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SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3839983

The Royal Society, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 1971(370), p. 3536-3542, 2012

DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2011.0325

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Turing's Three Philosophical Lessons and the Philosophy of Information

Journal article published in 2012 by Luciano Floridi ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

In this article, I outline the three main philosophical lessons that we may learn from Turing's work, and how they lead to a new philosophy of information. After a brief introduction, I discuss his work on the method of levels of abstraction (LoA), and his insistence that questions could be meaningfully asked only by specifying the correct LoA. I then look at his second lesson, about the sort of philosophical questions that seem to be most pressing today. Finally, I focus on the third lesson, concerning the new philosophical anthropology that owes so much to Turing's work. I then show how the lessons are learned by the philosophy of information. In the conclusion, I draw a general synthesis of the points made, in view of the development of the philosophy of information itself as a continuation of Turing's work.