Foreword
Thomas
J. Froehlich
I don't remember exactly when
we met for the first time, but I
remember very well your kind invitation to give a talk at Kent State
University
in 1992 before the annual meeting of the American Society for
Information
Science that took place in Pittsburgh, October 25-29. We both
participated
at the Panel Session "Information Democracy: Power and Control
Issues." I talked about "Information
Technology and Technologies of
the Self." The paper was published in 1996 in the Journal of
Information Ethics. Information Ethics was emerging from Library
and
Information Science and Computer Science, as you describe in A
brief history
of information ethics.
My paths of thought in
phenomenology, technology, and ethics and my
professional experience in Germany were closely related to yours. We
started an
exciting personal and academic conversation. Thank you for your
friendship and
hospitality.
Introduction
Matthew
Kelly & Jared Bielby (Editors)
Reading your biography
reviewing ideas and contingencies of my life
(bios) is an exciting experience for me. When I came to Germany
in the
early seventies I tried to understand information technology and its
application in LIS. Quick transformations induced me to cultivate
self-criticism and to remain sceptical when revolutions were announced
and soon
left behind. I searched for a remedy of intellectual and practical
nearsightedness looking into the history of ideas in order "to help
reveal
how we find ourselves cast in the digital world," as you rightly say.
The phenomenological
challenge is to unveil the power structures in
our own as well as in other information cultures with their implicit or
explicit normative frameworks. A vast historical and critical work is
needed in
order to analyze texts and artefacts reflecting them and to become
aware of
possible intersections, exclusions, mutual ignorance, and creative
adaptations
between information cultures. If we read foundational texts of
different
traditions from this perspective, Intercultural Information Ethics will
arise.
The issue addressed in the title of this Festschrift is a mark for this
future
conversation.
I warmly thank you both
for
the huge amount of time and the effort
you have invested encouraging contributors to present their ideas in
this
global seminar. These seeds will flourish at the right time in the
right
places.
I
Culture and Philosophy of Information
Super-Science,
Fundamental Dimension, Way of Being: Library and Information Science in
an Age
of Messages
David
Bawden and Lyn Robinson
Thanks for your clear,
concise, and comprehensive analysis of my
thoughts on the nature of Information Science and its foundations. You
both
write: "There is a good deal to be said about the relation between
information and entropy, complexity and similar physical concepts
(Bawden &
Robinson, 2015a, 2015b), but it is not yet evident that this is best
expressed
in terms of messages and messengers." You are right. What is missing in
my
analysis is no more and no less than the concept of
time. Three-dimensional time plays a key
role also in quantum mechanics as Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
and others have
shown.
With regard to "Capurro's
Trilemma" you write: "There
are, it seems, two kinds of gaps: those between the concepts; and those
between
scholars who think it worthwhile to try to bridge such gaps and those
who do
not." The "gaps between concepts" are in fact gaps between
contexts. Aristotle is a master in presenting commonalities and
differences
between the use of concepts in different contexts. Take, for instance,
his
analysis of the concept of middle (meson, mesotes) in
physics,
logic, epistemology, and ethics.
With regard to the importance
of the concept of document, "a
central concern within LIS," you both write: "This might be seen as
an endorsement of a focus on documents and documentation as a central
concern
within LIS, although Capurro does not seem to have made this link
explicitly." This is not quite the case. I pointed to it in my PhD (Information,
1978, 230-239, 293) where I defined information as documented knowledge
made
available or "useful" – "ready-to-hand" or
"zuhanden" in Heideggerian terms – within a network of institutions,
media, instruments for classification and retrieval and the like. This
definition is not only not in contradiction to Popperian World 3 but
includes
also Worlds 1 and 2. Popper's criticisms of "pure facts" and his
insistence that any observation is "theory-laden" is not dissimilar
to the hermeneutic concept of "pre-understanding."
Floridi's "Philosophy of
Information" is pretty near to my
early research on the Latin root informatio and the Greek
concepts of eidos, idea, morphe and typos (See
here).
In the course of
time I took a
self-critical distance from it, becoming less metaphysical and more
existential. Some clarity in these matters might come from a thorough
analysis
of what ontology means in different schools of thought and, as in my
case, in
Heideggerian phenomenology. An analysis of the question 'what is a
document?'
should reflect the epochal changes of this concept in such a way that
the word 'is'
in the definition should be always hermeneutically understood as an
'as.'
Having participated at
the FIS/ISIS
2015 Vienna Summit Information
Society at the Crossroads – Response and Responsibility of the Sciences
of
Information (See also here), I
am more curious than ever on how Information
Science—dealing
with knowledge documentation, organization, transmission and use—will
find its
place within this interdisciplinary framework (one that appears to me
more like
a labyrinth than as having one sort of rationale based on a
common
language and related to the whole of reality). But you are right when
you ask:
"What is real and what does 'real' actually mean?" These are
fundamental questions that need to be asked again and again because the
meaning
of being changes epochally, as in the case of Heideggerian
interpretation of being (as three-dimensional time). Thinking of the
nature of
the real from this perspective means to be able to look at the changing
essence
of what appears within a field of possibilities and not the other way
around as
metaphysics tends to do.
LIS can embrace both
traditions, the metaphysical and the
phenomenological, as it has to do with the reification of human
knowledge as
well as with its use. The user perspective is the practical and
original
horizon in which users are embedded. Information Science takes the
objectivizing "present-at-hand" perspective. In the Preface of their
seminal book Understanding
Computers and Cognition (1986) Terry
Winograd
and Fernando Flores wrote: "All new technologies develop within the
background of a tacit understanding of human nature and human work. The
use of
technology in turn leads to fundamental changes in what we do, and
ultimately
in what it is to be human. We encounter the deep questions of design
when we
recognize that in designing tools we are designing ways of being." This
was and is still a key insight for my LIS research as well as for my
view of
Information Ethics from an intercultural perspective.
Thank you for your
contribution.
The
"Naturalization" of the Philosophy of Rafael Capurro: Logic,
Information and Ethics.
Joseph
E. Brenner
Naturalization of
information: what a wonderful research programme!
It brings information back to nature (physis) and to the
life-world,
differentiating between kinds of messengers and messages as forms that
are
communicated. Not just reversing platonism but looking carefully at
what shows
itself from itself in all the contradictory richness of its logic,
i.e., in the
logic of its own possibilities (dynamis) coming from initial
forces (archai)
that take it to fulfilment (entelecheia), i.e., to presence and
permanence. Naturalization means also "the bringing-into-science" of
such dynamical processes with methodologies and strategies of
reductionism and
non-reductionism that allow perspectives from which physical no
less
than artificial beings can be grasped in their being as based
on
quantification aiming at forecasting.
"Logic-in-reality" means
giving priority to "the
basic antagonistic or contradictory nature of reality" in the different
ways it announces itself to human understanding and the different
possibilities
of giving responses to it. "One cannot find responsibility in oneself
as
an isolated agent" no less than as a worldless human agent. You write:
"Information is a meta-concept that defines both the environment and
the
individual, which cannot be separated from it, and LIR supports this
ontological turn in hermeneutics. For me, as for Heidegger,
hermeneutics is
ontological. LIR is about the most fundamental properties of man's
“becoming in
the world." This statement is a strong and clear message concerning the
issue of "naturalizing" information which is common to both of us.
You also write: "The origin and dualistic character of individual and
collective
moral responsibility to other human beings and the world begins with
the
awareness that we are individual entities, apparently separate from but
also
dependent on the world and others." We take a distance from the modern
concept of autonomy of an isolated subject and become aware of the
tension,
instead of the Kantian dichotomy, between autonomy and heteronomy. We
learn
this today particularly from our being embedded in the digital network
which is
itself part of a whole of networked things. Heidegger's concept of
"world"
addresses specifically this semantic and pragmatic "whole" in which
we are originally embedded that remains implicit until a tool breaks
down. This
is why the analysis of "broken technologies" by Fernando Flores
Morador is a key issue when it comes to a phenomenology of information
based on
everyday practices. Arun Tripathi's research is exemplary in this
regard and
highly relevant for LIS too.
You write: "Heidegger calls
"world" the perspective
that allows us to see things as contextualized tools. But the formula
being-in-the-world characterizes the mode of being of human beings in
which we
share a world and have a pragmatic objective view of things as tools.
Heidegger
does not negate or devalue the objective view but makes the key
statement, for
this comparison with Lupasco, that "being able to switch between the
two
modes makes manifest our capability of going beyond both, tools and
objects" (Capurro, 2008a, Interpreting the
Digital Human,
paragraph
8)." I think that this is a concise and precise statement that points
to
the issue of human transcendence ("our capability of going beyond")
from a "naturalized" perspective.
It is, indeed, in
phenomena
such as boredom and loneliness that are
not just subjective feelings but ways of being-in-the-world or ways in
which
the world becomes manifest to us that questions such as "What is the
world?" arise. You write: "Most importantly, the relation of all this
to human logos is an explicit one as is the way in which the
whole is
and "interplays" with us." Nature, physis, appearing and
concealing itself, give us no possibility to unveil its origin (arche)
and goal (telos), in case it is appropriate to use these
concepts as
different from us who know, in some way, strange enough, about our
birth and
death. Our being-in-the-world is unheimlich, uncanny, and un-heimlich,
homeless. We fail again and again trying to understand the whole of
reality and
reality as a whole.
To present me "as a
philosopher of transition, of transition to
a form of knowledge whose outlines to me are neither clear nor
determined"
is a good formulation for my life and my thinking.
I am very grateful for your
comprehensive interpretation of my
thinking in dialogue with you and Lupasco. Thank you for your
friendship.
Turing's
Cyberworld
Michael
Eldred
What is the cyberworld but a
project, maybe the project at
the end of modernity, aiming not only at understanding mathematically
the whole
of reality but also to do it in the medium of the Universal Turing
Machine
embracing what Heidegger calls "das Seiende im Ganzen," the world as
a totality (omnitudo realitatis).
This totality or
world-openness appears to us as three-dimensional
time where the phenomenon of presencing and absencing takes place
differently
in each ekstasis or time modus (past, present, future).
Being
contingent and fragile, we are able to host for a while what reveals or
conceals itself. We can remember, for instance, past events that seem
clear as
having been like this or that without being able to exclude the
possibility of
their concealness in this or that regard. Thanks for helping me to
better
understand this issue.
