  We describe a scenario for inflation in the framework of non-critical string
theory, which does not employ an inflaton field. There is an exponential
expansion of the volume of the Universe, induced by enormous entropy production
in the early stages of cosmological evolution. This is associated with the loss
of information carried by global string modes that cross the particle horizon.
It is the same loss of information that induces irreversible time flow when
target time is identified with the world-sheet Liouville mode. The resulting
scenario for inflation is described by a string analogue of the Fokker-Planck
equation that incorporates diffusion and dissipative effects. Cosmological
density perturbations are naturally small.
