Bruce,
Many thanks for your comments. You have addressed my concerns directly,
except those that you indicated would be dealt with in part 2. I went to
the web site for the Vygotsky and IS paper and hope to read it soon.
I'm wondering if there aren't three conclusions. The two you mentioned and
a third: that the concrete universal of information science hasn't yet been
theorized. But it sounds like you've decided that the concrete universal
isn't necessary to apply dialectics, an issue to be dealt with in the second
part of your response. So I'm looking forward to seeing that.
On the other hand, given that IS is a young discipline as you point out, it
could be that its development hasn't reached the stage at which its object
can be fully separated out. Didn't Wiener first bring the word into it's
current, though extremely more ramified usage. An interesting case of a
concept moving from "the scientific" to "the everyday". I remember first
seeing information in the systems sense in Richard Adams. Now the field is
so broad--10 categories you mention in the Vygotsky/IS paper. There can be
no doubt that the entire concept of information has assumed a much different
role in the organization of real social practice (ie how we organize
ourselves as a society--hence the fundamental power of the y2k bug) and as
such everything can now be discussed as "information". This situation is
similar to Petty's first use of the notion of value--theorising the source
of value in human labor, the step that Marx comments forever eluded
Aristotle -- which had become important precisely because abstract value
itself was beginning to dominate the relations of production. (value was
totally absent in the economic descriptions of Quesnay, for example). But,
according the the marxist version of economic history, it wasn't until Adam
Smith and David Ricardo, in developing the very idea, ran into insoluble
problems (e.g., the source of wages). In turn, Marx discovered the
principle of surplus value and with that turn was able (over the course of
many years) to develop the theory and identify the commodity as the Isn't
it possible now that information's intromission into the relations of
production is precisely the practice that precedes the conceptualization--a
process that emerges dialectically--and that this lays the basis for the
emergence of its theoretical concept. In any event, I'm looking forward to
reading your paper on the crisis in IS
Thanks for the clarification on the IS issues. When reading your paper I
felt sure I was missing the tie-in due to lack of familiarity with the
material. I guess my main confusion comes from the very specific sense that
you are applying "modeling" and the much more general usage given to it
elsewhere. I think this is good since it means that you are doing exactly
what Vygotsky and Ilyenkov indicated. I have the strong feeling however,
that the answers to my questions will be found in the Vygotsky/IS paper and
the second part of your response.
Very illuminating.
Paul H. Dillon
Fro
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