Is Information Out There?

In this paper, I argue that the distinction between information and data lies at the root of much confusion that surrounds the concept of information. Although data are ‘out there’ and concrete, informational content is abstract and always co-constituted by information agents – a set which includes at least linguistically capable human beings. Information is thus not an intrinsic property of concrete data, but rather a relational property, which relies on the existence of information agents. To reach this conclusion I first argue that the semantic content of human-generated data is co-constituted by the information agent. In the second part I broaden the scope and argue that environmental information also depends on information agents. I further consider and reject both Dretske’s view of information as an objective commodity and foundational accounts of information, that take information to be the fundamental ingredient of reality.