Copyright Philosophy of Science 2015 Preprint (not copyedited or formatted) Please use DOI when citing or quoting This is a preprint of an article that will appear in Philosophy of Science (“Information and Veridicality: Information-Processing and the Bar-Hillel/Carnap Paradoxxx”). The final publication will be available on http://www.jstor.org/journal/philscie. Information and Veridicality: Information-Processing and the Bar-Hillel / Carnap Paradox Nir Fresco & Michaelis Michael Abstract. Floridi’s Theory of Strongly Semantic Information posits the Veridicality Thesis (i.e., information is true). One motivation is that it can serve as a foundation for information-based epistemology being an alternative to the tripartite theory of knowledge. However, the Veridicality thesis is false, if ‘information’ is to play an explanatory role in human cognition. Another motivation is avoiding the so-called Bar-Hillel/Carnap paradox (i.e., any contradiction is maximally informative). But this paradox only seems paradoxical, if (a) ‘information’ and ‘informativeness’ are synonymous, (b) logic is a theory of inference, or (c) validity suffices for rational inference. We argue that (a), (b) and (c) are false. Introduction Does information have to be true to qualify as information? Some have maintained that it does (e.g., Adams 2003; Dretske 1981; Floridi 2011; Grice 1989; Mingers 2013). The requirement that information must be true is a very strong semantic constraint not merely due to the problem of defining and ascertaining truth. It also limits information to statements, propositions and sentences, since truth is a property of such linguistic constructs due to the relations they bear to states of affairs. Statements, propositions and sentences are types of information-that, but so are maps and some diagrams, for example. (A map of Sydney can convey information-that about the distance between Martin Place and Town Hall.) Hereafter, we refer to information-that as information. There is an embarrassment of riches as far as theories of information go, and Luciano Floridi is, obviously, free to define ‘information’ to mean anything at all. Floridi approvingly cites Claude Shannon’s saying that “[i]t is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account for [… its] numerous possible applications” (2010a, 1). Rather than endorsing a reductionist approach according to which we can extract the essentials of information from the wide variety of available models and theories, Floridi endorses a non-reductionist approach. We face, on his view, “a network of logically interdependent but mutually irreducible concepts” of information (Floridi 2011, 33). Whilst Floridi is not advancing an informational-monist position, his Theory of Strongly Semantic Information (TSSI) is supposedly intended as a new basis for doing both epistemology (2011, chap. 12) and ontology (2011, chap. 15). However, this invites the question whether defining information so that it is veridical gives us a theory that is useful in making sense of processes within us and other objects that we have antecedently understood as processing information. We are not committed here to an informational-monist view. Yet, a definitional pluralism of ‘information’ does not entail that there are as many genuine types of information. Importantly, no notion of information