Introduction

Topics at the core of the information sciences, such as the nature of knowledge and what we can know, how meaning and truth are ascertained, and how things can be distinguished, named, categorised, and classified, have been the concern of philosophy for many centuries. Yet information science has no agreed philosophy of its own; rather, a wide variety of philosophies and philosophers have been pressed into service to analyse its concerns. In this chapter we will look at some ways in which philosophy and information science overlap and interact, and how philosophical ideas may directly affect the theory and practice of the information disciplines. This is an extensive, and in some aspects technical, topic, and only a selective and informal overview will be given, with references to the literature for those wishing to take it further.

Philosophy and its relevance to information science

There are usually held to be three main branches of philosophy: ontology and metaphysics – what is it to ‘be’, and what kinds of things can exist; epistemology – what is it to ‘know’, what can we know, and how can we be sure of our knowledge; and ethics – how can actions be ‘right’, and how should we act. All of these have relevance to the information sciences; see Furner (2017a) for more detailed discussion. Metaphysics (the study of what can exist) and ontology (the study of fundamental categories and kinds of things) address the existence and nature of entities such as information, documents, relevance, aboutness and many more. Epistemology questions what is meant by knowledge, with very practical consequences for knowledge management. Ethics questions what is the right use of information, and touches on issues such as censorship and privacy. This is treated in detail in Chapter 15, and will not be repeated here.