Philosophy is making headway with aboutness. While traditional accounts of intentionality focused on human mental states and the meaning of public language, recent years have seen the rise of foundational accounts seeking instances of information transmission in the natural world. This paper surveys recent accounts of so-called natural meaning and their import for ethology. I argue that analyses are usually restricted to a few special cases that should be generalized along two dimensions to provide a clearer picture of the role of information in nature.
First, philosophers often focus on positive information, whereby information raises the probability of some state of affairs. Information can also lower the probability of a state of affairs, though it has not always been clear how probability-lowering information could be at work in the natural world. The second priority of recent informational accounts is cooperation. Some accounts take cooperation, or at least partial common interest, as a prerequisite for a biological signalling system. I argue information transmission does not require common interest, and that there is an interesting link between conflict and negative information. An overview of what impact the philosophy of information can have on ethology is also presented.