Information and Its Philosophy

THREE PROBLEMS IN RELATION TO Luciano Floridi's work on the Philosophy of Information (PI) and the relationship of PI to Library and Information Science (LIS) are considered: the claim that LIS is a materials-based discipline, Floridi's claim about Information as a message transfer system, and his downgrading of Social Epistemology to be a subset of PI. The recent history of LIS and the practice of professional library work are examined for evidence of the basis for making claims about LIS. A view of information based on individual interpretations is preferred to Floridi's account, which is found to be too innocent of LIS practice to be accepted without revision, as is his view of LIS as an applied PI. Luciano Floridi has provided us with a sweeping review of work on Information. He has, in particular, advanced claims for a Philosophy of Information (P1), and has identified Library and Information Science (LIS) as applied PI. He has labeled us thus contra the claims of Shera and others that LIS is based on a social epistemology. If we accept Floridi's claims, we will see ourselves as part of a larger PI movement whose problems and program have been identified by Floridi in his forthcoming Open Problems in the Philosophy of Information (OPPI ) (Floridi, in press-b). Many of these problems and several parts of the program will be familiar to LIS readers, especially those concerned with work in information retrieval. Much of Floridi's work is commendable on several counts. In particular; he has proposed a philosophical grounding to support much of what we in the LIS community do. His work reveals a deep structure of support in straight philosophy and in logic for Ian Cornelius, University College Dublin, Department of Library and Information Studies, Belefield, Dublin 4, Ireland LIBRARY TRENDS, Vlol. 52, No. 3, Winiter 2004, pp. 377-386 (D 2004 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 378 LIBRARY TRENDS/WINTER 2004 many of our research concerns. It would be convenient to be able to use his work as the philosophical foundation some have sought for so long. However, there are three main concerns that make it more difficult to take Floridi's claims without some fuirther work. First, is the kind of idea he has about information, as a root concept for his philosophy of information (which he labels PI). Second, is the view he takes, entirely consistent with his view about information, of LIS that allows him to call it an applied PI, which effectively settles LIS as a materials-based discipline. Third, there is room for debate about the way Floridi downgrades Social Epistemology to be a sibling of LIS rather than a grounding explanation for it. Floridi allows that: a good test for a 'foundational" canididate is to check whether it is able to learn from its applied counterpart . .. LIS does not need to acquire some ready-made philosophical foundation, it can play a key role in shaping one. (Floridi, 2002, p. 38). We shall see that Floridi's account of LIS needs some amendment, and perhaps if an enhanced view of LIS is accepted, then we can secure a more advanced PI as a more fruitful base for LIS. In this article I shall be taking up some of Floridi's claims about defining information and the scope of LIS. There is also an alternative view of how the politics of LIS operate to produce the kind of field and profession that it is. First, we must consider how LIS constructs itself. LIS AND PROFESSIONALISM I claim first that the broad field of LIS separated itself from philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century. By "broad field" I mean both the academic discipline of LIS and the practice of librarianship-the business of running libraries and providing information. Broad LIS has been a profession equipped with professional tools that quintessentially solve the practical task in hand rather than construct a philosophically acceptable arrangement of knowledge. Since Dewey, and some others, we have the tools to arrange books on shelves and describe what they are and where they originated, and we have concentrated on being good at that. A concern for the true relationship of any item to knowledge, or of the exact information content of any item, has remained the domain of specialists. The claims of LIS to be normative are muted and specific to the professional apparatus of LIS-the classification and description of materials, the identification of information-seeking behaviors, and the control (that is, universal awareness of the existence) of information materials. LIS is not normative about knowledge or its epistemology-we shall return to this later-but it operates within a cultural frame that gives purpose to its professional devices. LIS, I maintain, has a dual focus: first toward the rest of the academy, producing the work on information retrieval and information-seeking behavCORNELIUS/INFORMATION AND ITS PHILOSOPHY 379 ior, the history of books, and the dissemination of ideas; and second toward the practice of running libraries and other information agencies, where LIS works to produce the working tools and devices of the practice. The practice of librarianship is closely related to but not co-extensive with LIS. Second, in the twentieth century, LIS has reconstructed itself away from an overwhelming concern with information materials (documents) and their organizational systems to an equal concern with the behavior of individual people who use libraries, and documents. This concern with individual information use reflects an ambiguity about library service, which is a public community facility provided for individual use. Everyone entering a library has his or her own program in mind: there is no common social goal, but the cumulative practice of these individuals is a social act. Librarianship is a social practice, and any social epistemology must account for this individual behavior within the social practice, and any philosophy of LIS must account for it too. The close relationship between the way people construct their own individual identity and individual information seeking must be reflected in the concept of information that LIS embraces. The practical orientation of LIS leads to a third claim. No common or shared view exists in the LIS community about the philosophical or theoretical underpinnings of LIS. Indeed, many practitioners work in the belief that theories can tell them little in the performance of their daily tasks. Theoretical and philosophical explanations of what LIS might be are competing for attention and primacy in rendering an account to the members of the LIS community of what it is that we do. Within the professional social struggle for definition of the subject, those researchers, theorists, and practitioners who want to find and assert the intellectual underpinnings for LIS, and who want to seek, promote, and work within an understanding of our relation to other parts of the academy, work at times as a minority within the field. This is not necessarily bad and is certainly not unique. Within the field of law, for example, there is a similar imbalanced (in terms of numbers) relationship between the relatively small coterie of legal theorists and philosophers, including U.S. Supreme Courtjustices and their like, and the vast body of practicing attorneys. These latter work in a daily environment where clients come to them seeking not learned disquisitions on whether this or that law is good or bad, or what the intentions of a system ofjustice might be, but seeking to get the law to work on their side in some dispute. These practitioners know which forms to complete, which is the bestjudge to come before, how to turn a piece of evidence to an advantage; the niceties ofjurisprudence they leave to others. When I go into the library and seek the help of a librarian, I do so because Ijust want that person to fix the system for me by getting the book I want, finding the references I need, fixing an extension of my loans, and getting some more copies on the shelves for my students. Many librarians not only seem happy to work that way but are content without knowledge 380 LIBRARY TRENDS/WINTER 2004 of the imperfections in our understanding of the nature of information. When they make a point about what librarianship is, they point to customer satisfaction, management of resources, and personal fulfillment. If they are to give credence to a view of LIS as a social epistemology or an applied PI, they want to be given good reasons. The tension in the LIS workforce is notjust between this theory and that philosophy, but between all the sets of competing claims, theoretical and nontheoretical. The appeal of something like Floridi's PI must be notjust that it is right, or at least gives a more complete explanation of our situation in the firmament of academic disciplines in a way that all fair-minded people must assent to, but that it is a useful weapon in the social and political struggles within LIS for one particular set of interests. Practitioners within LIS learn about the practice through experience of it and build their understanding by reflection that leads them to adjust their practice and understanding. This subjectivity extends beyond performance in the workplace to include reflection on both personal identity and the appeal to the host-funding community of the conception of LIS that practitioners present (Cornelius, 1996a). Any PI must: (1) offer an explanation for a very wide range of phenomena and practices, from book history and curatorship, reading stories to children, and model-building in information retrieval (IR) and information seeking and (2) take account of how we remodel ourselves (say, from being librarians to being information scientists and then to being information managers) from time to time, according to the presentation of ourselves and of our practice that we wish to make to the world.