[Critical-Realism] Critical Realism and Philosophy of Information

["David Opderbeck" <dopderbeck@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jose-Carlos and Dave Taylor -- thanks for the helpful feedback!  I have read
Shannon and other work following off of Shannon such as Norbert Weiner.  I'm
relatively new to critical realism, though, having come to it through
discussions in the religion-and-science field.

Here's what I'm working on:  I'm an intellectual property law scholar.
Although my field deals with the legal regulation of "information," the
notion of "information" itself is undeveloped in our literature.  The
predominant underlying assumption is that "information" is a sort of
economic commodity, and that it should be viewed through the lens of
neo-classical economic theory as a sort of "public good" (a non-rival
resource).  There is also a significant stream of our literature that
focuses on "authorship" from a postmodern deconstructionist perspective, and
essentially argues that control over cultural production is entirely and
issue of power.  Finally, there are "cyberlaw" scholars who focus on
Internet regulation who -- I would argue -- mish-mash the economic and
postmodern ideas about information to suggest that information in cyberspace
is socially constructed "code" (including computer code), which can be kept
"open" without depleting the "information commons" because it also functions
as a non-rival economic commodity.

I want to critique and synthesize these perspectives on "information"
through a critical realist lens.  What I am thinking is that "information /
code" is neither a non-rival economic resource nor entirely a social
construction.  I want to conceive of "information" similar to the way in
which Bhaskar conceives of "society" in "The Possibility of Naturalism" --
as something that is both a given and a product of continual transformation
by people.  In other words, I want to introduce a critical realist ontology
of information to the debates over the control intellectual property.  I
think this will suggest a more communitarian ethical and regulatory approach
than the sort of libertarian presuppositions that I think underlie much of
the existing literature.  At the very least, I don't think anyone in my
field has made a serious stab at this sort of thing.
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