Thinker · TH-0166
Fred Dretske
Fred Dretske was an American philosopher who taught at the University of Wisconsin, Stanford and Duke. He developed an informational approach to knowledge and…
On the Coordinates: 1.3.3 Intentionality · 6.18 Philosophy of Information
Also known as Frederick Irwin Dretske
1932 – 2013 · Madison, Wisconsin; Stanford; Durham, North Carolina
Traditions: Analytic
Fred Dretske was an American philosopher who taught at the University of Wisconsin, Stanford and Duke. He developed an informational approach to knowledge and mind: knowledge is belief caused or sustained by information, and the content of mental states derives from the information they carry about the world. In the philosophy of mind he defended naturalistic, representational accounts of intentionality and experience, and in epistemology he argued that knowledge is not closed under known logical implication.
Key ideas
- Knowledge is belief caused, or causally sustained, by the information that p.
- A signal carries the information that p only if it would not occur unless p, which grounds aboutness in natural relations.
- What an internal state represents is fixed by its function, often acquired during a learning period.
- Knowledge is not closed under known entailment, which gives a response to some skeptical arguments.
Major works
- Seeing and Knowing (1969)
- Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981)
- Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes (1988)
- Naturalizing the Mind (1995)
In the conversation
- Discussion Testimony as an information channel: Nyāya’s śabda next to Dretske
- Discussion Data is not knowledge: what Dretske’s account says about my credit-scoring models
- Debate Teleosemantics is the best naturalistic theory of content we have
In the Coordinates
The questions of philosophy where Fred Dretske takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.
- 1.3.3 Intentionality How can one thing be about another thing?
- 6.18 Philosophy of Information Is information something in the world, or something we bring to it?