I would like to begin this week’s Journal with a look at Belkin. Our reading for Belkin this week starts with an excellent look at the theoretical basis behind the cognitive approach to the practices of Information science.
The cognitive approach at its core recognizes that the practice of communication in information science involves cognitive processing on both ends. More specifically Belkin cites De My who holds the view that the cognitive approach involves any kind of information processing (be it perceptual or symbolic) that is mediated by a system of categories or concepts which are a model for the information processor.
The cognitive approach asserts that the states of knowledge, beliefs and so on of people interact with that which they receive, perceive or produce. I think that this is essentially an important idea, especially in the context of the earlier systems based approaches that viewed people basically as passive sponges when it came to interaction with information. What draws me more specifically to the idea is how the concept of states of knowledge, beliefs and so on can be extended further to encompass the concept of a person’s worldview, and the role that the worldview has for people who are interacting with information.
I also visited Brookes this week, who was one of the first to use Cognitivism to develop a strong theoretical framework for information science. Brookes purses an objective (as opposed to subjective) view of Knowledge. However, before we look into his line of thought more closely, it is useful to briefly outline some of the ideas espoused by Popper. Popper refers to the three independent worlds:
1. Physical world
2. The world of subjective mental states or human knowledge
3. World of Objective knowledge – products of the human mind recorded in artifacts
He claims that objective knowledge is the totality of all human thought embodied in human artifacts.
Popper believed that once human knowledge was recorded, it gained a level of permanence, and objectivity (in that aliens may come down and decode our knowledge). Artifacts that record human knowledge become independent of the Author – hence it is no longer subjective and inaccessible but objective and accessible to all who care to study them.
Popper does however maintains that truth is something that we can never knowingly attain and that all our knowledge is always provisional and always open to critique and correction.
I’m not comfortable with some of poppers propositions here. Firstly, While the concept of a ‘third world’ of Objective knowledge sounds appealing to me, I think Poppers attempt to characterize it as a totality of human thought contained in artifacts severely limits the concept. Also, I find his position that truth cannot be attained and that all knowledge is provisional contradictory to the his concept of ‘objective knowledge’. Secondly, the process of recording to and the process of extracting meaning from an artifact entails a subjective process. Going back to Barlow's position, knowledge functions more organically as it is interpreted and reinterpreted, arranged and rearranged given people’s interaction with the artifact, and given their socio-political and historical contexts.
Essentially, I would hold that collective knowledge is not a level closer to objective knowledge due to an attained quality of permanence by recording it into an artifact, it is merely a different form of subjective knowledge that moves around organically.
Brooke regards knowledge as a structure of concepts linked by their relations and information as a small part of that structure – he argues that the knowledge structure can be both objective and subjective.
Brookes developed the following formula -
K[S] + IΔ = K[S + ΔS]
Essentially the formula describes how a knowledge state, when faced with changing information equals new knowledge that is a function of the existing knowledge state and a changing knowledge state.
Brookes suggests that the best way to use this formula is in the interaction between people and objective knowledge – with the purpose of discovering more about subjective knowledge structures. Here, again, we run into the concept of ‘objective knowledge’.
Brookes argues that ‘Potential information’ makes up the world. That there is information out there we cannot detect. Unknown information is objective and as soon as we perceive it, it becomes subjective. Again, when information is contained within a book, it is also deemed as objective as it is 'free' to interpretation.
Again, I find something very appealing about the idea of ‘Unknown Information’ and its relationship to objectivity. I agree with Brookes position here in so far as Unknown (objective information) becomes subjective as soon as we perceive it. However, I find the idea that information can be deemed as objective in an artifact questionable. What is meant by ‘free’ to interpret is problematic here, because the medium in which the information is contained (whether it be the physical medium or the language it is contained in) is subject to an enormous amount of influences that will affect how one will interpret that information – and this is not even to consider the social and historical context of the person who is interpreting the information.
I would like to expand a little on Brookes' statement here: No theory of knowledge is complete without a thorough perspective of consciousness. This statement allows me to entertain the possibility that data is objective and go off on a tangent of abstraction here.
I would like to use the terms Objective Knowledge, Data and potential information interchangeably here to illustrate my understanding.
In my first post I defined data as the the raw input that one receives from outside themselves. I want to now experiment by completely refuting my previous definition to argue that data is precisely that which we cannot receive from outside ourselves. I would like to define data not as segmented packets of potentially informative perceptibility, but rather as a universal indefineability that is excluded from human meaning, understanding and knowledge. That which cannot be known and that which is compromised as soon as it is brought to consciousness.
In this sense, I would argue that the act of Information Processing is in fact the act of destroying data or objective knowledge. The process by which we attribute meaning and rearrange and appropriate data to suit our various sociopolitical and historical contexts is also the process by which that data is divorced from its totality in reality and destroyed - that is, in any attempt to interpret or make conscious data, it no longer exists as data but as information. Thus my point here, is to refute the premise that information is in fact objective, and rather to claim that it is subject to subjectification as soon as one tries to make sense of that which is unknowable (data/objective knowledge).
There are three assumptions that this idea rests on.
1) First, that reality/existence (and non-reality/non-existence) is undefinable. It is a condition beyond duality that encompasses all things (and no things) and all time (and no time).
2) Second, that reality/existence (and non-reality/non-existence) cannot be known through consciousness in it's entirety.
3) Third is the assumption that the essential qualifer for existence is not dependent on ones perception of existence – That is to say, existence and reality (and vice versa) is external to whether we perceive it or not.
Sources
Belkin, N. (1990). The cognitive viewpoint in information science. Journal of Information Science. 16: 11-15.
Brookes, Bertram (1980) The foundations of information science. Part 1: Philosophical aspects. Journal of Information Science 2: 125-133.
Todd, R.J. (2006). "From information to knowledge: charting and measuring changes in students' knowledge of a
curriculum topic" Information Research, 11(4) paper 264. Available at http://InformationR.net/ ir/ 11-4/ paper264.html
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