"Only by virtue of being
nested in the existential world of
human beings is the cyberworld in time." We should then be cautious
speaking about the cyberworld as a world, i.e. as embracing the
whole of
reality, instead of understanding it as part of the "existential world
of
human beings." This is a crucial difference. What the digital copula
ties
is not a subject with a predicate or a subject with an object but one
bit
string with another one. "As physical, any copulator is tied to the
present, i.e. to its present state and what is presently in contact
with it
(the physical data it receives); it is unable to stretch itself into
the two
distinct kinds of absence, the past and future, and cope with the
ambiguity of
presence and absence „simultaneously‟, as a human mind can do and
constantly
does (even though modern science „thinks nothing‟ of it)." The
cyberworld
"nested" within the world reduces the "playground" to the
present with different possibilities of success and deterioration. The
main
challenge is, indeed, "that the cyberworld will increasingly engulf
human
being."
Our long-standing dialogue on
these and other issues has helped me
to see more clearly what digital ontology
is and how a "hermeneutic,
ontological compass" can help us to understand the cyberworld as
"nested" in the world and not the other way around. We need to think
about some strategies for dealing with this key challenge of the
digital age.
"Non coerceri a maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est"
("not to be coerced by the greatest, but to be contained by the
smallest – that is divine”) is Hölderlin's motto in the first book
of the Hyperion. The source is Ignatius of Loyola's
epitaph. Aristotle
says: "he
psyche ta onta pos esti panta" ("the soul is in some way all
beings") (De an. III, 8,
431 b 21). "In some way" (pos) indeed.
Thank you for all what I have learnt from you over the years and for
our friendship.
Hermeneutics
and Information Science: The Ongoing Journey From Simple Objective
Interpretation to Understanding Data as a Form of Disclosure
Matthew
Kelly
Thanks for retrieving my
paths of thought concerning the project of
interpreting hermeneutically Information Science. It is, indeed, a long
time
ago, namely in the eighties, when I started opening my eyes with regard
to what
was happening around me – my "circunstancia" as José Ortega y
Gasset
would say – at the Center for Nuclear Documentation located in
the Karlsruhe
Nuclear Research Center which is now part of the Technical
University of
Karlsruhe being called Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). It
embraces
research institutes dealing with applied material research, molecular
biophysics, meteorology and climate research, nanotechnology, technical
chemistry and physics and nuclear waste disposal. "The times they are
a'
changin" (Bob Dylan) and with them not only our understanding of
nuclear
energy but also of ICT. We talked in that mythical time about
bibliographic data
bases in the computer science context (data processing). It was
hard to
imagine that digital interpretation using algorithms, at that time we
called
them information retrieval languages, would be a key technology
of the
21st century.
Digital data is the universal
currency of capitalism in the digital
age. With the rise of the Internet, data do not refer any more
primarily to,
for instance, computer applications in the field of scientific
communication,
i.e., to bibliographic data, but particularly to what users
provide about themselves, intentionally or
unintentionally. The result
are world
data banks originating from the use of all kinds of digital devices
as well
as of smart digitally networked things and processes. User's
lives
become thus digitally objectivized. This is one condition of possibility about how to incorporate an
objectivist approach to information.
The other condition is to
reformulate existential
hermeneutics with
regard to the digital life-world. From the perspective of the users,
digital data
are "ready-to-hand" – but the question is: for whom? From the
perspective of the owners of world data banks, they are a magic
source
of capital that nourishes itself, a kind of data fusion reactor
similar
to the nuclear fusion reactor dreamt in the seventies that was
perceived
soon as too dangerous for an open society that would mutate into a
nuclear
surveillance society. The corresponding danger today is the one of an
information surveillance society.
I share your conclusion: "It
is only when we approach
hermeneutic enlightenment as more than the fusion of our own horizon
with
tradition, when we include a critique of ideology within its ambit (but
not its
orbit), that we are likely to realize the best of all possibilities: a
pluralistic understanding of the language-immersed interpretative
schema which
we inherit and contribute to and a well-formed objectivistic critique
which is
open to the contingent and practical requirements of information using
communities."
Thank you for retrieving my
"hermeneutics and information
science" and for your friendship.
The
Epistemological Maturity of Information
Science and the Debate Around Paradigms
Fernanda
Ribeiro and Armando Malheiro
I highly appreciate your
critical reflections and suggestions
concerning the long-standing debate around paradigms in Information
Science. I
share your views contrasting a cumulative or fragmented approach to the
information disciplines with an evolutionary approach that is
trans-disciplinary and increasingly scientific. According to my
experience,
there was little interest in the LIS community in discussing
fundamental issues
in the seventies and eighties. The discipline was based on practices
particularly
concerning how the new technologies could and should be used (or not)
in the
library field. In fact, some librarians were sceptical about it. The
use of
computers and data bases, for instance, was considered as non-relevant
for
public libraries when I started teaching documentation at the School of
Librarianship in Stuttgart. On the other hand, LIS was mainly conceived
from
the perspective of information retrieval, particularly at university
level.
I like your suggestion of
interpreting the evolution of information
science in terms of a "custodial" and "post-custodial"
process in which the matters dealt with theoretically and practically
in the
custodial paradigm do not disappear but are seen under a new light in
such a
way that, as you state, LIS includes "two types of theoretical and
practical intervention," one being the "technical matrix" and
another one "a know-how based on the study of and on mono-, inter- and
multidisciplinary research, which takes the social sciences as a
central axis
and derivation point for crossing with other scientific disciplines."
This
allows us to avoid the sometimes polemic discussion about the
(in)commensurability of scientific paradigms but also to leave a purely
pragmatic approach that gives "professional associations the power to
produce guidelines for the development of the curricula of
universities."
On the other hand, there is
an ongoing transformation of
universities into technical schools that deepens the
compartmentalisation of
disciplines as modules in view of their practical utility. This
takes us
to the foundational question about the nature of knowledge in the
digital age.
We need, indeed, more than ever, LIS curricula based on an open inter-
und
multidisciplinary research and we must abandon, as soon as possible,
the
"custodial" situation in which they have been relegated to for a long
time.
This is a matter to be dealt
with also from an ethical perspective
that includes, but is by no way identical with, a deontology for
librarians and
information scientists. This is what you do when you address critically
the
very nature of the field, starting a discussion which is not dissimilar
to the
one addressed by Immanuel Kant in his
Answer to the question:
What is
Enlightenment? (1784). Kant was dealing with the custodial
power
exercised
on science by the state, the military and the church. From this
perspective,
paradigm changes are not just an epistemological issue but are part of
the
social power-play not only within the sciences and the academic
production,
transmission and application of scientific knowledge, but also of the
sciences
as agents in the social interplay and the aim of the institutions on
which they
are based (resisting, or not, instrumentalisation). LIS academic
research and
teaching must grow up and enter a "post-custodial" age also in this
perspective. Your vision brings a new light and fresh insights into a
longstanding discussion. The challenge now is, following Karl Marx'
famous dictum,
to change the LIS world, once we have interpreted it in a new way.
Thank you for your
challenging ideas and for your friendship. I
remember with great pleasure the International Seminar you organized in
the Escola
Superior de Belas Artes in Porto on "Segredo e Memória na
Era da
Informação" (Secrecy and Memory on the Era of
Information) in the 29-30 of
November, 2007. The issue is even more relevant today than it was ten
years
ago.
A
Methodology for Studying Knowledge Creation in Organizational Settings:
A
Phenomenological Viewpoint
Anna
Suorsa and Maija-Leena Huotari
I read in the nineties some
of the publications that came into the
spot light of research on management and business administration, such
as the
book by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi: The Knowledge
Creating Company
(1995) or Georg von Krogh, Kazuo Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka: Enabling
Knowledge Creation (2000) and was surprised that I could not find
any
explicit mention of hermeneutics (See here). This was an
example, I thought, of
the
compartmentalisation of the sciences even when the phenomena at stake
are the
same.
Your methodology is an
example on how interdisciplinary research can
be fruitful, not only in the LIS field. You both bring something new
with
regard to the discussion in business administration, namely "the
experiences of the human beings involved in the process of knowledge
creation" as being "in the pivotal position." The interactive
process is "an event in itself." You explain this event by saying:
"the phenomenon of knowledge creation is always contextual: it happens
in
a borderless relation to the world (though the concept of context has
its
problems in the light of hermeneutic phenomenology)." You take the
issue
of phenomenology seriously, namely to let the phenomenon of knowledge
creation
be what it is, the interplay between participants that takes place
within a
shared theoretical and/or practical context. You write: "When we study
the
phenomenon of knowledge creation as an experiential phenomenon, we can
gain
from the participants’ multiple stories and interpretations of their
experiences.
These data can be collected by using interviews, diaries or even
surveys. In the data
gathering the phenomenological research
emphasizes openness: open-ended questions and
dialogues are
promoted to gain descriptions of the experiences (Moustakas, 1994, p.
13)." You add this important remark: "It is also important not to assume
anything, as the premise of a
phenomenologically oriented research is that the interviewer “does not
seek to
predict or determine causal relationships” (Moustakas, 1994, p. 105)."
You
apply this phenomenological premise to
the study of an event of interaction "in which phenomenology structures
the forming of knowledge on a very fundamental level, starting from
perceptions
and their interpretation. The phenomenological attitude rises from the
notion
of perceptions and phenomena as the real objects of study. Only a
phenomenon
exists in a certain time and place and only it can be reached. In
phenomenology
one does not search for truth or an idea behind the perceived
phenomenon but
examines what is manifested in the event (Zahavi, 2007, p. 15)
Phenomenon is
not a fixed object but a way of encountering. At the same time the
ambiguity of
knowledge becomes obvious: all knowledge is based on the perceived
phenomenon
and thus dependent on the perceiver's perspective and intention
(Heidegger,
2006, pp. 28-31)."
I
fully share your insights as well as
your conclusion that "the hermeneutic
viewpoint
does not offer simple models for knowledge creation; instead it
emphasizes the
deep and complex nature of the phenomenon. Phenomenological
hermeneutics offers
a well-grounded and coherent basis for understanding the phenomenon and
provides the structure of the hermeneutical circle with which to
further
analyze and study interaction empirically."
Thank you for your
contribution.
