The foundations of information science: Part I. Philosophical aspects
Journal of Information Science, 2 (3-4):
125-133 (1980)Abstract
It is first argued that a niche for information science, unclaimed by any other discipline, can be found by admitting the near-autonomy of Popper's World III - the world of objective knowledge. The task of information science can then be defined as the exploration of this world of objective knowledge which is an extension of, but is distinct from, the world of documentation and librarianship. The Popperian ontology then has to be extended to admit the concept of information and its relation to subjective and objective know ledge. The spaces of Popper's three worlds are then con sidered. It is argued that cognitive and physical spaces are not identical and that this lack of identity creates problems for the proper quantification of information phenomena.