Re: [Critical-Realism] Critical Realism and Philosophy of Information

["Dave Taylor" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

With David's interest and Mark's book review in mind, I picked up on the way
Lord Alton used the word in a recent House of Lords debate:

"I was struck in our preceding debate by how my noble friend Lord Patel and
the noble Lord, Lord Winston, were arguing, understandably, for the use of
INFORMATION to develop research to ensure good medical practice. ...
Bioethics brings together philosophy, science, medicine and healthcare but
increasingly recognises the need to have regard to broad social interests,
as well as the needs and concerns of specialist groups. The problems are
pressing, the concerns widespread and the issues difficult, but resources
can be brought to bear to provide policy-makers such as ourselves and others
with INFORMATION, advice and guidance."

This (perhaps because of the contrast with advice and guidance) gave me the
impression he was talking about FACTUAL information (CR events, Algol68
variables) whereas advice would be interpretive (CR structure, Algol68
modes) and guidance "know-how" (CR about mechanisms, Algol68 program).  In
the context of philosophy he would hardly have been talking about (in
Shannon's terms) "non-redundant" information, i.e. real-world "news" (CR
experiences, Algol68 values of variables), although with a four-level
Algol68 interpretation of Shannon's decoder it can be seen that new "facts"
to be remembered might well include interpretations or methods as well as
real world objects.

My conclusion from this is that Lord Alton was using 'information' in the
way which has become common-place in our Humean culture (i.e. excluding
interpretive advice and guidance), whereas the implications of the Shannon
and CR positions are that it should be used inclusively.  Advice and
guidance, I suspect, are precisely what Humean science has replaced by
pseudo-facts about monetary value and equilibriating markets.

Mark, from this you may get some idea of what it is I would like to know
about Minger's book.  His "characterisation of language as connotive rather
than denotive" sounds promising, but is he still going in Humean fashion for
one or the other and not (in CR fashion) both?  Has his focus on autopoiesis
(automata) drawn his attention away from the implications for human freedom
of Shannon's "how to free oneself from information error", how to
[sufficiently] absent an absence of truth?

Best

Dave


 

-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David
Opderbeck
Sent: 14 December 2007 15:22
To: critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Critical-Realism] Critical Realism and Philosophy of Information

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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