish article published in ¿Qué es información?, 2008

 

One sense of information: A quick tutorial to Information-theoretic logic

J.M. SAGÜILLO (Universidad Santiago de Compostela)

One of the multiple meanings of the word ‘information’ is given implicitly in the postulates and conditions of information-theoretic logic (I-T-L). The tradition of looking at logical phenomena from an informational stance goes back as far as the XIX century. Logicians such as Boole, De Morgan, Jevons, and Venn already suggested that deducing is a sort of unpacking the information already contained in given premises. In the XX century this tradition is recovered by Carnap and Bar Hillel, Cohen and Nagel, and more recently by Corcoran. John Corcoran has articulated a specific information-theoretic viewpoint of logic with its own particular characteristics. I intend to explain the basic ideas of I-T-L by motivating their philosophical underpinnings. One desideratum is to complement and to shed light on some of the philosophical shortcomings of the nowadays paradigmatic model-theoretic concept of logical consequence. Another is to provide a brief sample of questions to be newly addressed form the I-T-L, such as insufficiency as well as redundancy of information in a given axiom-set.

Article

 

Knowledge, information and surprise

Margarita VÁZQUEZ (Universidad La Laguna)

In this paper, I analyze the paradox called “The surprise exam paradox” or “The unexpected hanging paradox”. I study some interpretations of this paradox, like Quine and Ned Hall ones, and give my own view about its solution, making some approaches from classical logic and from temporal or epistemic logics.

Article