Abstract
Currently, a Science of Information does not exist. What we have is Information Science that grew out of Library and Documentation Science with the help of Computer Science. The basic understanding of information in Information Science is the Shannon type of “information” at which numerous criticisms have been levelled so far. The task of an as-yet-to-be-developed Science of Information would be to study the feasibility of, and to advance, approaches toward a more general Theory of Information and toward a common concept of information. What scientific requirements need to be met when trying to develop a Science of Information? What are the aims of a Science of Information? What is the scope of a Science of Information? What tools should a Science of Information make use of? The present paper responds to these questions.
Highlights
What scientific requirements need to be met when trying to develop a Science of Information? What are the aims of a Science of Information? What is the scope of a Science of Information? What tools should a Science of Information make use of? The present paper responds to these questions
Numerous criticisms have been levelled at the Shannon type of “information”
Taking up the philosophy-of-science differentiation of aims, scope and tools, information studies in the phase of normal science are characterized by three clefts: one cleft between technocratic and ivory tower perspectives, another cleft between reifying and deconstructive perspectives, and a third cleft between reductionistic and projectivistic as well as disjunctivistic perspectives
Summary
A Science of Information does not exist. What we have is Information Science. This, reflects the fact that research and development, starting in the late 1970s, have been streamlined world-wide according to neoliberal economic policies of liberalization, privatization, and deregulation It is less a reflection of the general statement that science at any given time is part of society and responsive, be it directly or indirectly, to historically developing societal needs. The receiver, by processes of decoding, attaches a meaning to the message and thereby produces “actual” information This is the leitmotif of all developments in communication studies, in particular cultural studies, which strive to complement or depart from the channel model. The second gives up the attempt at a subsuming, though unifying, solution and argues instead in favor of a lack of comparability of the given phenomena in nature and society In this dichotomizing, disjunctive view, information is exclusively ascribed to the human domain. It may exclusively be ascribed to particular incidences within the human domain
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