‘Culture is Information’

When cultural evolutionary theorists give a definition of culture, they usually say that culture is information. More specifically, they say that culture is information acquired by social learning. What does it mean to equate culture with information of this sort? This chapter argues for a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach to cultural information. The accounts of cultural information supplied by cultural evolutionists have obvious flaws. But this does not mean that philosophers should tell cultural evolutionists how to define cultural information, by adapting their best theories of genetic information to the task at hand. Instead, this chapter argues that ‘cultural information’ is a two-faced term. On the one hand, it denotes the population-level collections of mental states that evolutionary theories of culture aim to keep track of. On the other hand, it denotes the diverse set of resources that enable cycles of cultural reproduction.