Johan will present his paper, Which Measure of Information?, in room S2.77. The session will be hybrid, so you can either join via Teams or attend in person. If the latter, please show your interest in advance by sending an email to (pgphil.wips@warwick.ac.uk), so we are sure to have enough space for everybody.

Here is the abstract of Johan’s talk:

 Abstract

Teleosemantics is a discipline which aims to explain how meaning arises from natural processes. According to informational teleosemantics, the content of a mental representation is constrained by the information available to the representing system. Authors who adopt an informational version of teleosemantics, such as Martínez (2013) and Shea (2018) develop statistical formulae which capture, for any given environmental item, whether some representational state carries information about that item. Content is then restricted to only those items that the representational state carries information about. In this paper I argue that we should concern ourselves with how much information a representational state carries about some environmental item, rather than merely whether information is carried. A natural tool for this purpose is Claude Shannon's measure of mutual information. I argue that calculating mutual information allows for a novel solution to one variety of the indeterminacy problem for mental content, the so-called “specificity problem”. Armed with a measure for the quantity of mutual information, one can further constrain mental content according to which item maximises mutual information.