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an excess of fact II
"[Electronic data processing meant] that the collective knowledge bank would no longer be fed through routinized 'office' channels, but through entirely random and unregulated ones. This produced an n-fold multiplication of circulating data and a diminishment of the prestige of the quality of sources. The end result is a newly tolerated indeterminacy with regard to the quality of knowledge[.]"
—Sanford Kwinter & Daniela Fabricus, in Mutations
Elsewhere in Mutations, Kwinter and Fabricus refer to the concept of a "Truth-function," which they define as "the minimal assembly criteria necessary for an artifact to be held as a 'fact'".
Still elsewhere, they reference Herbert Simon, an Carnegie Mellon researcher in the fields of artificial intelligence, industrial management, cognitive psychology, and complex systems. Simon's work replaces the concept of "facts" with the concept of "acceptable functional propositions."
I'm also currently reading Peter Knight's analysis on the rhetoric of conspiracy, Conspiracy Culture, which spends some time exploring the way every "fact" pertaining to the Kennedy assassination has a haze of interpretive possibilities swirling around it.
All of this meditation on what constitutes a "fact" is causing me to reopen my aesthetics of misinformation files... Labels: information |
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
12:07 AM
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