Reasoning about data and information

Abstract

Cognitive states as well as cognitive commodities play central though distinct roles in our epistemological theories. By being attentive to how a difference in their roles affects our way of referring to them, we can undoubtedly accrue our understanding of the structure and functioning of our main epistemological theories. In this paper we propose an analysis of the dichotomy between states and commodities in termsof themethodof abstraction,andmorespecificallybymeansof infomorphisms between different ways to classify states of information, information-bases, and evidential situations.