A theory of information structure I. General principles (Q580239)

This paper is the first from a series devoted to a new view of cognition: This theory is built on a proposed relationship between computers and cognition: Content machine analogy which states that the cognition of, or extraction of information from, a phenomenon is the description of the phenomenon as a machine. The concept of a machine embodies two kinds of structures: computational, or algebraic structures and stability; and the way in which these two factors characterize aspects of cognition representation is investigated. The main result of the paper is a particular detailed statement of the content machine analogy, called the description postulate: the cognition is an attempt to model a phenomenon as the algebraic structure of a machine and the model is decomposed into a sequence of levels, with respect to stability (cognitive stability principle). From this, all the results concerning the perception of nested control, reference frames, etc., are obtained.