Re: [Critical-Realism] Critical Realism and Philosophy ofInformation

["Mark Johnson" <johnsonmwj1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is vey refreshing. To give a slightly more contemporary twist,
I'm spending a lot of time with the late work of Ivan Illich. The big
issue in education at the moment is what is termed 'personalisation'.
Illich was on to this years ago, and I'm fascinated by the resonance
between Illich's personalised universe and the 'personalisation' of
Teilhard de Chardin: "evolution is a continual process of
personalisation" to Max Scheler's 'personalism'... be interested if
anyone's looked at any of this...

Mark

On 12/15/07, Dave Taylor <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Mark
>
> "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?)
>
> Perhaps because the man who wrote your verse was, like Lord Alton, informed
> by the wisdom of G K Chesterton: one of if not the first to intuit the
> causal mechanisms of personality and policy differences.  A hundred years
> ago GKC wrote:
>
> "There is a thought that stops thought.  That is is the only thought that
> ought to be stopped".  Then he indicated what it was: "We have found all the
> questions that can be found.  It is time we gave up looking for questions
> and began looking for answers".
>
> Eliot was asking the right questions in 1934, but wisely was not satisfied
> by that.  By 1939 he was trying to answer them in "The Idea of a Christian
> Society"; by 1941, at the Malvern Conference on the Order of Society, in
> "The Christian Concept of Education".
>
> Here'e an Eliot line from 1939: "A national [leadership] must of course
> include individual [people] of different intellectual types and levels; and
> ... belief has a vertical as well as a horizontal measurement: to answer
> fully the question "What does A[lton] believe, one must know enough about A
> to have some notion of the level on which he is capable of believing
> anything".
>
> Sincere thanks for this.  I look forward to hearing more of Minger.
>
> Dave
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark
> Johnson
> Sent: 15 December 2007 17:35
> To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
> Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Critical Realism and Philosophy
> ofInformation
>
> 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.
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