At 02:30 PM 22/02/02, you wrote:
Diffused by
Complexity Digest 2002.08 February-21-2002
The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly
even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort
to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and
unfriendly countries, military officials said.
The plans, which have not received final approval from the Bush
administration, have stirred opposition among some Pentagon officials who
say they might undermine the credibility of information that is openly
distributed by the Defense Department's public affairs officers.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/international/19PENT.html>Pentagon
Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad, NYTimes, 02/02/18
Editor's Note: Disinformation
has been a traditional element of warfare with often unexpected outcomes
as a result of the interactions of hostile audiences (those who always
claim that the released information is false) and the friendly audiences
(those who want to believe that the released information is true).
Simulations to estimate the effect of any piece of released
(dis)information onto a multi-cultural audience certainly have a high
degree of complexity.
Disinformation is certainly a special case, since it does carry
information. Luciano Floridi has been investigating misinformation, which
is like information only it is not true. He has a draft chapter that
discusses this issue among others. Here is his email message, which I
don't think has been posted here>
Apologise for cross-posting
Dear colleague,
the draft 1.0 of "Information", chapter 5 of the Blackwell
Guide to the
Philosophy of Computing and Information (Oxford - NY: Blackwell, 20003)
http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/blackwell/index.htm
is available for
comments at
http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/pdf/info.pdf
I shall be very grateful and fully acknowledge any critical comment you may
wish to share.
Best regards,
Luciano Floridi
_______________________________________
[email protected]
www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/
I think that the whole issue of false messages requires careful study. Since falsity is a semantic notion, the idea applies only to semantic, not syntactic information and it correlates. Intentions also come into play.
Incidentally, my spell checker wants to replace "disinformation" with "disinfestation".
John
Dr John Collier
[email protected]
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research
Adolf Lorenz Gasse 2
A-3422 Altenberg Austria
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/pl/Staff/JohnCollier/
Received on Fri Feb 22 15:38:34 2002