A Comparative Study on Luciano Floridi and Rafael Capurro's Informatological Thoughts

The focal question in informatology is that of the nature of information. Luciano Floridi and Rafael Capurro are two philosophers that try to answer to the question “What is Information?”. Floridi traces the question in the framework of philosophy of information. Floridi suggests that information is “true well-formed meaningfull data”. According toFloridi, we haven’t such thing as pure data in itself. Information is always restricted to a certain level of abstraction. On the other hand, Capurro tries to answer to the question with regard to Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics. According to Capurro, information is a dimension of human existence that roots in Dasein’s “being-in-the-world-with-others”. Capurro says that information is dependent to the horizons of meanings in which Dasein is embedded. With regard to this existential analysis, Capurro emphasizes on hermeneutic-rhetoric character of information science; Angeletics in his own terms. A very important idea that Floridi and Capurro agree on it, is that information is always ontologically committed,i.e. it is always restricted to a certain horizon of meanings. Finally the implications of Floridi and Capurro's thoughts are discussed with regard to LIS.