III.
HERMENEUTICS AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
1.
Recent
Studies
Several
authors, information scientists as well as philosophers, have
considered
the relationship between hermeneutics and information science. Having
the
honor to held this lecture in Stockholm I would like to mention first
the
work of Börje Langefors. The following quotation may give a
general
idea about his infological approach:
"If
data are what is handled by computers and information is what is to be
served to people, then information is totally distinct in kind from
data.
Information is of the same kind as knowledge and data must form
sentences
in some language. Data inform if they bring about changes in the
knowledge
of the users. This will only happen if the data (or sentences) are
formed
in correspondence with the knowledge structure (S) of the user. Data,
or
sentences, do not 'contain' information, they only 'represent'
information
fragments and the information becomes established only if these
fragments
are brought into connection with a knowledge 'whole'. This was brought
out in terms of the 'infological equation' (Langefors 1966):
I
= i (D,S,t)
Where
I ist the information (or knowledge change) established by the transfer
of some data (or signs) D. The equation is meant to stress that to
obtain
information (I) from certain data (D), an information process (i) is
needed
and the process requires a certain time (t). Furthermore the outcome of
the process (I) is whole dependent on the 'pre-knowledge' structure S
available
to the process (thus to the data user). To 'understand' the data or
receive
the information will mean to conceive of a situation or event observed
by somebody else and recorded as D. A deeper understanding may then
result
by the process (user) drawing all sorts of conclusions from the
information
received. All this, clearly, will depend on (other parts of) S. It is
immediately
obvious that the knowledge structure S implies all the kinds of
problems
recently articulated under 'buss words' such as paradigms, world-view,
language games, ideology, personal styles and hermeneutics. It should
also
be clear that the data D are, basically, any real-life pattern that may
be not only perceived but also 'understood' or interpreted in some
way." (30)
Langefors
has successfully integrated the concept of pre-understanding in a
theory
of information science. However, the question still remains as how far
he still conceives human existence under the premise of a capsule-like
subjectivity. Nevertheless, intersubjectivity and the idea of a
community
of interpreters play a central role in his infology.
Alwin
Diemer and Norbert Henrichs, founders of the philosophy documentation
center
at Düsseldorf University, have made important contributions to an information
science hermeneutics (31).
Following Husserl's phenomenology - and particularly the terminology of
knower/"noesis" and its correlate the known/"noema"
-, Diemer
calls thought content being transmitted in the information process "Informem".
Informemes are constituted by the intersubjective
process of understanding
and they are identified in different ways through the processes of
indexing
and abstracting. The core of Diemer's informations science
hermeneutics
can be seen in the phenomenological relationship between the informemes
and the interpretation community(ies). Informemes are
constituted
through the mediation of the interpreter's pre-understanding which is
itself
part of the of pre-understanding of a scientific community. The
computer
processes only data or tokens. Diemer's approach was,
as
far as I know, the first attempt to consider the whole information
field
from the point of view of hermeneutics. Some of his ideas were further
developed by Henrichs.
Henrichs'
approach (32) is based on
hermeneutics as well
as on
Peirce's semiotics. Object, sign and interpreter, Peirce's central
categories,
constitute the underlying structure of the information field. If we
consider
the information concept from a semiotic perspective, we can distinguish
between the meaning or content of the messages, the signs used to
represent
it, and the interpreters (producer, mediators, recipients). A
characteristic
of Peirce's semiotics as well as of Henrichs' approach is the
non-separability
of these three elements. It would be absurd to speak, for instance, of
meaning (or knowledge) in itself, i.e., without any
relation
to an interpreter as well as to signs denotating it.
The
production of meaning and the processing of linguistic signs becomes
informational
when we regard them within the horizon of a community of interpreters.
Information is a social category. Characteristic of this approach is
the
close relationship between hermeneutic and semiotic categories. These
ideas
were applied at the philosopher's documentation center of the
University
of Düsseldorf. This system is based on a non-standardized indexing
method without taking into account the disadvantages of free-text. The
fidelity to the sign level is compensated by a special consideration of
the user's pre-understanding at the retrieval side. Henrichs' paradigm
of information science is still a torso.
