Conceptual analysis and human nature 183
priori/a posteriori grid do I believe accrues to my central claims? In lieu of a
narrative summary, I will list and discuss my claims as follows:
(H-1) Natural information is a strictly regular relation between world affairs
in which a condition r occurs if and only if another condition of s being
F obtains, with transformations on either side having to map in strictly
regular fashion, too (the informational specification claim).
(H-2) An organism’s environment is composed of the specific set of conditions
that are relevant to the accomplishment and the subset of those which
are constitutive to the presence of his biological functions, where these
conditions may be partly altered by him (the ecological coupling claim).
(H-3) If H-2 and H-1 are true: an organism inhabits an informational environment that is specific to him, to the extent that a certain set of distal sconditions in his environment is relevant to him and the related proximal
r-conditions are detectable for him (the informational specificity claim).
(H-4) If H-3 is true: the presence and accomplishment of cognitive functions
depends on the availability of natural information in the environment,
where the availability or treatment of that information may partly depend
on the presence and operation of artefacts (the cognitive coupling claim).
(H-5) If an organism’s environment is specific and dynamic in character (H-2),
and if conditions in his informational environment are strictly related to
conditions in his ecological environment (H-1 and H-3), and if the presence and accomplishment of some cognitive functions depends on the
presence and operation of cognitive artefacts (H-4), and if the presence
and use of those artefacts, being constituents of the environment, feeds
back into the relevant conditions therein (H-2), then there is no immutable, artefact-independent human nature (the anthropological claim).
Are any of these statements analytic? Such will be untenable to claim for most of
them, especially H-5. However, H-1 is a statement that can be readily considered
for analyticity. To be sure, it would be immediately faced with the objection that
the term “information” is used in a different way in the majority of contexts, and
that there are reasons why the Dretskean notion of information informally recapitulated here found it hard to gain widespread acceptance. However, these are
issues not of conceptual analysis but of terminological convention, which may be
mended by adding a marker of difference, for example by referring to information
as intended here as natural information.
As it stands, H-1 is recognisably a definition of a concept. It can be transformed
into a form such as “All information is a lawfully regular relation of the type
r ↔ F(s)” or “Information is the case if and only if a lawfully regular relation of
the type r ↔ F(s) obtains” without loss, and then can be tested for its semantic
properties. The strictly regular co-occurrence between distal and proximal conditions is part of that definition, so that any statement derived from it by means
of elementary logical operations – such as its negation or the symmetry of the
relation – is contained within it. Hence, the conceptual claim is that it is true
priori/a posteriori grid do I believe accrues to my central claims? In lieu of a
narrative summary, I will list and discuss my claims as follows:
(H-1) Natural information is a strictly regular relation between world affairs
in which a condition r occurs if and only if another condition of s being
F obtains, with transformations on either side having to map in strictly
regular fashion, too (the informational specification claim).
(H-2) An organism’s environment is composed of the specific set of conditions
that are relevant to the accomplishment and the subset of those which
are constitutive to the presence of his biological functions, where these
conditions may be partly altered by him (the ecological coupling claim).
(H-3) If H-2 and H-1 are true: an organism inhabits an informational environment that is specific to him, to the extent that a certain set of distal sconditions in his environment is relevant to him and the related proximal
r-conditions are detectable for him (the informational specificity claim).
(H-4) If H-3 is true: the presence and accomplishment of cognitive functions
depends on the availability of natural information in the environment,
where the availability or treatment of that information may partly depend
on the presence and operation of artefacts (the cognitive coupling claim).
(H-5) If an organism’s environment is specific and dynamic in character (H-2),
and if conditions in his informational environment are strictly related to
conditions in his ecological environment (H-1 and H-3), and if the presence and accomplishment of some cognitive functions depends on the
presence and operation of cognitive artefacts (H-4), and if the presence
and use of those artefacts, being constituents of the environment, feeds
back into the relevant conditions therein (H-2), then there is no immutable, artefact-independent human nature (the anthropological claim).
Are any of these statements analytic? Such will be untenable to claim for most of
them, especially H-5. However, H-1 is a statement that can be readily considered
for analyticity. To be sure, it would be immediately faced with the objection that
the term “information” is used in a different way in the majority of contexts, and
that there are reasons why the Dretskean notion of information informally recapitulated here found it hard to gain widespread acceptance. However, these are
issues not of conceptual analysis but of terminological convention, which may be
mended by adding a marker of difference, for example by referring to information
as intended here as natural information.
As it stands, H-1 is recognisably a definition of a concept. It can be transformed
into a form such as “All information is a lawfully regular relation of the type
r ↔ F(s)” or “Information is the case if and only if a lawfully regular relation of
the type r ↔ F(s) obtains” without loss, and then can be tested for its semantic
properties. The strictly regular co-occurrence between distal and proximal conditions is part of that definition, so that any statement derived from it by means
of elementary logical operations – such as its negation or the symmetry of the
relation – is contained within it. Hence, the conceptual claim is that it is true