Was ist Information? Kritik einer Legende

Citation

Bade, D. (2008), "Was ist Information? Kritik einer Legende", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 64 No. 1, pp. 172-174. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410810844222

Last year I wrote to Uwe Jochum asking for some references to recent German research and he responded to my request with a single citation: Peter Janich's Was ist Information? It was not what I was looking for, but it was definitely what I have been hoping for.

Janich is a philosopher who has written extensively on epistemological issues in science. At least since 1993 he has been looking at the use of the term “information” in scientific discourse, from Morris' theory of signs and its influence on cybernetics and communication theory to the influence of these latter on other sciences, especially molecular biology and genetics. Many of these themes were brought together in another volume published in 2006, his Kultur und Methode: Philosophie in einer wissenschaftlich geprägten Welt. While that book makes a good companion to Was ist Information?, it is in the latter that Janich devotes all his attention to the discourse, concepts and theories in which information science is grounded.

Unlike most other books on information, Janich does not attempt to describe, define or explain information; rather, he takes an historical‐philosophical approach, showing how the everyday metaphorical discourse about information and communication was altered in the context of changing ideas about nature, science and the development of communication technologies. Information was transformed linguistically, metaphorically, into a natural object that could be studied according to the methods of the natural sciences. This linguistic adaptation to changing realities is typical of human communication, but when imported into scientific discourse such metaphors can lead to all manner of epistemological problems. Janich argues that the trap into which the concept of information got stuck in the twentieth century was prepared by Hertz through his tripartite division of scientific knowledge as real in its object, mental in its method, and linguistic in its expression.

In connection with the inventions of Edison, Janich describes how communication was mechanized. With Edison's machines, “the spoken word turned into a lasting thing that could be transported through time and space” (p. 34) and “speech no longer comes from the speaker but what is communicated is detached from the normal pre‐technical situation of personal presence and a place and time shared with the one communicating” (p. 35). Curiously at this point he does not discuss writing, and one would like to find here some discussion of why the mechanisation of communication and the thingification of information only happened in the nineteenth century and not with previous technological revolutions such as the invention of writing or printing. I suspect that the answer lies in the changing understanding of both nature and science from Galileo on, but the question does not arise. What Janich claims is that these technological developments led to misunderstandings revealed in everyday language: “the phonograph speaks, the calculator calculates, the camera sees, the teletype writes” (p. 36). What this language suggests is exactly what later information theorists assumed, namely that “human achievements such as speaking, calculating, seeing, thinking, writing etc. can be taken over and performed by machines” (p. 36).

This is not a problem in everyday life; but when scientists adopt this understanding as the pre‐supposition and starting point for theorizing, forgetting the human origin and intentions in which all communicative action is grounded, then the “legend” of information as natural object appears and gives birth to information science. The first two chapters of the book outline that history. Chapter three explores the history of that legend when it has become full‐blown dogma: Morris' semiology, Wiener's cybernetics, and Shannon & Weaver's theory of communication.

In his extended critical examination of Morris' semiology Janich notes the “canonization and dogmatisation of the Syntax‐Semantics‐Pragmatics succession” (p. 47) and Morris' acceptance of the Vienna Circle's monological (rather than dialogical) understanding of communication and language. To this day, Janich claims, information theory and its concepts remain stuck in the dilemmas created by this philosophical foundation. The discussion of Wiener focuses on the dichotomy of communication and control and his use of metaphors. The confusion at the heart of Wiener's concept of information is “whether information is a real object of natural science or only a metaphor for model‐building” (p. 55).

His discussion of Shannon and Weaver continues in the fourth chapter in the section entitled “The information‐complex”. His criticism cuts to the core: “The concept of a ‘stock of possible messages’ [quoting from The Mathematical Theory of Communication] has nothing to do with the openness of human communication, but with the functional limitations of a technical system and the use of tools” (p. 72). On the following page he notes that “What a message ‘is’ or how one defines it remains unmentioned” (p. 73). In a section entitled “Have you understood me?” Janich returns to the monological views of communication in information science, noting that “the reciever's answer plays no role” in this view (p. 82). He gives a one sentence summary of his analysis of the “information‐complex”: “The dogmatic division of theoretical philosophy in the tradition of logical empiricism (through the amputation of pragmatics, separating it from the productive, constructive part) has assumed in its analytical, disintegrating manner only the ready‐made (and assumed to be real) products of science and technology, not the human effort and reasons that give rise to them and allow their proper understanding. But this is a fundamental error” (p. 87). Information is already there, Why? and For whom? are questions never asked.

That section is followed by a discussion of the concept of information in molecular biology, chemistry and genetics and the anthropomorphisation of these theoretical/physical entities that accompanies that discourse. That discourse, of genetic information, codes, messages and their transcription, copying, sending and translating, he argues is “not only redundant but inadequate” (p. 106). Communication and information in these sciences are not human activities in any sense, but the descriptions in these literatures are more human (i.e. anthropomorphized) than in theories of human communication like those of Morris and Shannon and Weaver!

In the section “Das Geistlose in der Maschine” (wonderful!) Janich formulates in his terms what I have argued elsewhere: “meaningful or meaningless, true or false, useful or useless, understandable or incomprehensible play no role” in the functioning of communication technologies (p. 113). Reducing our understanding of communication to the technical, physical system in which these matters play no role is fatal for any theory of communication or information. And this, surprisingly enough, he discusses in the context of the age old “mind‐body” problem of philosophy.

In the fifth chapter Janich discusses (among other matters) the purpose of communication. “The traditional theories of information and communication never ask why. Information and communication are always already there, and as natural facts at that” (p. 147). The description of nature according to science admits causality (in some theories at least) but not teleology. If, however, information and communication are products (and not the prerequisites) of human action as Janich argues, then they cannot be understood in terms of cause and effect but only in terms of purposes and intentions (i.e. teleologically, but Janich does not use that word).

A key theme of the book is that communication is a human activity arising from human purposes and intentions; it is not simply a technical process. And it is only within communicative activity that references to information can have any meaning; information is neither a natural object that is inserted into a communicative act, nor the explanation for communication. Those familiar with the works of Roy Harris will recognize this as the essence of his critique of linguistic theory: one can only understand language as a product of communicative activity, not as a prerequisite for communication or a pre‐existent tool/thing used in communication. These two criticisms converge precisely on the foundation which these two disciplines share: human linguistic communication. Janich is not the first to criticize theories of information through an investigation of the language, metaphors and philosophy of language informing those theories, but his discussion is one of the best. So good in fact, that if you cannot read German, it is time to learn. Do not wait for the translation.