ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book develops a perspective on how Simon's insight into the cognitive importance of the environment and the information provided by that environment could be accounted for in general. It also examines what implications this analysis will have for an account of information-providing artefacts like the ones referred to in the earlier quote. The book seeks to seek to rehabilitate the notion of natural information introduced by Fred against the altogether reasonable criticisms brought forward by advocates of 4E cognition, who argue for a local and probabilistic rather than nomologically governed character of natural information. It discusses three theories of visual perception that give markedly variant importance to the role of information and of the environment of perception and action: David Marr's computational theory of vision, James Jerome Gibson's ecological psychology and Dale Purves's Empirical Strategy of vision.
