What is philosophy? What do philosophers do? Otto Neurath put it this way:

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.

Philosophers are conceptual shipbuilders. We root out the planks that are no longer serving humanity for one reason or another, and we build new features of our ship in response to the changing winds. This is not so much a matter of uncovering ultimate truths as it is crafting solutions to help us get along. Quite along these lines, Luciano Floridi, in his new book The Logic of Information, describes philosophy as conceptual design, explicitly tying philosophical inquiry with the discipline of design.

My own academic work in information studies falls under the broad umbrella of sociotechnical research—that bridging human and technology. Like philosophy, sociotechnical work is also a field of design: Technology isn’t part of the natural world—it’s made by humans. Even librarianship can be considered through the lens of design. And so if information studies and philosophy are both design fields, then there may be more connection between them than is generally appreciated. Moreover, what we now generally call sociotechnical research once went by the name cybernetics. That term was chosen deliberately from the Greek kubernetes, meaning the pilot of a ship, the one in charge of correcting course in the face of endlessly shifting tides.

As Floridi has remarked, the juncture of information and philosophy, then, is a matter of shoring up the ship we’re steering—replacing rotten planks and upgrading components where possible. Philosophy can show us what assumptions no longer serve us and what new questions need asking. As designed information artifacts become more embedded in human life, it becomes more urgent to consider how and why design choices are made. Looking at information through the lens of philosophy provides conceptual scaffolding for understanding such vital issues.

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