Resurrecting Dretskean information 17
include the waning of daylight for plants, diurnal and nocturnal animals or the
overall reduction of daylight hours and ambient temperatures over some weeks
for migrating birds and hibernating mammals. Unlike the effects of physical
forces on inert matter, a behaviour is not exhausted by the observable effects
of such forces, as for example impact or heating, on organisms. Behaviour is a
structured response to a condition or a set of conditions in the environment, and
it is internally caused by the organism. This is the distinction Dretske was after.
As to the informational aspect of the exchange between organism and environment, all behaviours, and many things that are not immediately discernible as
behaviours, are structured by informational relations. It is not the physical nature
of the conditions in the environment as such that determines the response. Instead,
a certain change of variables, or a certain constellation of constancies and changes
of variables in the organism’s surroundings, has a signalling effect to the organism. It is the presence or absence of a signal or the difference between signals
that accounts for a difference in behavioural responses. Instances of some environmental variable moving outside a certain neutral or equilibrial range will, by
virtue of the value assumed by the variable rather than by virtue of the electrical,
chemical or other properties that are hence subject to variance, prompt a negative feedback reaction that results in returning the value of the variable into the
equilibrial range.
1
This is the first sense in which informational relations are partly
independent of, or underdetermined by, physical conditions.
The second sense in which informational relations are underdetermined by
physical conditions is complementary to the first: as the functional and physical
structure and dispositions of the organism are crucial structuring features in the
generation of behaviour, a condition identical in physical terms may give rise to
widely variant behaviours, depending on the informational relations in which it is
embedded. Hence, frogs and humans will do different things when placed in water.
Being so placed conveys different information to frogs (to whom it is the normal
habitat) and to people in different contexts (Am I going swimming, or did I slip
when walking on the river bank?). I will argue in Chapter 6 that, in providing different organisms with information for different behaviours, the set of variables that
an organism responds to in his specific way constitutes his specific environment.
As the flip side, as it were, of the coin of underdetermination, information is to
be thought of as an objective commodity, despite being used in diverse ways, in
diverse constellations and to diverse purposes by different receivers or “consumers”, for being relevant to them in distinctive ways. Information does not reduce
to whatever an interpreter takes to be information. In some important respects, it
is even indifferent to any interpreter’s dispositions or the presence of any interpretation. Instead, it is a relation between world affairs that can be both independently observed and subject to probabilistic and context-specific modes of
analysis. This view of information will be defended here as the proper reconstruction of Dretske’s theory.
This view of information might be best understood when properly placed among
the broad variety of theories of information that exist in the literature. In the first
instance, it sees itself as part of a historical lineage of approaches that departed in
include the waning of daylight for plants, diurnal and nocturnal animals or the
overall reduction of daylight hours and ambient temperatures over some weeks
for migrating birds and hibernating mammals. Unlike the effects of physical
forces on inert matter, a behaviour is not exhausted by the observable effects
of such forces, as for example impact or heating, on organisms. Behaviour is a
structured response to a condition or a set of conditions in the environment, and
it is internally caused by the organism. This is the distinction Dretske was after.
As to the informational aspect of the exchange between organism and environment, all behaviours, and many things that are not immediately discernible as
behaviours, are structured by informational relations. It is not the physical nature
of the conditions in the environment as such that determines the response. Instead,
a certain change of variables, or a certain constellation of constancies and changes
of variables in the organism’s surroundings, has a signalling effect to the organism. It is the presence or absence of a signal or the difference between signals
that accounts for a difference in behavioural responses. Instances of some environmental variable moving outside a certain neutral or equilibrial range will, by
virtue of the value assumed by the variable rather than by virtue of the electrical,
chemical or other properties that are hence subject to variance, prompt a negative feedback reaction that results in returning the value of the variable into the
equilibrial range.
1
This is the first sense in which informational relations are partly
independent of, or underdetermined by, physical conditions.
The second sense in which informational relations are underdetermined by
physical conditions is complementary to the first: as the functional and physical
structure and dispositions of the organism are crucial structuring features in the
generation of behaviour, a condition identical in physical terms may give rise to
widely variant behaviours, depending on the informational relations in which it is
embedded. Hence, frogs and humans will do different things when placed in water.
Being so placed conveys different information to frogs (to whom it is the normal
habitat) and to people in different contexts (Am I going swimming, or did I slip
when walking on the river bank?). I will argue in Chapter 6 that, in providing different organisms with information for different behaviours, the set of variables that
an organism responds to in his specific way constitutes his specific environment.
As the flip side, as it were, of the coin of underdetermination, information is to
be thought of as an objective commodity, despite being used in diverse ways, in
diverse constellations and to diverse purposes by different receivers or “consumers”, for being relevant to them in distinctive ways. Information does not reduce
to whatever an interpreter takes to be information. In some important respects, it
is even indifferent to any interpreter’s dispositions or the presence of any interpretation. Instead, it is a relation between world affairs that can be both independently observed and subject to probabilistic and context-specific modes of
analysis. This view of information will be defended here as the proper reconstruction of Dretske’s theory.
This view of information might be best understood when properly placed among
the broad variety of theories of information that exist in the literature. In the first
instance, it sees itself as part of a historical lineage of approaches that departed in