THE CONSTITUTIONAL FORCE OF PERSPECTIVALPHENOMENOLOGY: PHILOSOPHICAL UNIFICATIONIN INFORMATION SYSTEMS

摘要

Information systems are increasingly subject to philosophical inquiry. It is both a sign of the IS discipline’srnmaturity and a response to social perplexities. An obvious candidate for a philosophy of information systemsrnis semiotics. A serious obstacle, though, has been the reductionist development in the previous century ofrnsemiotics, thereby moving it away from phenomenology. Then, in its turn, a shortcoming of traditionalrnphenomenology lies in its reduction to the object-in-itself which implies the attempt at actually defeatingrninformationrnThis paper sketches a phenomenology from an outspoken behavioral perspective and connects it with arnbehaviorally oriented semiotics. A unification of phenomenology, semiotics and pragmatism results. It ‘fits’rnbecause phenomenological perspective is semiotically accommodated through an extended formalization, I.e.rnFrom triadic to enneadic dynamics in semiosis. Especially relevant as a foundation for information systems isrnthe dynamically operative concept of sign, or information. Philosophical (re)unification thus underlies a highlyrnpractical phenomenological method for including various perspectives in a single conceptual informationrnmodel. It shows the direction, through conceptual modeling, for developing actual information systems as morerncomprehensive, flexible, efficient, manageable, etc., artifacts.