Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

I introduce and argue for two theses. First, representations are, primarily, vehicles for information transmission, qua information transmission. Second, representations aim at optimally trading-off three key cognitive budgets: rate (or transmission and storage costs), distortion (or faithfulness of the transmitted information), and computational complexity. This is what connects both theses: the way to establish that some vehicle is involved in information transmission qua information transmission (as per the first thesis) is to show that it is subjected to operations to optimize information transmission (as per the second thesis.)