Hi everyone, To add to Charles' suggestions on philosophical approaches, you should try: Borgmann, A. 1999, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. A very thorough readable, social semiotics inclined text. Borgmann is well respected in philosophical circles. You might also like to check out some responses to the book at: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v6n1/ Cheers, Andrew Wenn. -- School of Information Systems Victoria University PO Box 14428 Melbourne Vic 8001 ---------- Series Co-editor of the NEW Routledge Series in Information Systems ---------- email: andrew.wenn@vu.edu.au web: http://homepage.mac.com/andrewwenn/ phone: +61 3 9919 4342 fax: +61 3 9919 5024 On 16/10/2005, at 9:16 PM, Charles Ess wrote:
More for the philosophically inclined...
For the philosophical community that has emerged in the past 15 years or so around the Computers and Philosophy conferences, originally in North America but now more spread about the planet (the 2nd Asian-Pacific CAP conference was held this month in Bangkok, for example), much of this is discussed in terms of a "computational turn" in philosophy, which in part means a focus on how computation and the new venues / experiences / interactions made possible by computing technologies helps / forces philosophers to re-examine old questions and raise new ones. Broadly speaking, there is some consensus among this group (so far) that "wisdom" would include an Aristotelian sense of _phronesis_ or "practical wisdom" - a sense of wisdom that is apparently fairly cross- cultural, for example, as it at least resonates with notions of wisdom found in Confucian thought, some African traditions, etc. The discussion gets even more interesting in the work of Luciano Floridi (Wolfson College, Oxford), whose information ontology turns traditional philosophical ontology upside down and takes information as the basic building block of reality.
1. See Floridi's chapter in his Blackwell's Guide to the Philosophy of Information, titled, appropriately enough, "Information": http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/blackwell/chapters/chapter5.pdf
2. Floridi has more recently argued for a specific view about the relation between data and information in an article titled "Is Information Meaningful Data?", that can be downloaded at http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/pdf/iimd.pdf
2.5 Finally, I've put up a modest documentation of a panel on Information Ethics held in August, 2004, as part of the Computers and Philosophy Conference (CAP) at Carnegie Mellon, in which Floridi, Terrell Ward Bynum, Bernd Carsten Stahl, Wallace Kohler, Kay Mathiesen, and May Thorseth represented their perspectives on information ethics and helped collectively develop something of a cognitive map of the relationships between information ethics and other disciplines both within and beyond the boundaries of philosophy.
<http://www.drury.edu/ess/CAP04/cap04infoethics.html>
This map and overview will grow and change, of course, most immediately as we pursue conversations with colleagues in Asia regarding expectations of privacy and emerging data privacy protection guidelines - but as I note there, participation and dialogue with many other geographical and cultural domains of the globe are needed as well. Nonetheless, I hope this is at least a useful sketch and initial orientation for those interested in especially philosophical approaches to information ethics and allied issues.
Charles Ess
Distinguished Research Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Drury University 900 N. Benton Ave. Voice: 417-873-7230 Springfield, MO 65802 USA FAX: 417-873-7435 Home page: http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html
Co-chair, CATaC'06: http://www.catacconference.org Co-chair, ECAP'06: http://www.eu-cap.org
Professor II, Globalization and Applied Ethics Programmes Norwegian University of Science and Technology NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway http://www.anvendtetikk.ntnu.no/pres/bridgingcultures.php
Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23
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