But reading Michel Menou's book and following the ideas of our listserv, I sense that much of the discourse is predicated on assumptions about information use that psychologists and other social scientists know to be seriously flawed. Such assumptions and corollaries seem to be well-suited for the purposes for which they were originally designed, namely, the transmission of signals down a telephone wire. But they present us with an extremely limited idea of information. Each concept can be defined in many different ways. This circumstance presents us with the danger of choosing definitions easily adapted to our measurement and statistical techniques, rather than adapting our techniques to fit more defensible definitions.
Psychologists are no more able to define information than anyone else.
But at least we can argue strongly what information is not. Information is not knowledge. We reduce it with knowledge, not with information. So psychologists are prone to be skeptical of measuring the effects of information on development, because we believe that it is more proper to evaluate the effects of knowledge on development. To do so it is prudent to learn something of the relationship between information and knowledge.