Abstract
Biological and cognitive sciences rely heavily on the idea of information transmitted between natural events or processes. This paper critically assesses some current philosophical views of natural information and defends a view of natural information as Nomic and Factive. Dretske (Knowledge the flow of information/Fred Dretske, MIT Press Cambridge, Mass, 1981) offered a Factive view of information, and recent work on the topic has tended to reject this aspect of his view in favor of a non-Factive, probabilistic approach. This paper argues that the reasoning behind this move to non-Factivity is flawed and mixes up different problems with Dretske’s original view. I show that one of these problems—strictness—has to do with Nomicity rather than Factivity. The other problem—reference class ambiguity—is not solvable just in terms of a theory of natural information. On the Dretske-inspired view I defend, natural information is Factive and Nomic but is insufficient to determine the cognitive or biological content of a natural process. In sum I present an examination what natural information is and what role it can (and cannot) play in our understanding of living and thinking things.
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Notes
Going forward I will usually refer simply to ”information” without the ”natural” qualifier, trusting that my meaning will be clear from context.
This is one way of roughly stating ”the problem of Intentionality,” which has concerned quite a few philosophers besides Dretske (Jacob 2019).
Dretske actually uses different phrases to connote non-accidentalness in different places, and some of these are weaker-sounding than (ii). At times he speaks broadly of ”nomic dependence” (1981, pp. 75–76). He also relies considerably on an example where informational relations are fixed by conventions among regular partners in a card game (70), which seems not to involve Lawful correlations in the strong sense DT suggests. Still, Dretske does explicitly appeal to Laws at times, and I believe DT reflects how Dretske’s approach has generally been received by others in this literature.
See (Strevens 2019) on difference-making.
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Baker, B. Natural information, factivity and nomicity. Biol Philos 36, 26 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-021-09784-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-021-09784-4