FUNCTIONAL ONTOLOGY CONSTRUCTION

GNWD043-09LU5577/O’ConnorTop Margin:Gutter Margin:May 14, 200818:21208DOING THINGS WITH INFORMATIONbehavior analysis. The general principles emerge through the replication acrossmany individuals and settings and are synthesized in an inductive manner. Themodel is simply the tried and tested concepts of Behavior Analysis appliedto problems within the domain of Information Science. The justification forthis technique lies in a shared tradition of pragmatism between InformationScience and Behavior Analysis. It is in the shared tradition of pragmatism thatwe find both the philosophical foundation for doing things with informationand the scientific foundation for implementing means of bringing togetherpeople with problems or issues to resolve and information that is functionalfor them.Pragmatism as a Shared TraditionPragmatism emerged as a philosophical school of thought in the late nineteenthcentury in the United States. TheCambridge Dictionary of Philosophy(Audi,1999) defines pragmatism as,a philosophy that stresses the relation of theory to praxis and takesthe continuity of experience and nature as the outcome of directedaction as the starting point for reflection. Experience is the ongoingtransaction of organism and environment, i.e., both subject and objectare constituted in the process. When intelligently ordered, initialconditions are deliberately transformed according to ends-in-view,i.e., intentionally, into a subsequent state of affairs thought to bemore desirable.Knowledge is therefore guided by interests or values. Since the reality ofobjects cannot be known prior to experience, truth claims can be justified onlyas the fulfillment of conditions that are experimentally determined, that is, theoutcome of inquiry (p. 730).Pragmatism and American semiotics have entwined roots in the nine-teenth century. The experience of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in the CivilWar led to a philosophical rejection of the idealistic and romantic notionsof his mentor, transcendental philosopher and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson.While not to the degree of Holmes, William James and Charles Sanders Piercewere also profoundly affected by the Civil War. Their collaboration in the yearsfollowing the antebellum period of the nineteenth century culminated in thepublication of Pierce’s seminal paper,How to Make our Ideas Clear(1878), andJames’ public introduction of pragmatism at a lecture entitled “PhilosophicalConceptions and Practical Results” delivered at the University of California atBerkeley in 1898 (James, 1898).Pragmatism becomes a rejection of universal truth in favor of subjectiveexperience. We accept a definition of ontology as “study of existence” as Flew(1986) suggests; that is, ontology is taken to be the environment rather than