Finally
I will mention the ASK-theory developed by N.J. Belkin, R. N. Oddy and
H. M. Brooks (33). ASK
stands for anomalous
states
of knowledge and means that
"an
information need arises from a recognized anomaly in the user's state
of
knowledge concerning some topic or situation and that, in general, the
user is unable to specify precisely what is needed to resolve that
anomaly." (34)
According
to this theory the information retrieval process should make possible
to
actively interact with the requester's knowledge structures, i.e., IR
systems
should be able to initiate a dialogue with the user's large-scale
intentions
without asking him to specify first his information need. Belkin
stresses
the importance of the user's "conceptual state of knowledge" which is
in
interaction with his "image of the world". He writes:
"interactions
of humans with one another, with the physical world and with themselves
are always mediated by their states of knowledge about themselves and
about
that with which or with whom they interact. The IR situation is seeing
as a 'recipient-controlled communication system, aimed at resolving the
expressed information needs of humans, primarily via texts produced by
other human beings." (35)
The
key
role played by the recipient's knowledge structure in this theory
validates
in some way its designation as a hermeneutic one. But the emphasis on
the
individual users should be expanded to the user's community with which
he/she shares a similar knowledge structure and from whom he/she
expects
to get some help in order to solve the anomalies.
Peter
Ingwersen (36) has recently
related this
cognitive
model to B. C. Brookes' fundamental equation:
K
(S) + D I = K (S + D S)
Where
K(S) is an existing knowledge affected by some increment of information
D I, and K (S+ D S) is the modified structure. Brookes relates this
equation
to objective knowledge in the Popperian sense of World 3.
Ingwersen's
adapts this model within the cognitive paradigm relating explicitly
objective
knowledge to a human knowledge structure (Popper's World 2)
which
it eventually modifies. But even in this modification does not take
intersubjectivity
into full consideration.
2.
A
Hermeneutic Foundation of Information Science
The
following
is a rough outline of a hermeneutic foundation of information science
that
takes into account the existential as well as the contextual-critical
discourses
previously explained. Information science is thus delimited with regard
to a general theory of information and communication. Delimitations are
usually controversial. The field of scientific and technical
information
has proved to be too restricted with regard, for instance, to societal
information and to all kinds of professional information that are not
produced
by research centers and the like. I use the term specialized
information
(Fachinformation) in this broad sense. Three basic parameters
are
necessary for its constitution: professional communities, special
fields
of research or action, a communication process based mainly on
represented
knowledge.
a)
Professional
communities
Producers
and users of specialized information are not isolated individuals but
belong
to professional communities. These share common theoretical and
practical
interests that build up their horizon of pre-understanding. This
specific
"in-between" of a professional community belongs to the "'web' of human
relationships" (Arendt) as mentioned above. Thus, problems and
questions
are interrelated in different ways within the whole of the existential
structure as well as within the concrete personality system of the
individual
user, i.e., of his/her social, cultural, political, geographical,
linguistic
etc. system of reference. One major aim of information science is the
study
of users not as isolated individuals but as members of professional
communities.
Information science is (so far) particularly concerned with the study
of
how scientists obtain information. The concept of specialized
information
refers then to the communication of knowledge contents to one (or
several)
professional communities. Information in information science is a
social
category. The term professional points to a more general target
as the term scientific community. This is, I believe, a
necessary
and useful extended sense as it takes into consideration the whole
range
of theoretical and practical issues that constitute the core of
advanced
technological societies.
We
usual think about professionals as people with an in-depth knowledge in
one specific field. The physicist Werner Heisenberg has a different
view.
For him a professional (Fachmann) is a person who knows some
important
mistakes in his/her field, and how to avoid them (37).
In other words, professionals are conscious of some major anomalies
in their fields. They have a questioning attitude, as they have learned
to be cautious. This means, paradoxically, that we should look upon
professionals
from the point of view of their ignorance. A very Socratic viewpoint
indeed.
The study of information processes within professional communities are
at the core of information science. There is need for research on a
sociological
theory of professional communities, not just on a sociology of science.
We need to explore the ways professionals gather and interpret
information
in order to solve their problems (38).
To
consider
hermeneutically professional communities as a core issue of
information
science means to criticize:
- an isolating
view of users and their cognitive structures,
- a restrictive
view on scientific communities,
- a purely
objective view of represented information.
b)
Special
Fields of Research or Action
Special
fields of research or action is the second parameter necessary for the
constitution of specialized information. They are the correlate of a
professional
community and their pre-understanding. K. Popper is right, on the one
hand,
when he states that we do not investigate subject matters or
disciplines
but problems (39). But
problems are, on the
other hand,
related to specific frameworks of theories, beliefs, traditions,
interests
and so on. In Popper's words, we can say that as there are no brute
facts - facts are always theory-impregnated - there are also no brute
problems. Special fields of research and action are not necessarily
identical with subject disciplines in universities. In information
science
the question of delimitation of a subject field plays a significant
role.