The
Significance of Digital Hermeneutics for the Philosophy of Technology
Arun
Kumar Tripathi
"From a Euro-American
perspective technology is viewed through
its connection with the sciences, while in South America the
perspective is the
reverse, science is viewed through its technologies understood as
cultural
instruments; this places the technification of sciences in the
foreground." This first sentence of your contribution opens a broad
intercultural
and interdisciplinary research programme. One important source for
South
America is the work of the Argentinian philosopher Rodolfo
Kusch (1922
- 1979).
There is a long history about science and technology as seen from a
Europe-US-South America, including Central America and the Caribbean,
perspectives addressed, for instance, by the Argentinian Domingo
Faustino
Sarmiento (1811-1888), the Cuban José Martí (1853-1895),
or the Uruguayans José
Enrique Rodó (1871-1917) and Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1872-1958), to
mention just a
few. The present situation concerns obviously the impact of ICTs on all
aspects
of social life.
Don Ihde, Peter-Paul Verbeek,
David Kaplan and Bernhard Irrgang are,
indeed, important representatives of a critical phenomenology of
technology.
Thank you for bringing my thoughts into a conversation with them and
with your
thoughts as well. This creates an exciting space of reflection. You
write how
Don Ihde's postphenomenology "focuses on how human-technological
devices
affect intentionality through meaning-making practices." I agree with
Patrick Heelan's remark that "the term postphenomenology is immediately
linked with ― "postmodernism" which is a critique of modernism.
According to Heelan, postphenomenology is not a critique of phenomenology but a careful,
concrete, and
hermeneutic application of (particularly Merleau-Pontyan) phenomenology
to
technological practices." This is the kind of analysis that we should
do,
looking critically at the historical, economic, material, and cultural
contexts
in which technological practices are instantiated. Considering
technological
practices within the horizon of the human "power play" (Eldred),
means learning from Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault.
"Material hermeneutics" can be conceived as historico-dialectical
hermeneutics that is largely lacking in my thought but that can be
related to
it following the paths opened by you as well as by Marco Schneider,
Bernd
Frohmann and Christian Fuchs who have fortunately contributed to this
Festschrift.
The question concerning technology is intrinsically related to the
question of
being and the question of power no less, as your remark, to the
question of
embodiment in material practices in everyday life, something that
Fernando
Flores Morador has carefully and critically analyzed with the concept
of
"broken technologies."
Thank you for your friendship
and for sharing with me over the years
your vast knowledge on Western and Indian philosophy and on your
ongoing
research on hermeneutics of technological culture.
II
Information Ethics
Reconciling
Social Responsibility and Neutrality in LIS Professional Ethics: A
Virtue
Ethics Approach
John
T. F. Burgess
Social responsibility and
library neutrality are two important and,
as you rightly remark, often conflicting values of the LIS profession.
The
attempt or even the temptation to misuse libraries as well as
educational
institutions for indoctrination by means of abuse of power at micro-,
meso- and
macro-levels is omnipresent also in democratic societies and has a
global
dimension in the digital age. Although no technology is neutral as far
as it
changes the possibilities of action and with it the question of
responsibility
for what can or should be done in view of this change, the value of
neutrality
can be interpreted as dealing with non-discrimination of users and
their needs.
This can be achieved by legal means but this eventually presupposes
that the
persons performing the practices within a community are conscious of
their
social responsibility particularly in situations in which forces inside
or
outside the institution in which they work become active in order to
enforce
their interests (which may be detrimental to the value of neutrality or
non-discrimination).
Your essay dealing with a
virtue ethics approach to this issue
offers "a framework to accommodate both values." Virtue ethics of
professionalism in LIS is no less crucial than in other branches such
as banks
or the car industry, to mention two examples in which the lack of
virtue ethics
is evident. You write: "Knowledge of an organization‘s functional
characteristics is combined with knowledge of the profession‘s unique
genealogical trajectory; the result is not only a professional
identity, but a
culture that reinforces the worth and goals of that profession and
guides the
acceptable ethical behaviour of its members. LIS professionals may be
expected
to represent not only their institutions when they are engaged in
public
discourse, but their profession as well (Budd, 2008)." Although a
virtuous
person is a necessary condition for good life in a society, there
remains a
tension, as Aristotle clearly saw, between ethical and political
issues. The identification of both in a Platonic ideal state, means in
reality
the establishment of a doctrine, the exclusion of critique via
censorship, and
the negation of private life under the dictate of a tyrannis.
As you rightly state:
"Individual professionals are also guided
by a variety of ethical bases, representing many cultural perspectives,
and a
variety of economic and political realities. Given this diversity, it
is
difficult for an international profession to maintain homogenous
ethical
concepts that centrally inform identity and practice." I fully agree
with
your conclusion that "professionalism is not an ethically neutral
approach." In a globalized world, we need more than ever a critical
intercultural dialogue on the issues addressed in your contribution.
The quest for universality
cannot be solved alone with the help of
professional codes of ethics but must go through a patient and concrete
analysis of the dilemmas implicit in such codification not only with
regard to
their implementation but also to the interpretation of the values
themselves.
This last task should be a special focus in LIS education as well as in
professional bodies at national and international levels. In the
Western
tradition we call phronēsis this prudential reflection that
illuminates
different possibilities concerning the relation between means and ends.
Thank you for your
contribution.
Information
Ethics in the Age of Digital Labour and the Surveillance-Industrial
Complex
Christian
Fuchs
A critical reflection on the
political economy of social media is
not only an urgent task due to the transformation of classical
industrial
capitalism into a digital-based one, but also a big challenge for
philosophers
and economists or, to put it more explicitly, for
philosopher-economists for
which in Modernity the work of Karl Marx, in spite of the ideological
malformations and dictatorial regimes it gave rise to, builds a main
source for
critical thinking about power (class) struggles in the 21st century.
We, in academia and in
political life, need more than ever a Marxian
perspective if we want to know the world in which we live, which is not
only
dependent on "the military-industrial complex" as courageously
addressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower when leaving office in 1961, but on
"the
age of digital labour and the surveillance-industrial complex" in all
the
forms such a complex is taking in the world today. The options we have
for
bringing what is to the level of knowledge opens paths
of
liberation—as Hegel wrote at the beginning of his Lectures on the
History of
Philosophy (Chapter 2, a: "The Notion of Development"). The
difference
between being "in himself" free and to know "for himself"
that one is free "is quite enormous" ("ganz ungeheuer")
although through having made himself "double" does not mean
"that a new content has been produced. [...] The whole variation in the
development of the world in history is founded on this difference."
This
difference is no less "enormous" with regard to the question of being
free "in himself" and "for himself" in the digital age.
You are right when you write
that I advance "a concept of information
ethics that in its stress on ambiguities of the information age is not
unrelated to a Hegelian and Marxian dialectical logic that stresses the
analysis of antagonisms." You are also right, when you say that I stand
"with the foregrounding of human rights in Internet ethics in a Kantian
tradition. This is expressed in his demand for a human right to freedom
of
communication on the Internet. One certainly must see how such freedoms
remain
in asymmetric societies class-structured. Economic and political power
limits
freedom so that universal ethical and legal claims are practically
undermined
and remain unrealised." This is, indeed, the theoretical and practical
challenge we are facing in the 21st century.
Your criticisms of Floridi
are not the same as mine,
but there is at
least one point where we converge: "It is worth highlighting that
Floridi‘s analysis does not problematise exploitation. His information
ethics
does not give importance to the phenomena of class and exploitation and
is, therefore,
particularly unsuited for a critique of exploitation in the information
age." What makes possible this convergence is my Heideggerian-based
criticism of metaphysics and the historical reflection on the changing
essence
of technology. I see no necessity (ananke) steering us if we are
aware
of the key role that chance (tyche) plays in human affairs (praxis)
as highlighted by Aristotle in Book II of his Physics. Thinking
power
and labour from the perspective of being as three-dimensional time, is
no less
crucial than thinking being from the perspective of the power play,
class
struggle being a form of it. We, as a plurality of human beings sharing
a
common world, face an open but limited horizon of felicitous and
murderous
possibilities of action. The realization of some of them is nothing
metaphysically permanent, neither for Marx nor for Heidegger, and not
even for
Aristotle, "der grösste Denker des Altertums" ("the greatest
thinker of Antiquity") as Marx called him in Das Kapital (I, 4,
ch.
13, b).
Thank you for your friendship
and for your contribution that resumes
our conversations in Salzburg and Vienna.
Intercultural
Information Ethics: A Pragmatic Consideration
Soraj
Hongladarom
Intercultural Information
Ethics (IIE) is a mark I created in 2004
at the ICIE symposium "Localizing
the Internet. Ethical Issues in
Intercultural Perspective" in order not to forget that we live in a
world
shared not only by a plurality of individual human beings but also by a
plurality of social identities or cultures changing over time. Although
the
reflection on cultural issues of ICT goes back to the CATaC (Cultural
Attitudes
Towards Technology and Communication) conferences organized by Charles
Ess et
al. since 1998. You were probably the first scholar who wrote on
ethical issues
of ICT from a Buddhist perspective.
Raising the question of
cultural diversity with regard to ethical
values and principles is problematic if it is understood as opposed to
universal
ethical values and principles codified, for instance, in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Looking back into history one can even
discover that some of these values and principles are the common
heritage of
humanity beyond cultural differences. You write that "[...] as the
internet, both the original internet and the Internet of Things (IoT),
spreads
across the globe, a concern arises over the clash between the values
originally
embedded in the internet itself and those of the various cultures
wherein it is
introduced. Even within the culture where the internet originated we
can find
conflicts between varying sets of values." This means that although we
can
agree on the universality of some values, this agreement does not
preclude their
potential conflict in different situations nor that such values and
principles
can have different kinds of foundations.
Taking the example of privacy
you write: "The European emphasis
on data protection and privacy, then, was understandable in light of
the overall
outlook of European culture that put less emphasis on individualism
than did
America from where the Internet originated." This is an inner conflict
between two Western cultures, in case one wants to simplify the matter
about one
"American" and one "European" culture. "This
shows," as you rightly state, "that the Internet, as with other forms
of technologies, can lend itself to the cultural environment it finds
itself
in." It follows that instead of starting an ethical reflection with a
universal a priori of whatever content – Kant was in favour of
the formal
criterion of universalisability – we can deal, as you do, with the
factual
situation of having different opinions and values, for instance about
the role
of the Internet, which shows "that culture does indeed play a role, and
it
is to our benefit to look closely at this interplay towards an
understanding of
the philosophical insights one can obtain through reflecting on it."
