Information without content: a Gibsonian reply to enactivists' worries.
Cognition January 1, 2015 Ludger Van Dijk, Rob Withagen, Raoul M Bongers 65 citations
Radical enactivists worry that using the concept of information in ecological psychology implies content, which would conflict with non-representational cognitive science. This article argues that James J. Gibson's later notion of information was intended to be content-less—information for affordances rather than information about the environment. The authors contend that subsequent ecological psychology has drifted into cognitivist language, but that reclaiming Gibson's original insight—that there is no information in content, only in use—allows the concept to be applied without invoking representation. Embracing this content-free notion of information can help situate the enactivist's "basic mind" within larger, more complex scales of coordination.