On Quantifying Semantic Information

The purpose of this paper is to examine existing methods of semantic information quan-tification and suggest some alternatives. It begins with an outline of Bar-Hillel and Carnap’s theory of semantic information before going on to look at Floridi’s theory of strongly semantic information. The latter then serves to initiate an in-depth investigation into the idea of utilising the notion of truthlikeness to quantify semantic information. Firstly, a couple of approaches to measuring truthlikeness are drawn from the literature and explored, with a focus on their applicability to semantic information quantification. Secondly, a similar but new approach to measure truthlikeness/information is presented. The term ‘information ’ can mean many things. Here information is understood as factual semantic content, where if s is an instance of semantic content then: 1. s consists of one or more data 2. the data in s are well-formed 3. the well-formed data in s are meaningful ‘Factual ’ simply means that the semantic content is about some state of affairs, that it i