Your
arguments and particularly your "pragmatic consideration" of the
question
of privacy from a Buddhist perspective is one of the most illuminating
arguments I have ever read concerning the importance of taking
seriously
cultural differences when it comes to looking for the ground(s) as well
as for
different ways of understanding ethical values and principles. What an
amazing
insight for me, a "Westerner," to find in compassion the
Buddhist
foundation for the right to privacy! The plausibility of universal
ideas and
ideals depends on how seriously we take the task of carefully and
deeply
analysing cultural differences and bringing them into a conversation.
Striving
towards universality through particularity is the royal road
("Königsweg") of Enlightenment.
Thank you for your
friendship, your wisdom, and for the time we
spent together in different parts of the world, particularly in
Bangkok. We
both found in Professor Makoto Nakada (University of Tsukuba, Japan) a
friend
and colleague with whom I have been working with for ten years.
Ethics
of European Institutions as Normative Foundation of Responsible Research
Bernd
Carsten Stahl
I have learned a lot about
issues concerning "responsible
research and innovation" (RRI) working with European institutions such
as the European
Group on Science and New Technologies (EGE)
to the European
Commission,
where I had the privilege to be a member for ten years (2000-2010) and
in
European projects like ETHICBOTS
(2006-2007) and, under your
leadership, ETICA
(2009-2011). What happens when academic ethicists and public policy
institutions converge temporarily and hopefully, in timely ways, in
order to
deliberate and provide advice on different courses of actions? This
advice
might, later on, be discussed in parliament and may even lead to legal
regulations. One of my lessons learned is the hermeneutic
insight on the
importance of the context in which we work and for whom. What is at
stake in
such interdisciplinary groups inside political institutions is a
cautious and
critical reflection about what appears to be the beginning (arche)
and
the end (telos) and, of course, the different means to achieve
that end
concerning ethical issues arising from science and technology that are
identified as problematic for society.
As you rightly remark: "The
problem of proactive engagement
with research and innovation activities is particularly pertinent in
information and communication technologies (ICTs) whose uses are
notoriously
difficult to predict and whose ubiquity render them of high social
relevance.
[...] Values are notoriously difficult to capture and describe. They
can also
contradict each other. Using values to support the normative basis of
RRI
requires a difficult exercise which involves identifying and describing
values
and demonstrating their reach and validity. It is, furthermore, not
obvious
whether and to what degree, particular values are applicable to
particular
technologies, in our case to particular ICTs."
Following this line of
thought the practical challenge is to
consider values as inherently related to the valuing process within the
human
"interplay" (Michael Eldred). Values can contradict each other
because there are differences among the evaluators – we, humans, are an
ens
aestimans – with regard to a particular situation based on the
interests
involved implicitly or explicitly. In other words, values need to be
interpreted within changing situations and as related to different
cultural
traditions that are not untouchable but contingent and subject to
change when
facing new possibilities of understanding coming from the others as
well as new
options for common action.
We are today more than ever
aware that such an evaluating interplay
should be based on rules of fair play that take into consideration not
only the
human players but the world they share. Human rights are inextricably
related
to the rights of other living beings as well as to the material
conditions for
survival. The "right to life" is a basic right, being subject, as any
other moral or legal right, to a process of interpretation and
application.
Hans-Georg Gadamer has taught us to be aware of the relation between
legal and
existential hermeneutics particularly with regard to the interpretation
and
application of norms as a special task that is rooted in the fact that
we are
evaluating beings, i.e., beings that must take care of their lives in a
shared
world. Different schools of ethics in different cultures and epochs
give us a
rich instrumentarium. We should consider the diversity of
ethical
theories as an advantage and not as a handicap or even as a danger.
Thank you for your friendship
and for having given me the
opportunity to work with you in the ETICA project.
III
From Information to Message
Raphael's
School of Athens from the Perspective of Angeletics.
John
D. Holgate
This is a fascinating angeletic
interpretation of Raphael's School
of Athens and other frescos and paintings. I remember Professor
Hans
Belting, an internationally renown art historian, telling me that each
time he
comes to Rome a colleague asks him if he could further decipher the
persons
depicted in this fresco. "Who then is this young semi-naked messenger
figure and what is the message (angelia) contained in the scroll
and the
two anonymous codices he carries? Who amongst this
assembly of great
minds is the intended reader? How does this
angeletic
situation epitomise the underlying message of the painting?" Good
questions! The young messenger has a scroll in his left hand and two
books (!)
in his right hand. Other persons, most notably Plato and Aristotle
themselves,
have also books of which we can read their titles, namely Timeo
in the
case of Plato, and Etica in the case of Aristotle, who has four
fingers
between "Etic" and "a," not enough, I think, to imagine
"Nicomache" in the space in between, but what else can this title
mean? All books in this fresco look like coming fresh out of
the
printing press maybe to point to the modernity of their messages with
regard to
the old scrolls and the overwhelming influence of the Christian message
and
messengers.
What is news? In her book News
and Society in the Greek Polis
(1996, p. 1-4) Sian Lewis writes: "In 396 news came to the Spartans
that
the Persian King was preparing a fleet of warships for use in the
campaign
against the Spartan allies in Asia Minor. Xenophon gives an account of
the means
by which the news reached Sparta: A Syracusan called Herodas had been
in
Phenicia 'with a shipowner', and when he saw the preparations, he
sailed on the
first boat to Greece to warn the Spartans. This story is typical of
Xenophon;
[...] It is also a paradigmatic story
about news in Greece. The coming of the news is haphazard; it is only
by chance
that it is brought to the attention of the Spartans. The messenger is
not
official, but there appears to be more to the story than meets the eye,
since
he was accepted without question by the Spartans. The news was brought
as
quickly as possible with normal means. [...] The desire to hear news is
documented in all societies ancient and modern, from the Athenian in
the Agora
asking "Legetai ti kainon?' (What's new?) to islanders in the
west
of Ireland in the 1960s awaiting the boat bringing news from the
mainland.
[...] Ta kaina, new things, or kainoi logoi, new
stories, are
reported, but the primary word is aggellô, I report, and
its cognates.
To bring news is to bring a message or report, and the advent of news
is
described impersonally: êggeilen, it was reported. An aggelma
is
both news and a message clearly the act
of reporting is what creates news. It is worth noting that Greek
vokabulary for
news does not distinguish between truth and falsity – phêmê,
common report, is not intrinsically
lest trustworthy than logos
(story) or epistolê (message); the distinction is one of
source. A
newsmonger, someone who makes up news, is in Greek a logopoios,
a
fabricator of stories. This word also denotes a poet, but this is less
surprising when placed in a Greek context. There was no correlation
made
between history and truth as opposed to poetry and fiction; on the
contrary the
Homeric poems, for instance, were treated by historical writers as
legitimate
history. The tales of poets and dramatists, equally, were drawn from
myth, and
hence true, as opposed to invented stories. A logopoios, then,
is not
necessarily a liar; as Demosthenes makes clear in his condemnation of
newsmongers,
it is because they are able to be plausible and authoritative that they
are so
dangerous."
Maybe Raphael's messengers
came from a ship "outside of the
system" as you write. Control over the dissemination of information is
a
key issue not only in war times. Xenophon's Cyropaedia is full
of
stories about messengers and messages. According to Herodotus (History,
Book 8,
98, 1), "[...] there is nothing mortal which accomplishes a journey
with
more speed than these messengers (angelon), so skilfully has
this been
invented (exeuretai) by the Persians." Had Raphael the
opportunity
to read Xenophon and Herodotus in the studiolo of Federico da
Montefeltro or in other libraries?
Your heretical interpretation
of Raphael's messengers and messages
is unique: "Raphael displayed an ambiguous trinity of personalities
each
represented as characters in the School — Raphael Sanzio, the creator
of
magnificent Madonnas and Papal apologist of the Christian story;
Raphael
Urbinas, the master craftsman of the Umbrian School and consummate
exponent of
technique; and finally the hedonistic Raffaello, the cryptic
Pythagorean and
explorer of the dark mystic underbelly of the Renaissance."
You have luckily rebaptized angeletics
as messaging theory,
giving it a more profane anglo-saxon name. There is no etymological
connection
between the peninsula of Angeln or Anglia and the Greek angelos,
not to
mention divine messengers.
Thank you for your friendship
and for your longstanding work in
angeletics / messaging theory.
Understanding
the Pulse of Existence: An Examination of Capurro's Angeletics
Fernando
Flores Morador
"Understanding the Pulse of
Existence": what a wonderful
title to address the issue of angeletics. What does human
existence mean
other than the tension between engagement
and acedia in view of "the double nature of the human act"
"between thinking and acting." Engagement and acedia
are two poles of communication behaviour, one of amelioration and the
other one
of deterioration, one fulfilling itself in acting and the other one
"proper to the processing of pure data" with a lot of possibilities
between these two poles. You write: "As we understand Capurro's work,
the angeletic
perspective leaves behind the opposition between object and subject and
substitutes it with inter-subjectivity in context as noema and pragma;
a proper message will then, not only "inform," but also
"persuade"." This is what we could call the angeletic turn
although still using the modern subject-object terminology und
Husserl's term (noema)
that belongs to a phenomenology of consciousness and not to the one of
communication as angeletics.
You write: "It would be
possible to distinguish communicative
types that combine different angeletic paths: some examples could be
the
"command"; the path of "regular conversation"; the path of
"asking" or the path of "wishing." This is obviously a case
of logical reasoning and, of course, it is possible to translate it
into the
language of traditional logic, but only if the traditional logical
contents
subordinates the rhythm of the facts." Excellent. To teach/to inform (docere,
informare), to influence/to move (movere) and to
please (delectare)
are modes of human communication. They are addressed by Aristotle as
deliberative speech (genos symbouleutikon), juridical (and
judicial)
speech (genos dikanikon) and laudatory speech (genos
epideiktikon)
(Rhet. 1358b). This induced me in the early nineties to understand Information
Science as a rhetorical discipline. The book by Lawrence William
Rosenfield Aristotle
and Information Theory: A Comparison of the Influence of Causal
Assumptions on
Two Theories of Communication (The Hague 1971) raised my attention.
