Information for Cognitive Agents

Humans use information in everyday activities, including learning, planning, reasoning and decision-making. There is broad agreement that, in some sense, human cognition involves the processing of information, and, indeed, many psychological and neuroscientific theories explain cognitive phenomena in information-theoretic terms. However, it is not always clear which of the many concepts of ‘information’ is the one relevant to understanding the nature of human cognition. Here, I suggest that information should be understood pragmatically. Whatever the criteria for information are, what makes some x informational has to do with how an agent either processes or can process x. Information is defined as meaningful structured representations of perceptual data. Their meaningfulness is determined by their behavioural effect on the agent.