Association for Information Science and Technology Annual Lecture with Professor Steve Fuller

What, if anything, makes knowledge an improvement over information?

In this era of smartphones and easy connectivity, we can’t seem to get ‘too much information’. Yet for a long time many have warned of the dangers of ‘information overload’.

Professor Fuller will argue that this polarity is not new. Indeed, what we value in information as ‘knowledge’ has always required a selective reproduction process, where the ‘information’ is systematically discarded and altered. Thus the difference between ‘error’, ‘distortion’, ‘clarification’ and sheer ‘originality’ is a feature of how this selective reproduction process works in particular societies. This can mean that one society’s fraud may be another society’s genius.

Given that we live an increasingly interconnected world, and one in which everyone is supposed to be reliant on the ‘same’ information, Professor Fuller will discuss the difficulties of accommodating different understandings of this ‘same’ information, and how these might be conceived and addressed.

Professor Steve Fuller is the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, UK. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 1985), Fuller founded the interdisciplinary research programme of ‘social epistemology’ with a quarterly journal by that name (Routledge, 1987- ) and the first of his 21 books (Indiana University Press, 1988). His most recent book is Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History (Routledge, 2015).

Doors open at 5.30pm / Lecture begins at 6pm followed by a Q&A

A reception will follow at 7pm (main foyer)

More information on the Association for Information Science and Technology can be found here