Nir Fresco (University of Wollongong, Australia), Information, Cognition and Knowledge
Monday, December 23rd, 18:00 PM
Gilman Building, Hall 449
Chair: Prof. Yossef Schwartz
The knowledge-how/knowledge-that distinction has been a hotly debated topic in both epistemology and cognitive science at least since the mid 20th century. In this talk, I discuss a more fundamental distinction between ‘information-how’ and ‘information-that’. This distinction can, arguably, shed light on the knowledge-how/knowledge-that debate and contribute to our understanding of natural cognition in terms of information processing. We take it for granted that cognition is engaged in information processing. Yet, there is no consensus on what information is or what types of information are processed by cognition. The first part of this talk focuses on ‘information-that’ arguing that whatever the criteria for information-that are, what makes some x information-that has to do with how a cognitive agent either uses x or can use x, even if x is false. This argument stands in contrast to the claim that information-that requires truth. The second part of this talk focuses on ‘information-how’ examining what it takes for some x to qualify as information-how and what the contextual conditions are for information-how to be effective, rather than true or false.
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