I
quoted it in my Hermeneutik
der Fachinformation (1986).
You write: "To understand
Capurro's angeletics, we introduce
the opposition between "order" and "information" (as the
measurement of "disorder") in relation to probabilities.
"Order" arises together with certainty while information is the
expression of uncertainty." This is Shannon, of course. But then you
add:
"The dialectics of knowing versus interpreting or that of reasoning
versus
believing follows this path, fragmenting and reconstructing
intentionality,
moving from a very uncertain world to a very convincing world, and vice
versa." This is angeletics having gone through Shannon.
You state that for me
"information is fragmented
intentionality." I understand this fragmentation as being twofold: 1)
in
reducing knowledge to pieces, the original contextuality disappears or
becomes
tacit; and 2) knowledge becomes dependent on the knower's frame of
reference,
truth and relevance are tied together. You call this existential
tension the
"logic of rhythm." Your conclusion is exciting; “This short
proclamation made intentionality the inverse of information and opened
the way
for an operative understanding of the meaningfulness of discourse as a
process;
in other words, the succession of moments during which different
intentional
fragments of different weights are organized and reorganized to create
sense. That
is the starting point of Angeletics, the discipline that studies
diachronically
the reorganization of intentionality in a discourse. This is going to
have
important consequences for the future development of artificial
intelligence as
the formalized pulse of existence."
Having gone through Heidegger,
intentionality does not mean a
phenomenon taking place inside subjective consciousness as a relation
between noesis
and noema but the factual existence of being with others in a
common
world. I understand being as messaging and Heidegger's thinking
as
angeletic as he himself says in From a Conversation on Language -
Between a
Japanese and an Inquirer (1953/54). But already his early concept
of
phenomenon as that which discloses itself, addressing us in such a way
that we
are not the masters of the play, is an angeletic approach. Heidegger
distinguishes in this late dialogue between two kinds of sayings to
respond to
language or to being as world messaging namely "speaking from"
("sprechen von") and "speaking about" ("sprechen
über"). In the psychoanalytic setting, the logic of "speaking
about" creates an illusionary homogenous order that can be crossed by
messaging in the mode of "speaking from." This has consequences for
the turn done by Heidegger
and Medard Boss from psychoanalysis to Daseinsanalyse.
But we should not forget what Freud said in the Introduction to
Psychoanalysis (1916/17) regarding the "meager messages
("kärgliche Nachrichten") about what happens unconsciously in his
soul." For Lacan, as you write, is the "Self" "a
circumstantial illusion and any definitive existential harmony outside
the
angeletical rhythm is impossible to achieve."
Thank you for your friendship
and your synnoein that opens
common paths of thought for us and surely also for others.
The
Demon in the Gap of Language: Capurro, Ethics and Language in Divided
Germany
Gustavo
Silva Saldagna
When I arrived to Germany,
more precisely to Karlsruhe, in 1972,
Germany was a divided country and Berlin a divided city. I remember my
first
trip to East Berlin with Annette, who became my wife in 1974, and
Thomas, her
brother. I had a Uruguayan passport. It was the time of the guerrilla
group Tupamaros
of which one of whose leaders, José Mujica, became president in
2010 after
having been imprisoned for 13 years during the military dictatorship
(1973-1985). I was starting a two years study of documentation at the Center
for Nuclear Documentation located in the Karlsruhe Nuclear
Research
Center. A Uruguayan young man, studying documentation at a Nuclear
Research Center who wanted to go the East Berlin was obviously
extremely
suspect for the DDR Border Police at Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing
point for
foreigners. They took me to a separate room and asked me questions such
as:
- "Why do you want to visit
East Berlin?' I answered: "I
want to visit the famous museums, particularly the Pergamon Museum."
- "What are you studying in
West Germany?" I answered:
"Documentation."
- "What is documentation?" I
answered: "Well I don't
know yet, since the courses have just started."
The interrogation took an
hour or so. I became nervous, of course,
although the Border Policemen were very polite. Once I passed the
control,
Annette and Thomas, who were waiting for me on the other side, asked me
with
astonishment why had it taken so long. We spent a nice day together in
East
Berlin.
In some way, Damiel and
Cassiel were and still are daimones
inside me roaming the divided city in those early 70s when I met
Annette and I
found myself thrown into the German Dasein leaving the role of
the
Uruguayan observer – there is no desire-free observation, at least for
us,
humans – with Italian roots, speaking Spanish as a mother tongue.
Cassiel, the
foreigner, remained for a time my heaven over Germany. Both became "the
demon in the gap of language," more precisely, in the gap of Spanish
and
German.
As your mythological story
suggests, my life turned into a message
carried by Hermes, the "principle of impulsion," coming from beyond
into Hestia's German home, "the principle of permanence." You write:
"The life of such an individual is the life of one who faces the
ethical-informational challenges of a dichotomous reality, divided,
therefore,
between First World and Third World, between East and West, and who
proposes
the search for a transversal-ethical construction between such poles."
Hermes is still whispering messages of happiness and peace in different
languages that unite and divide us but that are possible answers to the
open
possibilities of the world we share together.
Thank you for your friendship
and for helping me to decipher the
messages sent to me by the Enigma-machine that is human life. Each
human life
being unique, we cannot expect that when we believe how to better
interpret and
manage our personal life, we could logically deduce a conclusio
for
others. But others can maybe learn how to do it.
IV
Historic and Semiotic Themes
General
Intellect, Communication and Contemporary Media
Bernd
Frohmann
The work of John Durham
Peters, particularly his book Speaking
into the Air (1999) as well as the new one The Marvelous
Clouds. Toward
a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015) are indeed "a fitting
description of the central concerns" of my work "on the ethical and
political dimensions of communication and message theory." In his new
book
Peters writes: "The old oral world of face-to-face interaction is not
necessarily more real or vital than artificially mediated ones.
Presence, of
course, is a medium too. [...] People long to be with their dear ones
not
because they harbor the illusion that presence and voice yield
privileged
access to the other's soul that writing cannot afford. If it's mind you
want,
and many do, then writing is better. But
we also want and need each other's bodies and presence, and not only in
a
sexual way." (p. 276). This fits into yours as well as into my ethical
and
political concerns. You write: "Peters notes that "there is nothing
ethically deficient about broadcasting as a one-way flow," nor "are
the gaps between sender and receiver always chasms to be bridged; they
are
sometimes vistas to be appreciated or distances to be respected" (p.
59),
and often the "dream of communication has too little respect for
personal
inaccessibility" (p. 59). At best, he says, "communication is a dance
of differences, not a junction of spirits" (p. 65). The concept-cloud
of
communication generates a concept-cloud of associated political
possibilities;
there is much more to be said."
I am not familiar with the
work of Paolo Virno and particularly with
his concept of "general intellect." Thanks for introducing me to it
in dialogue with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Collier and Lakoff,
Shannon,
Habermas, Latour, Kittler, Chomsky, Lacan, Hardt and Negri, Marx,
Lenin, and
Peters. What a magnificent intellectual cosmos for thinking
information,
documentation, and communication in relation to society, power, and
capital
looking for new forms of local and global assemblages.
Let me quote your last
provocative sentences about becoming
"thinkers of the unintelligible" as suggested by your friend and
colleague Warren Steele, Western University, Faculty of Information
& Media
Studies. His profile in the FIM website reads as follows: "my research
interests include: the philosophy of technology (Heidegger,
especially);
technics and responsibility; the politics of love, memory, mourning,
and
melancholia; film; critical race theory; critical whiteness studies;
Marxist
political economy; and media theory." You write "[...] that thinking
about communication might find value in the unreadable, inherently
undecidable,
inaudible, unheard of or non-said, especially in a communicative scene
that
harbors the reactionary dream of channels without ambiguity,
interference,
surprise, static, the unexpected, and noise. Their virtues and
possibilities
carve a space apart from the continual flow of authorized
"communication," and provokes my friend's question: do we not also
need to become thinkers of the unintelligible? I am grateful for the
question,
and hope the unsaid in this paper provokes others." I am sure it will.
Thank you for our
longstanding friendship and for bringing, as
usual, good and fresh thoughts about general and special topoi
of
resistance in and to the capitalist digital society.
"Data":
The Data
Jonathan
Furner
What is data? I am very
thankful for your contribution to this
question that brings into my mind my early research on the etymology
and the
history of ideas of the information concept also in relation to the
concept of
the document in the context of LIS. I defined the concept of
information within
the framework of Information Science as follows: "Information is the
documentary existing knowledge as far as it becomes available or
'useful' (Information
as communicable knowledge)." ("Information ist das dokumentarisch
vorhandene Wissen, sofern dieses dem Benutzer zugänglich bzw.
"nützlich"
gemacht wird. (Information als kommunizierbares Wissen)." (Information,
1978, p. 293).
At that time, in the
seventies, the concept of data was not on the
forefront of the LIS discussion beyond its use in compounds like data
bases,
i.e., related to computer science where it was omnipresent. A few years
later,
in my Hermeneutik
(1986), it is there particularly in relation
to Börje
Langefors "infological" approach according to which the concept of
information is based not only on "data" but also on the cognitive or
semantic structure. It follows that data is (are) not Information(s) –
the
plural is not common in English probably because the Latin concept informatio
concerns the process of formation of the senses, the intellect, the
customs...
and less its result; the British empiricists used, instead, the word impressions
which comes close to the Greek typos – and not every
information can be
made understandable to every cognitive subject. A text 'contains' no
information without a "receiving structure." According to Langefors,
data without "pre-knowledge" are not Information(s) (Hermeneutik,
1986, p. 52-55).
In philosophy the concept of and the word data is familiar to me
from Kant's Kritik
der
reinen Vernunft. In the Transcendental Analytics he writes
that
concepts and all principles ("Grundsätze") can be as a priori
as they want but they must have a relation to "data of possible
experience" ("auf Data zur möglichen Erfahrung") (KrV, B 298).
