Philosophical Aspects of Information Science

I am still catching-on the classic articles of information science. These are the articles, we should all have read, but often don’t quite have the time. One such article is by the late Bertram Brookes – The foundations of information science. Part I. Philosophical aspects. Brookes, is most ‘famous’ if an information scientist can be famous that is, through his much quoted fundamental equation.

The paper argues for a philosophical basis for Information Science based on Karl Popper’s three worlds ontological scheme. This scheme, which as I understand it, is not without its critics, aims to develop a new objective epistemology, breaking away from many traditional views and constructs of knowledge. Popper postulated schema based on ‘three worlds’; Brooke concentrates on the third world as the one of relevance to information science – the objective knowledge world. This is a very interesting and thought provoking paper and is a must.

Measuring Knowledge Use

Another paper today, this one very easy to read and understand!! This paper by William Dunn (Measuring Knowledge Use, 1983) is a brief summary (in 1983) of the problem of measuring knowledge in research. I thought that this may prove to be of particular relevance to my research. The paper is a summary or a very brief literature review of main approaches take to measuring knowledge via interview and questionnaire techniques. More importantly, the paper summarises the methods used by researchers in quantifying knowledge by use of different scales. This paper, has some good references, although I suspect is quite old, nevertheless because of its accessibility is a good place to start when looking at the subject.

Information Science and the Phenomenon of Information

In the run up to Christmas, and the holidays, I have decided to go through my paperwork and the hundreds of unread articles. That said, the library emailed me to let me know that three more inter-library loan requests had arrived. One of these articles was Information Science and the Phenomenon of Information by Belikin and Robertson (1976).

This is a very interesting foundation type article, which examines and tries to define the phenomenon of information. They describe information as that which is capable of transforming structure. Information is seen as being best describe by its context, for which they present seven examples, including: Hereditary (genetics); Uncertainty; perception; Individual concept-forming; Inter-human communication; Social conceptual structures and Formalized knowledge. Needless to say, this is a very interesting paper, that needs your full attention, but is worth reading through as it foes help to set a back-drop to information science and the phenomenon of information.

The Ladder of Inference and its use in Information Literacy

Ok, my new resolution is to try again at typing something every day on my blog; we will have to see how long that lasts! Well, part of the reason for my lack of activity on this blog was the preparation for my PhD confirmation process. Thankfully, I passed that, and so I would seem to be a boa fide PhD student. Since my confirmation viva, I have been looking at altering some parts of my methodology – more of this in a future posting.

Whilst preparing for my viva, I came across the ladder of inference. The ladder of inference is a theory, which deals with how people make decisions based on the information they have at hand. This information is sometimes quite incomplete, yet they use what they have and infer a result that is sometimes way off the mark. Although, my understanding is that it was developed for international negotiations, I believe that it has a lot of potential for examining the ‘critical’ aspect of information literacy. I would value any of your thoughts on this subject.