INFORMATIONAL THEORIES OF REPRESENTATION

Informational theories of representation, or informational semantics as they are sometimes called, are built around the idea that representation derives from informational relations obtaining between organisms and environments. The relevant notion of information involved here is, roughly, natural information in Grice's sense. The number of rings in a tree, for example, is said to carry information about the age of the tree. The height of a column of mercury in a thermometer carries information about the temperature of the surrounding medium. The turning red of a piece of litmus-paper carries information about the relative acidity of the surrounding liquid. The figure-of-eight dance of certain bees carries information about the distance and direction of a food source. A compass needle carries information about the direction of magnetic north. And so on.

It is important to realize that, in the above cases, the relevant notion of information is completely independent of the contents of any person's propositional attitudes or other mental states. Information is understood to be objectively present in the environment independently of the representational states of any subject. Indeed, information is objectively present in the environment even if there are no subjects of representational states. This feature of the concept of information is crucial. The goal of informational semantics is to provide an account of representation in terms of the concept of information. Propositional attitudes, however, are representational states. Therefore, if information depended on the propositional attitudes of a subject of mental states, then information would itself depend on representational states.