Documentation redux: prolegomenon to philosophy of information

ABSTRACT

A PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION IS GROUNDED in a philosophy of documentation. Nunberg's conception of the phenomenon of information heralds a shift of attention away from the question "What is information?" toward a critical investigation of the sources and legitimation of the question itself. Analogies between Wittgenstein's deconstruction of philosophical accounts of meaning and a corresponding deconstruction of philosophical accounts of information suggest that because the informativeness of a document depends on certain kinds of practices with it, and because information emerges as an effect of such practices, documentary practices are ontologically primary to information. The informativeness of documents therefore refers us to the properties of documentary practices. These fall into four broad categories: their materiality; their institutional sites; the ways in which they are socially disciplined; and their historical contingency. Two examples from early modern science, which contrast the scholastic documentary practices of continental natural philosophers to those of their peers in Restoration England, illustrate the richness of the factors that must be taken into account to understand how documents become informing.

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THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF INFORMATION

In his essay, "Farewell to the information age," Geoffrey Nunberg (1996) proposes a phenomenology of information. His proposal has important implications for a philosophy of information. Rather than posit a particular definition or argue what the nature of information might be, Nunberg directs our attention to the manner in which information presents itself at this particular historical moment. Instead of elaborating a theoretical model of the essence of information, Nunberg asks, "How is the impression of 'information' constituted ...?" (p. 115). His reason for this approach is that the ambiguities, contradictions, and confusions inherent in the phenomenon of information account for its force and authority. Ideas of information that enjoy the theoretical rigor of definitions and essences are not useful in understanding the phenomenon of information, because "any effort to try to extract a coherent conceptual structure for the notion would be not just futile but false to its phenomenology: 'information' is able to perform the work it does precisely because it fuzzes the boundaries between several genetically distinct categories of experience" (p. 114). And the work it performs is significant, because the confusions between different senses of the word "information"--confusions that constitute information as a phenomenon--permit, inter alia, information age enthusiasts to use "information" in a sense "which bears the ideological burden in discussions of the new [information] technologies," discussions in which those technologies are believed to "usher in a new and epochal discursive order" (p. 110). Moreover, because quantifiability is one of the phenomenological characteristics of information, we tend, Nunberg notes, to take seriously such popular claims as "a daily issue of the New York Times contains more information than the average seventeenth-century Englishman came across in a lifetime" (p. 111). Once information presents itself in countable bits, we have a resource--the amount of information--that permits us to denominate not only new experiences, such as "information anxiety" (Wurman, 1989), but also new socio-historical phenomena such as an "information society," an "information age," or an expanding "infosphere" (Floridi, 1999). The study of the phenomenology of information can, therefore, help us trace the sources of the many imaginings associated with the word "information."

Nunberg's essay is important to the approach this paper takes to a philosophy of information, because the question "What is information?" which might be taken as the foundation of such a philosophy, belongs as much to our current phenomenon of information as does the idea of quantification. Information presents itself as a particular kind of thing; our impression of it is of a kind of substance. Since the grammar of "substance" and its cognates license conceptual explorations of what, precisely, the properties of the stuff in question might be, it legitimates the question "What is information?" Whereas the impression of information-as-substance leads the popular imagination toward pursuits of remedies for the deleterious psychic effects of being overwhelmed by too much of the stuff, it directs the theoretical and philosophical imagination toward puzzles posed by information imagined as a coherent theoretical kind, that is, the sort of thing about which general, theoretical knowledge may be gained. (Once substance presents itself, the quest for essence is not far behind.)

According to Nunberg's argument, the key properties of our abstract impression of information-as-substance, those he calls the syntactic properties of quantifiability, uniformity, and morselization (or boundedness), and the semantic properties of objectivity and autonomy, "are simply the reifications of the various principles of interpretation" (p. 116) we bring to reading specific, historically contingent document forms, most notably among them: the newspaper, the modern reference work, national dictionaries, and encyclopedias; travel guides, census and other statistical reports; the printed schedules, work rules, and forms of modern managerial organizations; and the modern novel (pp. 115-116). Our various impressions of information, he argues, "grow directly out of the material organization of [these] informational genres" (p. 117). In addition, he notes, there arose a set of institutions "charged with representing the modern world," whose manner of representation "closely mirrored" these document forms (p. 116). They include various kinds of public museums, especially those devoted to representations of fine art, natural history, and science and industry, in addition to department stores and "public libraries, great and small, card catalogues, and the 'library science' (now 'information science') that grew up along with them" (p. 116). Because the properties of our current phenomenon of information that Nunberg reveals in his analysis of their documentary and institutional roots pertain to the category of substance, they lead, in spite of their contradictions and ambiguities, to ideas of information as a coherent theoretical kind. They lend a theoretical aura to the question "What is information?"