Two Kinds of Information Processing in Cognition

Abstract

What is the relationship between information and representation? Dating back at least to Dretske (1981), an influential answer has been that information is a rung on a ladder that gets one to representation. Representation is information, or representation is information plus some other ingredient. In this paper, I argue that this approach oversimplifies the relationship between information and representation. If one takes current probabilistic models of cognition seriously, information is connected to representation in a new way. It enters as a property of the represented content as well as a property of the vehicles that carry that content. This offers a new, conceptually and logically distinct way in which information and representation are intertwined in cognition.