In the Transcendental Dialectics he states: "it is likewise
sufficient to refute empirical idealism that without perception even
fictions
and dreams are not possible, so our outer senses, as regards the data
("den Datis nach") from which experience can arise, have actual
corresponding objects in space." (KrV A 377). The German present
participle "given" ("gegeben") is, of course, given (!)
from the very beginning. You point to it in your contribution. The
Latin origin
of data can still be heard in Kant. It would be interesting to follow
the path
you mention about the Arabic translation of Euclid's Dedoména
and the
way(s) in which this term was discussed in the Arabic/Islamic context.
André Lalande's Vocabulaire
technique et critique de la
philosophie has an entry "Données, D. Data, Annahmen; E.
Data; I.
Dati" in the sense of assumptions ("assomptions") as well as to
"Donné" (masculine) meaning what is immediately given ("synonyme
d'immédiat, de premier, de conscient") and a reference to
Herbert
Spencer's System of Synthetic Philosophy "The Data of Biology"
vs. "The Induction of Biology" as well "The Data of
Psychology", "The Data of Sociology" and "The Data of
Ethics." There is also Henri Bergson's doctoral thesis:
"Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience"
(1889).
The conceptual relationship
between data and document that you
propose is convincing for me. You write "The position I wish to develop
in
this paper, however, is that it is not in fact the case that documents
are made
up of data. On the contrary, it is the other way round: datasets are
made up of
documents." The only etymological study on the concept of document I
know
about is the one by Helmut Arntz (1912-2007), who was many years
president of
the (former) Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation (DGD)
(German
Society for Documentation): "documentatio a documento" in: Nachrichten
für Dokumentation, 5, 4, Dec. 1954, 171-179.
Thank you for your
contribution.
On
the Pre-History of Library Ethics: Documents and Legitimacy
Joacim
Hansson
Although I knew that
librarianship has a long tradition of ethical
statements regarding the profession it is new for me that there are
documents
going back up to the 15th century. "It is possible to argue that
librarianship is one of the founding professions of civilisation." This
argument opens a broad and long path of research on documented ethical
statements in cultures other than the West. Professional ethics is
indeed not
the whole story about ethical issues of a profession as far as they
concern
society as a whole but they are an important mark for a profession to
having
achieved awareness about their social responsibility, something that
other
professions have done in recent times with one famous exception, at
least,
namely medicine.
I prefer to speak of moral
instead of ethical codes in
order to clarify the difference between ethics as an academic
reflection and
its object, namely the customs and rules of behaviour in a given
society
(Latin: philosophia moralis vs mores, Greek: philosophia
ethiké vs ethos). In everyday language both concepts
are often used
as synonyms or they are put together without a clear understanding of
their
difference. Sometimes ethics is supposed to deal with rules of conduct
and
morality with the difference between right or wrong. But in this case a
difference should be also made between an academic reflection on both
issues
which is called moral philosophy.
Your analysis of the
pre-history of library ethics raises the
question about what kind of reflection had taken place and how far this
reflection had to do also with the application of such rules, similarly
of what
happens with the academic reflection about law as well as about the
application
of a given law. In other words, my question is about the existence of
some kind
of library ethics hermeneutics prior to what we have today taking as an
example
the work of Robert Hauptman and the ethical debates in different
library fora
such as IFLA.
As you rightly state:
"Although hard to define, certain ways of
conduct are often seen among, for instance, physicians and lawyers,
giving them
a certain kind of authority in the relation with their patients or
clients. This
conduct may be described as simultaneously emphatic and distanced, and
has
developed over generations of practitioners" (emphasis added) and,
I
would add, also of theoreticians. A new situation forces, so to speak,
professionals to reflect on the given rules that do not quite fit as a
normative horizon for what makes a societal difference. Ethical
reflection
arises particularly in times of crisis. As you write: "Presenting the
final version of his code in the Annals of the American Academy of
Political and
Social Science in 1922, Knowles Bolton acknowledges the virtue based
tradition,
but also emphasises the importance of taking it forward so as to repay
a debt
to the first pioneering generation of American librarians."
I fully agree with you when
you characterize the
"pre-history" of library ethics as dealing with: "(1) founding
charters for libraries and instructions to librarians, (2) peer
handbooks in librarianship, written primarily by prominent
librarians,
defining the profession from a practical point of view, and (3) educational
texts developed in direct relation to the emergence of new and
increasingly
academic levels of education for librarians."
Your analysis of the Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana takes me
back to John Holgate's interpretation of Raphael's frescos that
asks now
for an explicit connection to the matter you address. If Ad Decorem
"does not evolve (as far as we know) from discussions involving
librarians," with whom had Sixtus IV conversations on this issue? Is
there
any source in the theological debates and documents of that time?
Naudé
pre-announces the discussions in the République des lettres
of
philosophers like Voltaire and Kant.
Some years ago I read in the
newspaper about a catalogue of rules
and values dealing with the management of knowledge in ancient Babylon.
Prof.
Markus Hilgert (Oriental Institute, University of Heidelberg) told me
that this
is a very interesting topic but we missed the possibility of further
contact.
Since 2002, The British Museum has run a project "The
Library of
Ashurbanipal." According to the website information: "The oldest
surviving royal library in the world is that of Ashurbanipal, King of
Assyria
(668-circa- 630 BC). British Museum archaeologists discovered more
than 30,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments at his capital, Nineveh
(modern
Kuyunjik). Alongside historical inscriptions, letters, administrative
and legal
texts, were found thousands of divinatory, magical, medical, literary
and
lexical texts. This treasure-house of
learning has held
unparalleled importance to the modern study of the ancient Near East
ever since
the first fragments were excavated in the 1850s." In 2015 - ISIS burned
the Mosul Museum Library.
Thank you for your
contribution.
Ethico-Philosophical
Reflection on Overly Self-Confident or Even Arrogant Humanism Applied
to a
Possible History-Oriented Rationality of the Library and Librarianship
Vesa
Suominen
Descartes, the library, and
librarianship! What a wonderful and
fresh topic to deal with. Although Descartes is generally considered as
the
father of subject-centered philosophy it is often ignored that he can
be
interpreted as belonging to the tradition of philosophy as art de
vivre
that implies, as Pierre Hadot has shown, different kinds of exercices
spirituels or of technologies
du soi as Michel Foucault
called them.
The question is then whether Hadot is right when he believes that
already in
the Middle Ages philosophy was not any more conceived of as spiritual
exercises
of self-examination or, as Foucault argues by saying that the break
takes place
with Descartes. (See my Leben
im Informationszeitalter 1995).
But, in fact, Descartes was
educated in the Jesuit college of La
Flèche. His famous dream in Ulm in Winter 1619 deals with a
classic question of
Ignatian sprituality, namely: "Quod vitae sectabor iter?" (Which way
shall I take in my life?). His Regulae ad directionem ingenii
(1618)
dealing with the formation of the scientific mind has a clear Ignatian
mark.
Not to speak of the title itself of one of his masterpieces, the Meditationes.
Some of his methods recall Ignatian exercises as well, particularly
when he
moves to The Netherlands where he expects "to lead a life as solitary
and
withdrawn as if I were in the most remote desert" (Discours de la
Méthode, 3rd Part, last sentence). The methodic doubt
aims at
attaining self-mastery and with it peace of mind ("tranquilité
de son âme"). I
pointed to this in my Leben
im Informationszeitalter (1995).
There is also an interesting
dialogue between Descartes and Princess
Elisabeth about how an "immaterial being" can move or be moved by a
body. Princess Elisabeth speaks from an Aristotelian perspective about
the soul
"informing" the body. Descartes uses the same word, namely
"inform" but with the modern meaning that the ideas communicate or
"informant" the intellect when then it turns its attention to what is
drawn ("depictae") in the bodily imagination (phantasia corporea).
For Descartes, in opposition to Aristotle, the "forms of thought" (cogitationis
formam) are not "depicted" in the brain. The mind communicates
directly with the ideas and in turn with the brain without any kind of
substantial 'in-formational' process. See more in R. Capurro & J.
Holgate:
Messages and Messengers, 2011, p. 167. See also here.
You write: "In general terms,
we can find with both Descartes
and Gadamer a claim that we can never exhaustively conceive of the
foundation
of our capacity to know and understand anything. Consequences of this
in this
essay are ethical by nature: if we cannot conceive of the foundation of
our
knowledge and understanding, an overly self confident attitude could
approach
arrogance." But what about the library and Librarianship? Libraries are
places where we can find knowledge. Librarianship deals with methods about how to do it. Scriptum est
means, from an angeletic perspective, missum est. Gadamer's
hermeneutics
deals with the interpretation of a given text. Angeletics takes
a step
back and considers texts as messages. Hermes, like Iris, the rainbow,
are
messengers, not only interpreters. A library can be considered as a
deposit of
messages waiting for potential receivers that are also potential
senders in a
kind of angeletic Wirkungsgeschichte. The tradition,
in terms of "what the history
has handed down to us" [Uberlieferung], is itself a phenomenon
different from the one dealing with interpretation. What is a library?
a lieu
de passage. History (Geschichtlichkeit) is a messaging
process (schicken).
I understand the Cartesian
"monologism" in the platonic (Phaidros)
and augustinian tradition as the dialogue of the soul with itself,
i.e., with
messages arriving and leaving the soul in a process of permanent
selection. The
soul is no less a lieu de passage as the library is. The split
between
sender and receiver is not only a Cartesian but already a Socratic and
Christian, and particularly Ignatian one, with very different
connotations in
each historical context.
Thanks for bringing Blondel
into the conversation. When I was
studying philosophy with the Jesuits in Argentina (1968-1970) I got in
contact
with his thinking because my supervisor, Prof. Juan Carlos Scannone
S.J., had
written his PhD on Blondel (See my: Filosofía
existenciaria
y dialógica
cristiana, 1970). The
question of
"the middle term," the mediator, is crucial for Blondel's
christian-hegelian thought. Libraries are mediators. They deal with the
scriptum
est as missum est. There are two poles of human messaging,
one
concerns the situation in which all messages are considered as being
addressed
to me. The other situation concerns a sender who thinks that he has a
message
for humanity. Libraries are located in between these two poles.
Sometimes they
imagine that they are the place for all knowledge. They believe that
they are
or should be omniscient. At other times they believe that they should
be a
mediator for the right messages and only for the right messages. The
Aristotelian middle (meson) is also, in this case,
difficult to
find.
Thank you for your
contribution.
