Misinformation

Predominantly (but not exclusively), the contemporary philosophical analysis of information and misinformation has focused on animal signalling and specifically on contexts analogous to Lewisian signalling games. ‘Sender’ and ‘receiver’ are players in Lewisian signalling games. In their simplest version, the two players face a set of situations (‘states’), only the sender can observe these states, and each of them gets a certain payoff depending on the response given to these states. Considering his potential payoff, the sender chooses a signal, observed by the receiver, who then chooses a response (based on his potential payoff). Typically, it is considered that the sender determines the content of the signal in this situation.

However, in these settings, what counts as misinformation is notoriously difficult to define. The reason is that whether a signal counts as information or misinformation depends on many factors, such as which measure of accuracy one decides to use, or which partition one uses to determine the content of the signals (in determining the content, we ‘partition’ i.e., divide the possible states of the world), or whether one understands signals as having propositional content or changing probabilities of states, and so on. It is no wonder, then, that this sets grounds for a very fruitful and interesting philosophical debate.