From Specification to Convention (A Purple Peril)

I previously laid out how specification works and why it's important to the ecological approach. Read that first, because I build on it a lot here. I also laid out the corollary of specification, that it allows that information to come to be something an organism can actually use to coordinate and control functional behaviour. Here, I think out loud about how convention might be able to do similar work, because of Sabrina's work (here, and published now here; read that paper for the extended detail on this) expanding ecological information to handle tasks such as language where specification is not always an option.

This is in part an attempt for me to get my head around some implications of Sabrina's analysis. My plan here is to develop an analogy to specification. This analogy will detail the work specification does to make information informative, then try to lay out how conventions fills this role. The goal is to see if conventions can support behaviour without needing representational help. The answer will be yes, because all the differences between law based and convention-based information are 'behind the curtain', only visible from the third-person perspective. From the first person perspective of the organism, all it gets is structures in energy arrays it can try to use to organise behaviours. Conventions place no special learning burden on the organism (Golonka, 2015) and this means that convention can support behaviour with any representational enrichment the same way specification can. (The hidden differences do have consequences, however, so I will map that out a bit.)

There are many things I have not attempted to explain and as usual this reflects my current thinking, not necessarily my final thinking. I look forward to hearing what questions this leaves unanswered for the reader as a way to move this discussion forwards.