In information societies, operations, decisions and choices previously left to humans are increasingly delegated to algorithms, which may advise, if not decide, about how data should be interpreted and what actions should be taken as a result. More and more often, algorithms mediate social processes, business transactions, governmental decisions, and how we perceive, understand, and interact among ourselves and with the environment. Gaps between the design and operation of algorithms and our understanding of their ethical implications can have severe consequences affecting individuals as well as groups and whole societies. This paper makes three contributions to clarify the ethical importance of algorithmic mediation. It provides a prescriptive map to organise the debate. It reviews the current discussion of ethical aspects of algorithms. And it assesses the available literature in order to identify areas requiring further work to develop the ethics of algorithms.

In the contemporary society a massive amount of data is generated continuously by various means, and they are called Big-Data sets. Big Data has potential and limits which need to be understood by statisticians and statistics consumers, therefore it is a challenge to develop Big-Data Literacy to support the needs of constructive, concerned, and reflective citizens. However, the development of the concept of statistical literacy mirrors the current gap between purely technical and socio-political characterizations of Big Data. In this paper, we review the recent history of the concept of statistical literacy and highlight the need to integrate the new challenges and critical issues from data science associated with Big Data, including ethics, epistemology, mathematical justification, and math washing. First published February 2020 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives

The logic of 'being informed' gives a formal analysis of a cognitive state that does not coincide with either belief, or knowledge. To Floridi, who first proposed the formal analysis, the latter is supported by the fact that unlike knowledge or belief, being informed is a factive, but not a reflective state. This paper takes a closer look at the formal analysis itself, provides a pure and an applied semantics for the logic of being informed, and tries to find out to what extent the formal analysis can contribute to an information-based epistemology.

Informational semantics were first developed as an interpretation of the model-theory of substructural (and especially relevant) logics. In this paper we argue that such a semantics is of independent value and that it should be considered as a genuine alternative explication of the notion of logical consequence alongside the traditional model-theoretical and the proof-theoretical accounts. Our starting point is the content-nonexpansion platitude which stipulates that an argument is valid iff the content of the conclusion does not exceed the combined content of the premises. We show that this basic platitude can be used to characterise the extension of classical as well as non-classical consequence relations. The distinctive trait of an informational semantics is that truth-conditions are replaced by information-conditions. The latter leads to an inversion of the usual order of explanation: Considerations about logical discrimination (how finely propositions are individuated) are conceptually prior to considerations about deductive strength. Because this allows us to bypass considerations about truth, an informational semantics provides an attractive and metaphysically unencumbered account of logical consequence, nonclassical logics, logical rivalry and pluralism about logical consequence.

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The core aim of this special issue is to present the philosophy of information as a way of doing philosophy, to focus on the contributions of Luciano Floridi to that area, and most important, to stimulate the debate on the most distinctive and controversial views he has defended in that context. This introduction contains a description of the philosophy of information, a discussion of two common misconceptions about the scope and the ambition of the philosophy of information, and a brief overview of the essays in the issue.Keywords: informational turn, philosophy of information.This collection of essays is devoted to Luciano Floridi's contributions to the philosophy of information. As Floridi explains in his replies near the end of the collection, his own work during the past ten years has been almost co-extensive with the philosophy of information. Some might find this claim problematic. After all, doesn't the philosophy of information go all the way back to Leibniz? Or shouldn't we acknowledge the crucial role played by Wiener, Turing, Simon, Dretske, and many other fathers of the philosophy of information? Of course, the informational turn in philosophy cannot be reduced to work done in the past decade, let alone work done by one person (see the epilogue by Terrell Ward Bynum and the concluding section of Floridi's replies). Yet, what I want to emphasise is that while there has been a clearly discernible informational turn in recent (and not so recent) philosophy, Floridi gave that turn a more radical twist by claiming that taking the informational turn means redefining philosophy. This is why there is a conception of the philosophy of information that Floridi may rightly call his own.In this introduction, I want to do two things: situate the contributions to this collection in the broader context of the philosophy of information, and say something more general about Floridi's unique understanding of what the philosophy of information is (or should be). I'll start with the latter, and then use my sketch of the philosophy of information as a map to situate the various essays.

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