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  1. Causes That Make a Difference.C. Kenneth Waters - 2007 - Journal of Philosophy 104 (11):551-579.
    Biologists studying complex causal systems typically identify some factors as causes and treat other factors as background conditions. For example, when geneticists explain biological phenomena, they often foreground genes and relegate the cellular milieu to the background. But factors in the milieu are as causally necessary as genes for the production of phenotypic traits, even traits at the molecular level such as amino acid sequences. Gene-centered biology has been criticized on the grounds that because there is parity among causes, the (...)
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  • Information as a Probabilistic Difference Maker.Andrea Scarantino - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (3):419-443.
    By virtue of what do alarm calls and facial expressions carry natural information? The answer I defend in this paper is that they carry natural information by virtue of changing the probabilities of various states of affairs, relative to background data. The Probabilistic Difference Maker Theory of natural information that I introduce here is inspired by Dretske's [1981] seminal analysis of natural information, but parts ways with it by eschewing the requirements that information transmission must be nomically underwritten, mind-independent, and (...)
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  • Steps to an Ecology of Mind.G. Bateson - 1972 - Jason Aronson.
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  • Origins of Objectivity.Tyler Burge - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Tyler Burge presents an original study of the most primitive ways in which individuals represent the physical world. By reflecting on the science of perception and related psychological and biological sciences, he gives an account of constitutive conditions for perceiving the physical world, and thus aims to locate origins of representational mind.
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  • Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information.Brian Skyrms - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Brian Skyrms offers a fascinating demonstration of how fundamental signals are to our world. He uses various scientific tools to investigate how meaning and communication develop. Signals operate in networks of senders and receivers at all levels of life, transmitting and processing information. That is how humans and animals think and interact.
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  • A teleosemantic approach to information in the brain.Rosa Cao - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (1):49-71.
    The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...)
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  • The philosophy of information.Luciano Floridi - 2011 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Luciano Floridi presents a book that will set the agenda for the philosophy of information. PI is the philosophical field concerned with the critical investigation of the conceptual nature and basic principles of information, including its dynamics, utilisation, and sciences, and the elaboration and application of information-theoretic and computational methodologies to philosophical problems. This book lays down, for the first time, the conceptual foundations for this new area of research. It does so systematically, by pursuing three goals. Its metatheoretical goal (...)
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  • The Introduction of Information into Neurobiology.Justin Garson - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (5):926-936.
    The first use of the term "information" to describe the content of nervous impulse occurs 20 years prior to Shannon`s (1948) work, in Edgar Adrian`s The Basis of Sensation (1928). Although, at least throughout the 1920s and early 30s, the term "information" does not appear in Adrian`s scientific writings to describe the content of nervous impulse, the notion that the structure of nervous impulse constitutes a type of message subject to certain constraints plays an important role in all of his (...)
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  • John Maynard Smith’s notion of animal signals.Ulrich E. Stegmann - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (5):1011-1025.
    This paper explores John Maynard Smith’s conceptual work on animal signals. Maynard Smith defined animal signals as traits that (1) change another organism’s behaviour while benefiting the sender, that (2) are evolved for this function, and that (3) have their effects through the evolved response of the receiver. Like many ethologists, Maynard Smith assumed that animal signals convey semantic information. Yet his definition of animal signals remains silent on the nature of semantic information and on the conditions determining its content. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Meaning.Herbert Paul Grice - 1957 - Philosophical Review 66 (3):377-388.
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  • Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 2004 - MIT Press.
    How the various things that are said to have meaning—purpose, natural signs, linguistic signs, perceptions, and thoughts—are related to one another.
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  • Knowledge and the Flow of Information.Fred I. Dretske - 1981 - Stanford, CA: MIT Press.
    This book presents an attempt to develop a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of mind using ideas derived from the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon. Information is seen as an objective commodity defined by the dependency relations between distinct events. Knowledge is then analyzed as information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information in analog form for conceptual utilization by cognitive mechanisms. The final chapters attempt to develop a theory of meaning by viewing meaning as (...)
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  • Consequences of a Functional Account of Information.Stephen Francis Mann - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (3):1-19.
    This paper aims to establish several interconnected points. First, a particular interpretation of the mathematical definition of information, known as the causal interpretation, is supported largely by misunderstandings of the engineering context from which it was taken. A better interpretation, which makes the definition and quantification of information relative to the function of its user, is outlined. The first half of the paper is given over to introducing communication theory and its competing interpretations. The second half explores three consequences of (...)
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  • The Biosemiotic Approach in Biology : Theoretical Bases and Applied Models.Joao Queiroz, Claus Emmeche, Kalevi Kull & Charbel El-Hani - 2011 - In George Terzis & Robert Arp (eds.), Information and Living Systems: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives. Bradford. pp. 91-130.
    Biosemiotics is a growing fi eld that investigates semiotic processes in the living realm in an attempt to combine the fi ndings of the biological sciences and semiotics. Semiotic processes are more or less what biologists have typically referred to as “ signals, ” “ codes, ”and “ information processing ”in biosystems, but these processes are here understood under the more general notion of semiosis, that is, the production, action, and interpretation of signs. Thus, biosemiotics can be seen as biology (...)
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  • Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 2017 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    Ruth Garrett Millikan presents a strikingly original account of how we get to grips with the world in thought. Her question is Kant's 'How is knowledge possible?', answered from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. We begin with an understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, then develop a theory of cognition within that world.
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  • (6 other versions)Convention: A Philosophical Study.David Lewis - 1969 - Synthese 26 (1):153-157.
