「情報の哲学」の見取り図: 20 years later

Abstract

Luciano Floridi set the agenda for Philosophy of Information (hereafter referred to as “PI”) in 2004 with his 18 open problems in PI. In an era known as the Information Age, PI has become increasingly influential and is still being studied, especially in the United States and the Western world. Twenty years after Floridi’s advocacy of the 18 open problems, the purpose of this paper is to reorganize the current state of PI, which is rapidly developing and spreading in various ways, and to clarify its characteristics and relationships with other fields considered to be similar. To accomplish this purpose, the discussion of this paper takes the following steps. First, in Section 2, I summarize the characterization of PI currently supported and redefine PI in three parts: (a) philosophizing information, (b) info-philosophy, and (c) philosophizing information science. Then, in section 3, I present several attempts to reconstruct the history of PI with a focus on a particular sense of purpose. That is, (A) the view of history adopted by Floridi, (B) the view of history reconstructed from the history of information science, and (C) the view of history reconstructed from the history of the concept of information. Up to this point, the discussion has portrayed PI as a diverse collection of activities, focusing on the question ‘What is PI?’ In contrast, section 4 indirectly highlights the characteristics of PI with the objective “What is not PI?” by showing its relationship to other information-related fields in the humanities, namely (1) Digital Humanities, (2) Fundamental informatics, and (3) Library and Information Science. With the analysis presented above, twenty years after the monumental event in PI, Floridi’ s advocacy of the 18 open problems, I can redraw a map of PI as a whole in a more explicit way than in previous studies. This new map showcases the synchronic and diachronic diversity of PI, offering a comprehensive view of its evolution and current state.