Open Works, Open Cultures, and Open Learning Systems

Abstract

The idea of openness as a political, social, and psychological metaphor has been part of a set of enduring narratives in the West since the time before the flourishing of modern democracy, scientific communication, and the rise of the knowledge economy. Principally these narratives have been about the nature of freedom, the primacy of rights to self-expression, the constitution of the public sphere or the commons, and the intimate link between openness and creativity. The core philosophical idea concerns openness to experience and interpretation such that a work, language, and culture consider as a semiotic system permit multiple meanings and interpretations with an accent on the response, imagination, and activity of the reader, learner, or user. The classic work that philosophically develops this central idea is the Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) who draws a close relationship between language as a set of open overlapping speech activities or discourses he calls “language games” and a “form of life” (or culture). Wittgenstein of the Investigations demonstrated that there was no such thing as a logical syntax or meta-logical language considered as a closed system of rules that acts as a hard and fast grammar for any natural language. The ‘language games’ conception seems to deny the very possibility of a logical calculus for language such that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions (or logical rules) for use of a word. In Wittgenstein’s account of rule- following we see a view of openness to language and to the text that permits multiple interpretations and the active construction of meanings. This emphasis on the openness of language, of the text and, indeed, of ‘openness to the other’ as aspect of subjectivity, which rests on the values of multiplicity and pluralism, is in part a reaction by Wittgenstein against the logical empiricist understandings of logico-linguistic rules that allegedly allow for only pure and single meanings unambiguously correlated with words that depict the world.