Databases and expert systems are basically always related to of a scope
or subject field. Some of the empirical laws in our field, for
instance
Bradford's law, refer to the regularities of the core literature of a
subject
field.
The
concept of subject fields has radically changed with regard, for
instance,
to the classification schemes of the 19th century. We can
call
this change a Copernican revolution. Instead of considering knowledge
something
static and permanent in the center of a (library) system, we are now
aware
of the constitutive role played by the interpreter and user of such
schemes.
This means a dynamic view of knowledge schemes as something which is
"in-between"
the members of a professional community, i.e., constituted by their
horizon
of expectations. The delimitation of a subject field also implies the
use
of a specialized vocabulary or language game (Wittgenstein).
The
study of the structure and use of such vocabularies including the use
of
logical devices in modern expert systems is a major concern of
information
science.
c)
Professional
communication
Communication
is a main concern of information scientists, particularly with regard
to
modern information technology. The technological view leaves aside, as
C. Shannon and W. Weaver remarked, the semantic and pragmatic levels of
communication. These levels are at the core of information science
research.
From a comprehensive view of human existence, communication, on the one
hand, cannot be reduced to the physical process of sending and
receiving
signals, but it is a specific human phenomenon. Freedom of thought, on
the other hand, cannot be considered idealistically, as something
independent
from the ways of its communication. Kant reminds us of this when he
writes:
"But,
how much and how correct could we think, if we would not do it together
with other people, to whom we can communicate our thoughts and they
theirs!" (40)
Communication
means making knowledge publicly available. The concept of information
points
to this potential availability, adding a new aspect to the concept of
knowledge: information is knowledge as seen form the point of view
of
its capacity
of being communicated. Here is the place where the concept of
representation
of knowledge as used by modern cognitive science becomes interesting
for
information science. In fact, for some information scientists such as
B.
C. Brookes, information is identical with objectivized
knowledge.
As Ingwersen remarks (41)
"objective
information" should
not be separated but dynamically integrated with the intersubjective
process
of interpretation. Information scientists are not interested in
building
knowledge structures in themselves in a pre-Copernican manner,
but
they study the interaction of represented knowledge with a user
community
whose pre-understanding of a specific field is supposed to be partially
objectivized.
The
concept of information in information science includes these three
dimensions:
a professional community, i.e. the producers, interpreters and users of
specialized information, a specific field of research or action to
which
(objectivized) thought contents are supposed to primarily refer, and a
communication process through which they are shared by the community of
interpreters.
The
following quotation by Martha Williams summarizes, I believe, this
hermeneutic
paradigm of information science:
"Information
science is the quest to understand the nature of information, man's
interaction
with information, and the communication process. It is a developing
discipline
and, although it uses the tools and techniques or technologies of many
other disciplines, it has its own subject matter (information) and its
own problems (human communications)." (42)
Information
and meaning are, on the one hand, very close concepts indeed, but they
are not identical, as the concept of meaning is not usually related to
that of communication. Information, on the other hand, should be
potentially
meaningful. Fred Dretske argues in a recent study (43)
that the concept of information should not be confused with meaning but
that it should be applied to all kinds of communication mechanisms.
From
the point of view of information science I agree with Langefors'
distinction
between data and information. Nevertheless, the information concept, as
we can see in its history, is a very rich one. A broad application can
be useful in order to stress the common ground of different phenomena,
as Dretske suggests. However, unless we are monists, analogy does not
mean
identity. As Bar-Hillel remarked (44)
we must
be careful
with the "semantic traps".
3.
Hermeneutics
and Information Retrieval
It
is
not difficult to see now the relevance of hermeneutics not only for
information
science but also for the information retrieval praxis.
Databases
(bibliographic, numeric, factual etc.) and other forms of knowledge
representation
such as expert systems are objectivizations of specific
pre-understandings.
Their scope or horizon is supposed to be the correlate of the one
shared
by a professional community. This must be clearly stated before the
input
of the information items into the computer takes place. Information
systems
are basically related to outside parameters. There is no absolute
system
as there is no absolute information. Classification schemes, indexing
methods
etc. delimit the possible horizon of interpretation of the
(bibliographic)
items. The online dialogue can be considered as a special kind of
hermeneutic
process. On the one side we have the fixed horizon of the system, while
on the other side there is the open or existential horizon
ofthe
inquirer. During the dialogue a "fusion of horizons" (H.-G. Gadamer)
takes
place on different levels (descriptors, descriptive categories,
contents
of abstracts, classification etc.). The partial identity or "fusion"
between
the horizon of the inquirer and the objectivized horizon of the system
is actively determined by the pre-understanding of the searcher and by
his/her question and query formulation(s).
