Luciano Floridi presents an innovative approach to philosophy, conceived as conceptual design. He explores how we make, transform, refine, and improve the objects of our knowledge. His starting point is that reality provides the data, to be understood as constraining affordances, and we transform them into information, like semantic engines. Such transformation or repurposing is not equivalent to portraying, or picturing, or photographing, or photocopying anything. It is more like cooking: the dish does not represent the ingredients, it uses them to make something else out of them, yet the reality of the dish and its properties hugely depend on the reality and the properties of the ingredients. Models are not representations understood as pictures, but interpretations understood as data elaborations, of systems. Thus, he articulates and defends the thesis that knowledge is design and philosophy is the ultimate form of conceptual design. Although entirely independent of Floridi's previous books, The Philosophy of Information (OUP 2011) and The Ethics of Information (OUP 2013), The Logic of Information both complements the existing volumes and presents new work on the foundations of the philosophy of information.

The logic of information flow has applications in both computer science and natural language processing and is a growing area within mathematical and philosophical logic.

Logic and the Organization of Information closely examines the historical and contemporary methodologies used to catalogue information objects—books, ebooks, journals, articles, web pages, images, emails, podcasts and more—in the digital era. This book provides an in-depth technical background for digital librarianship, and covers a broad range of theoretical and practical topics including: classification theory, topic annotation, automatic clustering, generalized synonymy and concept indexing, distributed libraries, semantic web ontologies and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). It also analyzes the challenges facing today’s information architects, and outlines a series of techniques for overcoming them. Logic and the Organization of Information is intended for practitioners and professionals working at a design level as a reference book for digital librarianship. Advanced-level students, researchers and academics studying information science, library science, digital libraries and computer science will also find this book invaluable.

This book describes in detail the relationship between symbolic representations of knowledge and abstract states of knowledge, exploring along the way the foundations of knowledge, knowledge bases, knowledge-based systems, and knowledge representation and reasoning. The idea of knowledge bases lies at the heart of symbolic, or "traditional," artificial intelligence. A knowledge-based system decides how to act by running formal reasoning procedures over a body of explicitly represented knowledge—a knowledge base. The system is not programmed for specific tasks; rather, it is told what it needs to know and expected to infer the rest. This book is about the logic of such knowledge bases. It describes in detail the relationship between symbolic representations of knowledge and abstract states of knowledge, exploring along the way the foundations of knowledge, knowledge bases, knowledge-based systems, and knowledge representation and reasoning. Assuming some familiarity with first-order predicate logic, the book offers a new mathematical model of knowledge that is general and expressive yet more workable in practice than previous models. The book presents a style of semantic argument and formal analysis that would be cumbersome or completely impractical with other approaches. It also shows how to treat a knowledge base as an abstract data type, completely specified in an abstract way by the knowledge-level operations defined over it.

Epistemic logic is the branch of philosophical thought that seeks to formalize the discourse about knowledge. Its object is to articulate and clarify the general principles of reasoning about claims to and attributions of knowledge. This comprehensive survey of the topic offers the first systematic account of the subject as it has developed in the journal literature over recent decades. Rescher gives an overview of the discipline by setting out the general principles for reasoning about such matters as propositional knowledge and interrogative knowledge. Aimed at graduate students and specialists, Epistemic Logic elucidates both Rescher's pragmatic view of knowledge and the field in general.