V
Resisting Informational Hegemony
Culture
Clash or Transformation? Some Thoughts Concerning the Onslaught of
Market
Economy on the Internet and its Retaliation
Thomas
Hausmanninger
Your contribution brings me
back to our conversations at the first
ICIE symposium in Augsburg in 2001 as well as to the ICIE book series:
the
first volume on foundational issues of an ethics of the Internet (Netzethik,
2002), where we published a dialogue on ethics in a global environment (Ethik
in der Globalität); the second one on youth protection (Handeln
im Netz,
2003); the third on the digital divide (Vernetzt
gespalten,
2004) with a
trialogue between you, Rupert Scheule and me; the fourth one Localizing
the
Internet (2007) on Intercultural
Information Ethics with the papers
of the
2004 ICIE international symposium, and the fifth one on Messages
and
Messengers on angeletics as an approach to the phenomenology of
communication (2011).
What was the Internet? A
promise of change with regard to the
hierarchic structure of 20th century mass media. The horizontal and
distributed
structure of the Internet offered an alternative and originated,
ironically, in
the US defence strategy. You describe accurately this process that
began with
the hope of the cyberspace "as a space of communicative freedom"
expressed in the libertarian ideals of John Perry Barlow and Howard
Rheingold
as well as in the visions of Pierre Levy. Sherry Turkle began with a
positive
view of this media revolution. What is the Internet? The change from
net
illusion to "Net Delusion" (Morozov) is shared in the meanwhile by
critical thinkers like Lawrence Lessig, Evgeny Morozov, and David
Gerlernter,
to mention just a few. Digital monopolies transform classical
capitalism into a
digital one based on a huge accumulation of data provided intentionally
or unintentionally
by the users. New forms of social amalgam originate, with positive and
negative
possibilities with regard to cooperation and subordination, creativity
and
oppression, inclusion and exclusion, hate and respect.
You highlight some positive
aspects when you write: "The
possibilities of virtual identity are still in use but it seems that
through
the amalgamation with RL an intensified intersection between personal
face-to-face relationships and virtual connections has taken place. I
take this
as a sign that the internet has been seamlessly incorporated into the
everyday
lifeworld (to use the term of Edmund Husserl and phenomenological
sociology).
The net is no longer a disconnected realm of extra-normal validity, but
rather
embodies and represents the continuation of everyday life that offers
alternative means of being."
I appreciate your
reconstruction of the Habermasian theory of
society and communication from an angeletic perspective in the digital
age.
This is an innovative approach also for me.
I agree with your caveat
concerning neoliberalism: "The
supposed automatic generation of beneficial effects through market
economy and
its functional laws leads neoliberal theory to throw off political
frameworks
and thus forget the crucial role of politics in Mandeville and Smith
[...]". I share the hope in your conclusion: "Though market economy
has always expressed the view that "the customer is always right" on
its imaginary shop and office walls, it did not behave accordingly.
[...] Now
the customers have become evaluators of products and can retaliate on a
broad
and economically relevant scale. Cooperation could seize strategy — and
thus
open up possibilities of a real mutual steering of the economy where
all those
affected by the economy, the stakeholders in a broad sense, would guide
the
economic processes to real and universal public benefits. We then would
witness
a new, socially productive message in economy: go for co-operation, if
you want
to win. Our ecologically tormented planet and our societies torn by
stratification and the ever-increasing gap between rich and poor could
certainly use that transformation."
Thank you for your friendship
and your longstanding support of ICIE
and IRIE.
Magicians
and Guerrillas: Transforming Time and Space.
Juliet
Lodge and Daniel Nagel
Benjamin Constant, Immanuel
Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche on truth
and truthfulness: what an exciting conversation! In his answer to
Constant,
Kant writes (Of a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic
Concerns)
that there is no right to truth but only to one's own truthfulness
("der
Mensch habe ein Recht auf seine eigene Wahrhaftigkeit (veracitas)"
because the truth of a sentence is not dependent on the will of a human
subject. The question is whether we have the moral duty to truthfulness
independently of any situation or, as Kant says, only with
regard to
statements he cannot avoid, whether or not they could cause a damage
("in
Aussagen, die er nicht umgehen kann: sie mag nun ihm selbst oder andern
schaden"), "damage" ("nuit") being the concept used by
Constant and that Kant rejects based on the argument that it is a
matter of
"injustice" ("Unrecht"). Constant writes in De réactions
politiques (1797): "To tell the truth is therefore only duty with
regard to those who have a right to know the truth. But nobody has a
right to
know the truth that harms others." ("Dire la
vérité n'est donc un devoir qu'envers ceux qui ont droit
à la vérité. Or nul
homme n'a droit à la vérité qui nuit à
autrui."). Kant
also says that this unconditional duty applies "under all
circumstances" ("in allen Verhältnissen"). I add: under all
circumstances that we cannot avoid. The reason for this famous Kantian
rigorism
is the fact that human action (praxis) cannot have knowledge
about
incidental causes or chance, a form of causality that Aristotle
calls apo
tyches – Tyche is the goddess of fortune – in the second
book of his Physics. Kant pays tribute to human contingency. We
cannot dupe chance.
But we can be cautious if we can foresee the probability of such
situations
without being a potential liar ("ein Lügner (in potentia)")
trying to avoid them. This is a second-order solution in case it works.
We could broaden this
discussion embracing the topic of parrhesia
in ancient Greece addressed by Michel Foucault, or the tradition of
indirect
speech in the "Far East," and particularly the famous reservatio
mentalis that is supposed to have been invented by the
Jesuits and was
attacked by Blaise Pascal. In fact, it was the canonist Martín
de Azpilcueta,
the "Doctor Navarrus," (1491-1586), who developed not only a
monetarian theory but also a moral casuistry, that included the
doctrine of mentalis
restrictio. He influenced the Jesuit Leonardus Lessius (Lenaert
Leys)
(1554-1623), professor of moral theology at the Jesuit College in
Leuven from
1585 to 1600. The Jesuits as champions of liberalism and conscious
self-ownership? Wim Decock's paper Jesuit
freedom of contract (Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis
77 (2009) 423-458) is
worth reading in
this context.
Maybe I come near to what I
wanted to say at the workshop on ICT
Ethics and Public Policy that took place in the Europe House, the
EU
Commission and European Parliament's UK Office in London – will this
House
still exist in one or two years? – in March 2011 with the provocative
title Never
enter your real data. I mentioned Nietzsche, Leo Strauss (Persecution
and the Art of Writing), and Helen Nissenbaum's Privacy in
context
(2010) where the concept of "contextual integrity" plays a key role.
Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum have published a book with the title Obfuscation.
A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest (2015), a kind of guerrilla
tactics
for self-protection in the digital age. We discussed the concept of
integrity
that goes back to Aristotle's teleiotes, concerning the
relation of
parts to a whole. Integrity is an important ethical value in the field
of
corporate responsibility.
You write: "The spell of
modern ICT has not only led to the
world becoming both a smaller and, at the same time, an unthinkably
bigger
place but it has shaken the very foundations of how we lead our lives
and who
we are in the digital age. [...] We would suggest that the answer seems
to lie
somewhere between the extremes of a digital guerrilla and a magician in
order
to navigate safely and swim against the tides where necessary." These
two
extremes looking for a middle, in Aristotle's terms, are indeed a key
ethical
issue in our time. Digital guerrilla can become a frustrating issue as
far is
it is a tactic for individual and not a societal solution. Digital
magicians
might show us how to pull a rabbit out of a hat but such solutions are,
eventually, illusory and deceptive.
This is the case with "the
idea of digital code providing
absolute certainty over claimed identities" which is "both portrayed
as the holy grail of identification technologies and as a deception
itself." It follows: "If the digital code cannot provide such
certainty, can code provide insight into who and what we are above and
beyond
traditional definitions of being? Authenticating and
verifying human
identity through code is infinitely mutable and therefore infinitely
open to
deception. Yet, derived as possessing
ontological
potential, code, whether single or multi biometric is paraded as a
symbol of
certainty, as a token to be trusted speedily." What is the middle
between
guerrillas and magicians? Maybe lawyers, ethicists and IT experts
working
together with guerrillas and magicians can provide some advice,
assuming that
the quest on how "to navigate safely and swim against the tides where
necessary" has been woken up.
Thank you for your friendship
and for the opportunity to discuss
these issues with you, Daniel, in the Acatech (National Academy
of
Science and Engineering) project A
Culture of Privacy and Trust for
the
Internet (2011-2013) and with you, Juliet, particularly at the Biometrics
Conference in London in 2014.
Gramsci,
Golem, Google: a Marxist Dialog with Rafael Capurro's Intercultural
Information
Ethics
Marco
Schneider
When you invited me to write
a prologue to your
book A
Dialectics of Taste: Information, Music, and Politics (A
Dialética do
Gosto: Informação, música e política,
Rio de Janeiro 2015. See:
www.capurro.de/schneider.html). I was aware of the fascinating
conversation we
were starting. We have in common not only South America as cultural
background
but also the transformation of labor and capitalism in the digital era
as a
philosophical challenge. Your book helped me to think anew
intercultural issues
of information ethics from a Marxian perspective looking at the points
of
conflict between culture and the productive forces set free by digital
capitalism. The new interactive and inclusive communication structure
of the
Internet began as a huge promise for new forms of work, societal and
cultural
development. Your analysis of the relation between information, music,
and
politics is based on an interpretation of the Marxian (originally
Aristotelian)
concepts of use value (Gebrauchswert) as taste (gusto)
and
of exchange value (Tauschwert) based on different forms of
commodification of cultural products. This allows a critique of new
forms of
social and cultural exploitation and manipulation in the digital age.
You write: "The fact that,
for the first time in human history,
a wide variety of societies and cultures are living in a concrete,
common and
synchronic history poses new challenges to any claim of universality in
our
interconnected, interdependent world." This is a new situation in human
history that "would not be possible without the current stage of
development of digital technologies of information." The concept of
Intercultural Information Ethics and, as you suggest, of Dialectical
Intercultural Information Ethics are possible answers to this
historical
challenge. It is "the theme of our time" (El tema de nuestro
tiempo, 1923) as José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) would say.
