A Note on Information and Mental Models

The concept of information is an important issue both in the context of modelling the human mind and in the design of intelligent machines. This article discusses the meaning of “information” and how it is acquired and observed, and presents a simple intuitive model for information acquisition. It proposes the idea that information has two forms, “referential” and “non‐referential” or “thing” and “described‐thing”. This suggests that we should develop process‐and action‐oriented information theories instead of descriptive ones.