Wittgenstein, Language and Information: “Back to the Rough Ground!”

Abstract

First of all, why are the issues of language and meaning important to the study of information systems? Information systems are, of course, tools that are used to search for information of various kinds: data, text, images, etc. Information searches themselves inevitably require the searcher to ask for or describe the information he or she wants and to match those descriptions with the descriptions of the information that is available: in short, when we ask for or describe information we must mean something by these statements. This places the requests for information as properly within the study of language and meaning. Surely, requests for information, or descriptions of available information, can be clear or ambiguous, precise or imprecise, just as statements in natural language can. In short, understanding how requests for, and descriptions of, information work, and, more importantly, how they can go wrong, is an issue of language, meaning and understanding.