It was his
first philosophical book where he develops the concept of "vital
reason" (razón vital) criticising the onesidedness of the
concept
of reason in rationalism and the blindness of total relativism and
mono-perspectivism. Indeed, "we must be able to articulate hard
philosophical reflection with precise empirical studies and actions (in
Marxian
terminology, this articulation is called praxis)."
Your approach "considers the
contradictions between the
universal (symbolic) and the particular (the imaginary) in light of the
traditional contradiction between universal values and particular
morals.
Second, we should consider the contradictions between
singular-concrete-living-individuals, groups or corporations and entire
societies. Among these "groups," social classes deserve a special
attention." And you follow Marx when your write that "the reduction
of human subjects to objects, resulting from the universal exploitation
of
labor, in all its particular and singular forms, is ethically
unsustainable.
The corollary of this exploitation is violence, irrationality, the
abortion of
the individual's creative potentialities for self-development, for
solidarity
and well-being. This reduction can (or should) be concretely
surpassed."
This is, indeed, the heart of Marxian ethics that you now extend to our
historical situation in the digital age.
Concerning the concept of
culture, you "highlight the fact that
the idea of culture as a monolithic, homogeneous, stable unity does not
correspond to anything in reality. Each human group is characterised by
divisions
of gender, generation and labor, the latter supposedly resulting from
the
former, as well as from other factors such as wars and conquests
(violence).
Such divisions necessarily place each subgroup in a different
perspective with
regard to the unifying culture. Each of these perspectives frames the
subgroup's particular (imaginary) universal (symbolic) horizon." From
this
perspective you criticize culture in a negative sense or culture as
ideology,
i.e., "as a set of hierarchic frames of worldviews and social life
representations, explanations, opinions, values, sympathies and
rejections
(tastes), senses of reality and the like, that justify and legitimate
class
exploitation through religion, philosophy, the economic and social
sciences,
cinema, TV, journalism, Facebook, common sense (Schneider,
2015)."
You ask: "What does the above supposition imply?" Your answer is:
"The most desirable goal is a transcultural ethics, that is to
say
in dialectical logical terms, the concrete and dynamic universality of
the
unity of the diverse. To translate this into ethical terms, it
represents the
theoretical and practical conciliation between universal and particular
ethical
values, from where singular ethical actions would have more favorable
conditions to take place."
Thank you for bringing me to
Gramsci, Golem and Google! An
intercultural information flow is needed in order to bridge the
informational
and not only the digital divide. It is an honor for me to be mentioned
in the
same breath with Gramsci. Thank you for your friendship.
From
Culture Industry to Information Society: How Horkheimer and Adorno's
Conception
of the Culture Industry Can Help Us Examine Information Overload in the
Capitalist Information Society
Shaked
Spier
Following your detailed
analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno it is
evident that we need a critical digital enlightenment different
from
what digital enlightenment sometimes is aiming at, namely to
enlighten
people just about the benefits of the digital revolution. We need a Dialektik
der digitalen Aufklärung of which your contribution is an
important part. I
fully agree with your last sentence: "From my perspective, resistance
to
information overload is in many situations an act of resistance to
(transnational informational) capitalism itself. It is vital."
Thank you for your friendship
and for our frequent exchange of ideas
in Berlin.
VI
Futures: Information Education
Ethical
and Legal Use of Information by University Students: The Core Content
of a
Training
program.
Juan-Carlos
Fernández-Molina and Enrique
Muriel-Torrado
Information education is
crucial for the future of societies in the
digital age. Ethical and legal issues belong to the core of our
discipline.
This was for a long time not the case, as you know. Fifteen years ago,
you,
Juan-Carlos, and Félix Moya-Anegón, published a paper in
the Revista
Española de Documentación Científica (Perspectivas
epistemológicas
"humanas" en la documentación, 25, 3, 2002, pp. 241-253)
about
the chaotic discussion on different paradigms as if they were
incommensurable
while, in fact, they are less paradigms sensu stricto than perspectives
on matter with we deal with in documentation. Your plea is for an
integration
of the methodological tradition of the social sciences with the one of
the
engineering sciences, joining what Fernanda Ribeiro and Armando
Malheiro da
Silva write in their contribution. This is the right way to go.
In this contribution you
point to an important ethical and legal
issue concerning the use of information by university students as users
and
producers of intellectual works, namely the copyright legislation and
the
ethical debate dealing with it. You write: "The use and creation of
intellectual works on the part of university students has implications
of a
legal and of an ethical nature. Indeed, the frontier between these two
realms
can prove to be quite fuzzy. It is not always clear which uses of a
work are
permitted within the right of quotation, or how to discern plagiarism
from a
dishonourable or lazy practice that is not strictly illegal." This
presupposes that we have lawyers and ethicists that are acquainted with
our
field. One more reason for integrating legal and ethical issues in our
curricula so that we can make aware university students in other fields
what we
deal with in our discipline and why this is important for them too.
You refer to the
societal
issue of information literacy. In
their paper Three Theoretical Perspectives on Information LiteracyA
Consideration on
the
Concept of Information Literacy (in: International
Review of
Information
Ethics, 2 (2004) 11): "Is information literacy "necessary for
all"? Now we can answer this question in the following manner: It is
impossible to conclude such without specifying the category, field, and
level of
the concept of information literacy in each situation. If we do not
care about
such matters, discussions will be confused and may lead to faulty
conclusions." (p. 5). (Human IT, 11 (2012) 2, pp. 93-130)
Louise Limberg, Olof
Sundin, and
Sanna
Talja suggest to use the plural form instead. They write: "Three
theoretical perspectives are presented that represent different
understandings
of information literacy; phenomenography, sociocultural theory and
Foucauldian
discourse analysis. According to all three theoretical lenses,
information
literacy is embedded in and shaped by as well as shaping the context in
which
it is embedded. In consequence, we propose the notion of information
literacies
in the plural." (p. 93). Already in 2004 the Japanese information
scientist Tadashi Takenouchi wrote in his paper
This is in line with what you
write about the Association of
College and Research Libraries (ACRL): "Fifteen years after putting
out its standards, the ACRL came out with a new version, in this case a
denominated “framework,” in an attempt to update and adapt the
standards to the
rapidly changing higher education environment. The change of
denomination —
from standards to framework — reflects a shift in scope. The old closed
list of
standards with their corresponding learning outcomes and skills has
been
replaced by a flexible set of core concepts interconnected with
multiple
options for their implementation." On the other hand, you are right
when
you state: "Moral rights can differ from one country to another
(Fernandez-Molina & Peis, 2011), but there are two recognized by
any
national law on copyright: paternity (or attribution) and integrity."
This
means that we have to teach university students in general and our
students in
particular, the complexity of ethical and legal issues that you analyze
so well
in your contribution. Your training program should be mandatory
for
university students.
Thank you for your
contribution.
Reflections
on Rafael Capurro's Thoughts in Education and Research of Information
Science
in Brazil.
Lena
Vania Pinheiro
It is an honour and a great
pleasure to read your contribution on
how my thoughts on education and research in Information Science have
helped
Brazilian research institutions and scholars. The first sentence of
your paper
makes clear to the reader that we are not isolated and worldless
subjectivities
but owe to each other most of what we think as coming from our minds.
You
write: "In many fields the scholarly literature forms naturally around
a
core group of authors, often for reasons not always fully explicated.
This
influence ebbs and flows at different times and in different countries,
but
often there is a core group whose work finds a major place
internationally, in
many oeuvres." In his What does it mean to orient
oneself in thinking? (1786) Kant writes: "The freedom to
think is opposed first of all to civil compulsion. Of course it
is said
that the freedom to speak or to write could be taken
from us by a
superior power, but the freedom to think cannot be. Yet
how much
and how correctly would we think if we did not think as it were in
community
with others to whom we can communicate our thoughts, and who
communicate
theirs with us! Thus one can very well say that this external power
which
wrenches away people's freedom publicly to communicate their thoughts
also
takes from them the freedom to think – that single gem
remaining to us
in the midst of all the burdens of civil life, through which alone we
can
devise means of overcoming all the evils of our condition." In other
words, freedom of communication, a core value of a democratic society,
is
linked with the freedom of the medium through which we communicate.
Thinking is
originally a social phenomenon.
I owe a great debt to Brazilian
academic institutions, particularly
IBICT, for giving me the opportunity to meet colleagues and students
with whom
I could share my thoughts and they theirs,
such as:
- V
Encontro Nacional de Pesquisa em
Ciência da Informação, Belo Horizonte, December
10-12, 2003.
- III
Colóquio Internacional de Metafísica,
Natal, March 20-24, 2009.
- I
Simpósio Brasileiro de Ética da Informação
organized by Gustavo Henrique de Araujo Freire, Universidade
Federal de
Paraíba, João Pessoa, March 18-19, 2010.
- Universidade
Federal de Minas
Gerais, Escola de Ciência da Informação Belo Horizonte, March
22, 2010.
- IBICT
(Instituto Brasileiro de Informação
em Ciência e Tecnologia) e Programa de
Pós-Graduação de Ciência da
Informação da UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, March 24, 2010.
- Universidade
de São Paulo (USP), Escola de
Comuniçaões e Artes e Programa de
Pós-Graduação em Ciência da
Informação, São Paulo , March 25, 2010.
- Universidade
Estadual Paulista (UNESP),
Marília: VII Encontro Internacional de
Informação, Conhecimento e Ação,
Marília, October 31 - November 11, 2011.
- II
Seminário Internacional de Informação
para a Saúde. Fortaleza, May 21-23, 2012.
- IBICT/UFRJ:
Aula da disciplina Ética e
Informação, Rio de Janeiro, November 21, 2014.
- V
Encontro Ulepicc 2014 (União
Latina de Economia Política da Informação, da
Comunicação e da Cultura):
Comunicação, cultura, informação e
democracia, Rio de Janeiro, November
28, 2014.
- Universidade
de Brasilia & IBICT:
Palestra: “Teoria, Epistemologia e Interdisciplinaridade em
Ciência da
Informação” Brasilia, December 2, 2014.
- Universidade
de Campinas, Perspectivas Unicamp
50 ANOS. Mesa: "Impactos das Tecnologias da Informação na
Filosofia, nas
Artes e na Ciência", Campinas,, September 15, 2016.
- IBICT:
I Colóquio Teoria, Epistemologia e
Interdisciplinaridade em Ciência da Informação, Rio
de Janeiro, September 19,
2016.