Information Research Weblog

Tom,

An interesting article by John Ioannidis in PLoS Medicine on false findings in published research.

"The term Proteus phenomenon has been coined to describe this phenomenon of rapidly alternating extreme research claims and extremely opposite refutations. Empirical evidence suggests that this sequence of extreme opposites is very common in molecular genetics."

Examples of the Proteus phenomenon in IS are the Shannon entropy versus Wiener's opposite view that information is not matter (paninformationism) and, in physics, the Landauer/Feynman materialist school ('information is physical and slippery but erasible') versus the quantum information theorists (information 'as such' emerging from form and space). Similar opposite views have also populated the IR literature over the years.

No wonder 'information' can be such a protean concept and not reducible (pace Luciano Floridi) to alethic (true or false) data or documents. It may be more at home in the worlds of Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn than in that of Popper. If we embrace the doctrine of 'emergence' we can of course entertain diametrically opposed views.
John Holgate