Cultural information

don't ask, don't tell

Tim Lewens

pp. 369-382

in: Dennis Dieks, Stephan Hartmann, Thomas Uebel, Marcel Weber, Maria C. Galavotti (eds), New directions in the philosophy of science, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

Cultural evolutionary theorists typically endorse an informational conception of culture. When we examine the accounts they give of information, they frequently have obvious problems. One might think the solution is to adapt a teleofunctional account of genetic information to the cultural domain, but this, too, would be a mistake. Instead, the cultural evolutionist can make do with a scantily theorised notion of cultural information, which acts both to delimit the primary explanatory focus of cultural evolutionary theory, at the same time as serving as a heuristic prompt for uncovering the diverse structures responsible for cultural reproduction.