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Natural information refers to the information carried by natural signs such as that smoke is thought to carry natural information about fire. A number of influential philosophers have argued that natural information can also be utilized in a theory of mental content. The most widely discussed account of natural information (due to Dretske, in Knowledge and the flow of information, 1981/1999) holds that it results from an extremely strong relation between sign and signified (i.e. a conditional probability of 1). Critics have responded that it is doubtful that there are many strong relations of this sort in the natural world due to variability between signs and signified. In light of this observation, a promising suggestion is that much of the interesting natural information carried by natural signs is really information with a probabilistic content. However, Dretske’s theory cannot account for this information because it would require implausible second order objective probabilities. Given the most plausible understanding of the probabilities involved here, I argue that it is only sequences of traditional natural signs (not individual signs) that carry this probabilistic information. Several implications of this idea will be explored.

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-015-0692-6

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