Propositional content in signalling systems

Abstract

Skyrms, building on the work of Dretske, has recently developed a novel informationtheoretic account of propositional content in simple signalling systems. Information-theoretic accounts of content traditionally struggle to accommodate the possibility of misrepresentation, and I show that Skyrms's account is no exception. I proceed to argue, however, that a modified version of Skyrms's account can overcome this problem. On my proposed account, the propositional content of a signal is determined not by the information that it actually carries, but by the information that it would carry at the nearest separating equilibrium of the underlying evolutionary dynamics. I show that this amended account yields reasonable ascriptions of false propositional content in a well-known formal model of the evolution of communication (the 'Philip Sidney' game), and close with a discussion of the serious but perhaps not insuperable difficulties we face in applying the account to examples of signalling in the real world.

Consequences of a Functional Account of Information

“…Like all orthodoxy this view has been disputed [44]. However, it is strongly theoretically supported [28,32,34,33] and recent formal work seeks to justify it in light of Skyrms's treatment [5,47]. To repeat, the traditional view that natural signs do not have correctness conditions is supported by 16 the teleosemantic approach to intentionality, on which having a function is necessary for having a correctness condition.…”

“…In MCT, uncertainty is a quasi-mathematical, quasiengineering concept. Mathematical formalism does not provide its own interpretation, so we have no prima facie reason to constrain Shannon's definitions and theorems to their 5 original domain. However, we do need good reason to apply them elsewhere.…”

Content in Simple Signalling Systems

“… 6 Birch ([ 2014] ) uses a different way of defining content to argue that signals in out-of-equilibrium states have propositional content (which, as with our functional content, in general differs from informational content). …”

Propositional content in signals

“…Biologists and philosophers, some represented here, have developed naturalistic accounts that preserve the distinction between content and information. We have been moved to think about this issue by the recent work of Peter Godfrey- Smith (2012) and Jonathan Birch (2014). There is a lot of commonality in these proposals, but there are significant differences as well.…”