Logan Fletcher

Fred Dretske opens his book Knowledge and the Flow of Information with the assertion that information is objective. In contrast to the common view of information “as something that depends on the interpretive efforts— and, hence, on the prior existence—of intelligent life,” Dretske intends to develop a view of information “as an objective commodity, something whose generation, transmission, and reception do not require or in any way presuppose interpretive processes,” something “independent of its actual or potential use by some interpreter” (Dretske, 1981, p. vii). Dretske has a significant stake in the question of information’s objectivity, because he is trying to use information to naturalize the mind: Can you bake a mental cake using only physical yeast and flour? The argument is that you can. Given the sort of information described... something the most reflective materialists should be willing to give, we have all the ingredients necessary for understanding the nature and function of our cognitive attitudes. (1981, p. xi) And, as Dretske points out elsewhere, “One cannot have a recipe for cake... that lists a cake as an ingredient.... This is why a recipe for thought cannot have interpretive attitudes or explanatory stances among the eligible ingredients” (2000, p. 209). In other words, if information is not objective, if it does depend crucially on interpretation, this effectively renders Dretske’s whole naturalization project viciously circular. As we might expect, then, Dretske takes up the challenge, in the remainder of the book and in other writings, of defending his claim that information is an “objective commodity”, by arguing that everything else on which information depends is itself objective.