Page 132 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Unit 6: Information Retrieval Model and Search Strategies

Vico’s Critique of Aristotelian Classification Notes

A strong, and highly significant, analogue to exploratory capability can be found in Vico’s critique of
Aristotle. Aristotle’s philosophy, as well as being a direct and indirect source for subsequent
understandings of genus, species, specific difference, synonymy and equivalence, involved, in some
of its aspects, a systematic method of enquiry in order to classify an object. An enquirer was required
to ask a series of questions: Does the thing exist? What is it? How big is it? What is its quality? and the
like. This method of enquiry was subjected to an incisive critique by Vico:
Aristotle’s Categories and Topics are completely useless if one wants to find something new in
them. One turns out to be a Llull or Kircher and becomes like a man who knows the alphabet, but
cannot arrange the letters to read the great book of nature. But if these tools were considered the
indices and ABC’s of inquiries about our problem [of certain knowledge] so that we might have it
fully surveyed, nothing would be more fertile for research.
The last clause of that critique deserves emphasis, ‘nothing would be more fertile for research.’ The
rigidity of the method is avoided, while some of its techniques are retained, and it is transformed
into a systematic and effective means for enhancing knowledge of an object. Analogously, while
rejecting the rigid transformation of a query into a set of records assumed as desirable in information
retrieval research, similar techniques can be used to explore the domain of discourse covered by the
information retrieval system.
A further supporting analogue can be found in the fictional rather than discursive treatment of
rigid classifications in Dickens’ Hard Times. The logical distinctions exemplified in Bitzer’s definition
of a horse - ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth,
and twelve incisive ... Age known by marks in mouth.’ (Dickens 1989: 6)—which does resemble
19th century taxonomies for the horse, themselves influenced by the Aristotelian method of definition
by genus and species, are presented as harsh. Outside the restricting enclosure of the town, a different
metaphor for knowledge is discernible:
They walked on across the fields and down the shady lanes, sometimes getting over a fragment of
a fence so rotten that it dropped at a touch of the foot, sometimes passing near a wreck of bricks and
beams overgrown with grass, marking the site of deserted works. They followed paths and tracks,
however slight.
The value of an information system could then be the ability it offers discriminatingly to follow
‘paths and tracks, however slight’. Classification schemes themselves (and their analogues in
thesaural relations among indexing terms) can then be received not as fixed models of stable entities
but as valuable exploratory devices.

Ordinary Discourse
Ordinary, particularly informal spoken, discussion of information systems is simultaneously highly
significant and difficult to produce as evidence. Evaluative criteria may be implied rather than explicitly
articulated. Yet when a searcher complains that it is difficult to control the number of records retrieved,
a principle of discriminatory power is being invoked. More explicitly, one spoken response to an
earlier version of this paper was: ‘that’s the basis [an enhanced capacity for informed choice] on
which people use systems anyway’.

Abstract

Similarities in themes and principles enunciated or implied have been revealed in largely separate
discourses, emerging in information retrieval research, implied in discussions of principles of indexing
and classification, made explicit in Vico’s critique of Aristotelian methods of investigation, and present,
in partly unarticulated form, in ordinary discourse.

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