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

["Mark Johnson" <johnsonmwj1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dave, everyone

I'm not sure I know what Lord Alton means by information (and I doubt
he does either!). I'll send you some more stuff on Mingers when I have
it to hand, but in the meantime, I think T.S. Eliot put it rather well
in "The Rock":

"Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

(how is it that three lines of poetry written 70 years ago can tell us
so much about the information cult of our times?)

Mark

p.s. If you're adding to the reading list then Winograd and Flores:
"Understanding Computers and Cognition" is absolutely essential.

On 12/15/07, Dave Taylor <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.
> _______________________________________________
> Critical-Realism mailing list
> Critical-Realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/critical-realism
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Critical-Realism mailing list
> Critical-Realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/critical-realism
>

_______________________________________________
Critical-Realism mailing list
Critical-Realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/critical-realism