In this article, we aim to strengthen the emerging radical, non-representational, approaches to cognitive science by defusing the worries radical enactivists have with the use of information in the ecological approaches – namely the worry that information carries content. We show that Gibson’s later use of the concept is meant to allow for a content-less notion of information, but that the language surrounding information in ecological psychology has subsequently slipped into a more cognitivistic vocabulary. We argue that by considering ecological information not to be information about, but information for affordances, the notion of information can be fruitfully applied without invoking notions of content. Gibson’s later notion of information for perception, stresses the insight that in ecological theory there is no information in content, but only in use. It is suggested that radical cognition should embrace this notion of information without content, as doing so can help to situate the enactivist’s “basic mind” into large and complex scales of coordination.

Key words: content, ecological psychology, enactivism, information, representation.

Excerpt: It is […] clear that there are a number of epistemological options for diverseresearch programs in [Artificial Life]. […] [My] purpose here is to sketch the options that I have been cultivating for some 20 years and why.

Key words: Artificial life

Excerpt: The rationalistic orientation of our prior training in science and technology made the foundations of hermeneutics and phenomenology nearly inaccessible to us. Before we could become open to their relevance and importance we needed to take a preliminary step towards unconcealing the tradition in which we lived, recognizing that it was in fact open to serious question. For us, this first step came through the work of Humberto Maturana, a biologist who has been concerned with understanding how biological processes can give rise to the phenomena of cognition and language.

Excerpt: Questions concerning the future uses of computers are often intertwined with questions about whether they will be intelligent. The existence of a field called ‘artificial intelligence’ implies that possibility and, as we pointed out in our introduction, there have been many speculations on the social impact of such developments. The theoretical principles developed in the earlier chapters lead us to the conclusion that one cannot program computers to be intelligent and that we need to look in different directions for the design of powerful computer technology Our goal in this chapter is to ground that conclusion in an analysis and critique of claims about artificial intelligence. We begin by examining the background in which the question of machine intelligence has been raised.

Excerpt: In this chapter we first establish a context for talking about computers and programming in general, laying out some basic issues that apply to all programs, including the artificial intelligence work that we will describe in subsequent chapters. We go into some detail here so that readers not familiar with the design of computer systems will have a clearer perspective both on the wealth of detail and on the broad relevance of a few general principles.

Excerpt: In this chapter we show how ‘language as action’ and ‘language as interpretation’ can be reconciled. In doing this we will move back and forth between two fundamental questions: “How does an utterance have meaning?” and “What kinds of actions do we perform in language?” The juxtaposition of these questions leads us to a new grounding for our understanding of language and the nature of human existence as language.