Information
Information

Summary/Abstract: I would argue that the development of science in the last decades of the 20th century was shaped more by the concept of “information” than by any other technical concept or discovery. And yet the version of this concept that has played this central organizing role, as Jesper Hoffmeyer has long been arguing, is curiously hollow, eviscerated of the functional role it pretends to play. Indeed, it is nearly unrecognizable in comparison to both the colloquial version of this concept and its historical antecedents. But even more curious is the fact that its centrality to so many fields of inquiry – and its attractiveness for uses in fields as diverse as biology, cognitive science, and even quantum physics – derives from feigning to provide this excluded conceptual content. As a result, the term “information” has become a Trojan horse, enabling a radical form of eliminative materialism to become the presumed established dogma in science, while pretending to offer a false consilience between the physical and the semiotic realms of inquiry.

• Details
• Contents