As
far as the system corresponds to the user's pre-understanding behind
his/her
question(s) a partially positive answer or "fusion" takes place, such
as
(part of) the anomaly can be solved. In the case of bibliographic
databases
such a solution usually means some references to relevant
documents.
Thus, bibliographic databases only offer a very limited possibility for
a "fusion of horizons" with regard, for instance, to expert systems.
Our
capacity to build more intelligent information systems depends on our
insight
on the pre-understanding of a professional community. As D. R. Swanson
remarks, the retrieval process can be compared to a trial-and-error
process
in scientific research. He states, following Popper's ideas, the
following
analogy:
"Creative
research does not begin with a 'topic' but with a problem - a
researcher
must be puzzled, curious, in a sense 'bothered' about something. Even
this
is not enough - some initial conjecture as to the nature of a possible
solution to the problem at least must also be present. Theories are not
synthesized form observations. Quite the contrary; one cannot gather
data
or make an observation without first having a theory. (...)
Analogously,
we might look upon the process of information retrieval as a trial of a
conjecture, guided by some idea of what one is seeking. The principle
value
of the process lies not so much in the direct use of the retrieved
documents
but rather in the indirect function which they serve of stimulating a
reformulation
of the request. A request (...) is a conjecture, which he tests by
examining
the retrieved document." (45)
The
retrieval
process can thus be primarily considered as a problem oriented
process
and not as a purely 'objective' or 'topic oriented' one. But it would
be
misleading, I believe, to divorce the horizon of the inquirer from the
one he shares with other colleagues and which is, of course, not
something
definite or 'objective' in a pre-Copernican way. The existential
ASK-situation
considers the problem to besolved as interrelated with the
pre-understanding
of a professional community as well as with problems, goals and
interests
which are finally shared in different ways by society in general. The
answers
of the system are thus matched against this complex background and just
against a query formulation or a discipline, dissociated from the whole
existential structure.
The
question of relevance in information retrieval must take these
different
levels into account. T. Saracevic (46)
has
summarized
this matter some years ago. In his excellent Introduction to Modern
Information Retrieval, G. Salton states a difference between an
objective
or system-oriented and a subjective or user-oriented relevance (47)
Of course it would be wrong to identify the process of information
retrieval
with the conception of scientific research as a trial-and-error
process.
Stephen P. Harter (48) has
recently emphasized
the
limits of this analogy. The motivation and the subsequent treatment of
the results differ significantly in online searching and in scientific
inquiry. He writes:
"the
raison d'etre of scientific research is its contribution to knowledge,
to our theoretical understanding of ourselves and our universe. The
purpose
of online information retrieval is much less grandiose. (...) The
results
obtained do not ordinarily become part of a knowledge base or larger
theory,
as do the results of research." (48, p. 111)
With
regard
to the problem-oriented and the topic-oriented relevance we should
avoid
to divorce them, as we can no less divorce the individual inquirer from
the (professional) community.
F.
W. Lancaster (49) makes
a terminological
difference
between relevance as the relationship between a document
and
a request statement and pertinence as the relevance to
the
requester himself. Boths aspects are "subjective and equivocal"
though
"no less important in system evaluation". The reason for this paradox
is,
I believe, a (tacit) hermeneutic view of the pre-understanding of a
community,
subject matters being nothing objective or in themselves, but a
relative horizon of such a community.
Finally
we should be aware that the scientific process of testing hypothesis is
related to truth and falsity of theories, while there is no such
specific
intention in online searching. The underlying purpose is to search and
find presumably relevant information. The concepts of error and truth
as
used in scientific methodology would prove, in this context, to be
misleading.
Online searching is not restricted to scientific information but
concerns
different kinds of pragmatic interests. The concept of relevance has to
embrace all possible levels of the process, which thus can only
partially
be explained with the analogy of scientific inquiry.
Pointing
to the role of the inquirer as a correlate of a request, Swanson and
Harper
implicitly stress the intersubjective nature of information retrieval.
Hermeneutics offers a broad theoretical spectrum that enables a more
adequate
analysis of the information retrieval process as the specific model of
scientific inquiry. The dialectic of pre-understanding and
understanding,
i.e., of the critical "fusion" between questions and answers as a
biased
process is a process that leads always to tentative or conjectural
knowledge.
The present research in information retrieval heuretics should
be
considered with this broader hermeneutic frame.