26 Informational environments
occurrence of some s being F to a certain degree covaries with a reduction of possibilities in the receiver’s behaviours between t 0 and t 1 , an informational relation
is established.
The game-theoretic aspect of Skyrms’s theory is not supposed to be read too
literally: the signalling games involving senders and receivers of information are
introduced in order to provide a formal model of patterns of modifications of
probabilities that can be detected even in kinds of natural processes that could
not possibly involve any consciously pursued strategies of players. For the senders and receivers, there is no presupposition of a “pre-existing mental language”,
and the analysis shall include cases “where no plausible account of mental life is
available” (Skyrms 2010, 7, endorsing David Lewis’s 1969 account of senderreceiver games).
It does not become entirely clear to what extent Skyrms introduces these
notions as formal analogies that shall help reconstructing informational relations
of all kinds, or whether they are to be read in a more material sense, where senders
and receivers are involved in sending and receiving signals even in cases where
they are not endowed with a mental life. At any rate, the probabilities involved
are meant to be understood as frequency distributions of certain outcomes, not
as degrees of belief on the sender’s or receiver’s side. What, however, is presupposed whenever real-world organisms are involved is some kind of adaptive
dynamics that accounts for the transition from randomly variant towards directed
and world-fitting behaviours. Variation and natural selection within populations
are a necessary precondition of the evolution of signalling games. Successful
behaviours and failures are accrued by real-world organisms, and provide the
values on the basis of which a strategy is determined within the context of the
game-theoretical model. Even though the players of signalling games need not be
aware of certain strategy or of following that strategy, they will remain players in
terms of their real-world behaviour and its consequences, as they are influenced
by signals received and, sometimes, emitted by them.
Even more explicit reliance on the Lewisian notion of sender-receiver games is
displayed in recent work by Peter Godfrey-Smith, who focuses on the co-evolution,
broadly conceived, of sender and receiver behaviour – which may also comprise
functional components of one organism. Instead of the uptake of natural information encountered in the environment, the paradigm applications of this model are,
first, mechanisms of signalling within an organism, more specifically mechanisms
of transmission of genetic information and of memory (Godfrey-Smith 2013b)
and, second, rule-governed activities of signalling between organisms, in the context of animal communication (Godfrey-Smith 2013a). In the following chapters,
I will make a case for environmental information for perception being the genuine paradigm of information, from chemo- or magnetotaxis onward, with active
signalling within or between organisms building upon such natural information.
In a different critical take on Dretske’s approach to the role of probability in
information, Millikan (2001) observes that, if the probability required for informational content shall be p = 1, r would have to not only be a signal of s being F
but also, at the same instance, transmit a mark of its reliability to its consumer,
occurrence of some s being F to a certain degree covaries with a reduction of possibilities in the receiver’s behaviours between t 0 and t 1 , an informational relation
is established.
The game-theoretic aspect of Skyrms’s theory is not supposed to be read too
literally: the signalling games involving senders and receivers of information are
introduced in order to provide a formal model of patterns of modifications of
probabilities that can be detected even in kinds of natural processes that could
not possibly involve any consciously pursued strategies of players. For the senders and receivers, there is no presupposition of a “pre-existing mental language”,
and the analysis shall include cases “where no plausible account of mental life is
available” (Skyrms 2010, 7, endorsing David Lewis’s 1969 account of senderreceiver games).
It does not become entirely clear to what extent Skyrms introduces these
notions as formal analogies that shall help reconstructing informational relations
of all kinds, or whether they are to be read in a more material sense, where senders
and receivers are involved in sending and receiving signals even in cases where
they are not endowed with a mental life. At any rate, the probabilities involved
are meant to be understood as frequency distributions of certain outcomes, not
as degrees of belief on the sender’s or receiver’s side. What, however, is presupposed whenever real-world organisms are involved is some kind of adaptive
dynamics that accounts for the transition from randomly variant towards directed
and world-fitting behaviours. Variation and natural selection within populations
are a necessary precondition of the evolution of signalling games. Successful
behaviours and failures are accrued by real-world organisms, and provide the
values on the basis of which a strategy is determined within the context of the
game-theoretical model. Even though the players of signalling games need not be
aware of certain strategy or of following that strategy, they will remain players in
terms of their real-world behaviour and its consequences, as they are influenced
by signals received and, sometimes, emitted by them.
Even more explicit reliance on the Lewisian notion of sender-receiver games is
displayed in recent work by Peter Godfrey-Smith, who focuses on the co-evolution,
broadly conceived, of sender and receiver behaviour – which may also comprise
functional components of one organism. Instead of the uptake of natural information encountered in the environment, the paradigm applications of this model are,
first, mechanisms of signalling within an organism, more specifically mechanisms
of transmission of genetic information and of memory (Godfrey-Smith 2013b)
and, second, rule-governed activities of signalling between organisms, in the context of animal communication (Godfrey-Smith 2013a). In the following chapters,
I will make a case for environmental information for perception being the genuine paradigm of information, from chemo- or magnetotaxis onward, with active
signalling within or between organisms building upon such natural information.
In a different critical take on Dretske’s approach to the role of probability in
information, Millikan (2001) observes that, if the probability required for informational content shall be p = 1, r would have to not only be a signal of s being F
but also, at the same instance, transmit a mark of its reliability to its consumer,