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  • A Peircean Approach to ‘Information’ and its Relationship with Bateson’s and Jablonka’s Ideas.Charbel Niño El-Hani - 2008 - American Journal of Semiotics 24 (1-3):75-94.
    The Peircean semiotic approach to information that we developed in previous papers raises several new questions, and shows both similarities and differenceswith regard to other accounts of information. We do not intend to present here any exhaustive discussion about the relationships between our account and otherapproaches to information. Rather, our interest is mainly to address its relationship to ideas about information put forward by Gregory Bateson and Eva Jablonka. We conclude that all these authors offer quite broad concepts of information, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Information without truth.Andrea Scarantino & Gualtiero Piccinini - 2010 - Metaphilosophy 41 (3):313-330.
    Abstract: According to the Veridicality Thesis, information requires truth. On this view, smoke carries information about there being a fire only if there is a fire, the proposition that the earth has two moons carries information about the earth having two moons only if the earth has two moons, and so on. We reject this Veridicality Thesis. We argue that the main notions of information used in cognitive science and computer science allow A to have information about the obtaining of (...)
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  • (1 other version)The concept of information in biology.John Maynard Smith - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):177-194.
    The use of informational terms is widespread in molecular and developmental biology. The usage dates back to Weismann. In both protein synthesis and in later development, genes are symbols, in that there is no necessary connection between their form (sequence) and their effects. The sequence of a gene has been determined, by past natural selection, because of the effects it produces. In biology, the use of informational terms implies intentionality, in that both the form of the signal, and the response (...)
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  • Information: Its interpretation, its inheritance, and its sharing.Eva Jablonka - 2002 - Philosophy of Science 69 (4):578-605.
    The semantic concept of information is one of the most important, and one of the most problematical concepts in biology. I suggest a broad definition of biological information: a source becomes an informational input when an interpreting receiver can react to the form of the source (and variations in this form) in a functional manner. The definition accommodates information stemming from environmental cues as well as from evolved signals, and calls for a comparison between information‐transmission in different types of inheritance (...)
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  • How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species.Dorothy L. Cheney & Robert M. Seyfarth - 1990 - University of Chicago Press.
    "This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done,...
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  • Biosemantics.Ruth Millikan - 2007 - In Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • (2 other versions)Knowledge and the Flow of Information.Fred I. Dretske - 1981 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 175 (1):69-70.
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  • (1 other version)Knowledge and the Flow of Information.Barry Loewer - 1982 - Philosophy of Science 49 (2):297-300.
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  • Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life.Eva Jablonka, Marion J. Lamb & Anna Zeligowski - 2005 - Bradford.
    Ideas about heredity and evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. New findings in molecular biology challenge the gene-centered version of Darwinian theory according to which adaptation occurs only through natural selection of chance DNA variations. In Evolution in Four Dimensions, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb argue that there is more to heredity than genes. They trace four "dimensions" in evolution -- four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. These systems, they argue, can all (...)
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  • Consumers Need Information: supplementing teleosemantics with an input condition.Nicholas Shea - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2):404-435.
    The success of a piece of behaviour is often explained by its being caused by a true representation (similarly, failure falsity). In some simple organisms, success is just survival and reproduction. Scientists explain why a piece of behaviour helped the organism to survive and reproduce by adverting to the behaviour’s having been caused by a true representation. That usage should, if possible, be vindicated by an adequate naturalistic theory of content. Teleosemantics cannot do so, when it is applied to simple (...)
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  • Information-How.Nir Fresco - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (1):58-78.
    The distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that has long been debated in the epistemological literature. This distinction can, arguably, be better understood in terms of a more fundamental distinction between information-how and information-that. Information-how is prescriptive and informs a cognitive agent about which action can be performed to achieve a particular outcome. Information-that is descriptive and informs the agent about events, objects, and states of affairs in the world. Since the latter has received more attention in the epistemological literature, this article (...)
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  • (6 other versions)Convention: A Philosophical Study.David K. Lewis - 1971 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 4 (2):137-138.
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  • Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3):674-681.
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  • (1 other version)The philosophy of information.Luciano Floridi - 2010 - The Philosophers' Magazine 50:42-43.
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  • The re-emergence of emergence, and the causal role of synergy in emergent evolution.Peter A. Corning - 2012 - Synthese 185 (2):295-317.
    Despite its current popularity, “emergence” is a concept with a venerable history and an elusive, ambiguous standing in contemporary evolutionary theory. This paper briefly recounts the history of the term and details some of its current usages. Not only are there radically varying interpretations about how to define emergence but “reductionist” and “holistic” theorists hold very different views about the issue of causation. However, these two seemingly polar positions are not irreconcilable. Reductionism, or detailed analysis of the parts and their (...)
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  • (1 other version)Convention: A Philosophical Study. [REVIEW]Richard E. Grandy - 1977 - Journal of Philosophy 74 (2):129-139.
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  • (1 other version)Meaning.H. Paul Grice - 2010 - In Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing about language. New York: Routledge.
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  • Is Representation Rife?David Papineau - 2003 - Ratio 16 (2):107-123.
    This paper applies a teleosemantic perspective to the question of whether there is genuine representation outside the familiar realm of belief‐desire psychology. I first explain how teleosemantics accounts for the representational powers of beliefs and desires themselves. I then ask whether biological states which are simpler than beliefs and desires can also have representational powers. My conclusion is that such biologically simple states can be ascribed representational contents, but only in a system‐relative way: such states must be ascribed varying contents (...)
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  • The rights and wrongs of natural regularity.Jon Barwise & Jerry Seligman - 1994 - Philosophical Perspectives 8:331-364.
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  • A primer on information and influence in animal communication.Ulrich Stegmann - unknown
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