Natural information, factivity and nomicity

Biology and Philosophy 36 (2):1-21 (2021)
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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 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 play in our understanding of living and thinking things.

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Convention: A Philosophical Study.David Kellogg Lewis - 1969 - Cambridge, MA, USA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Laws and symmetry.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
What is a Law of Nature?D. M. Armstrong - 1983 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Sydney Shoemaker.
The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science.Nancy Cartwright - 1999 - New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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