Information Pluralism and Some Informative Modes of Ignorance

In this paper information concepts will be roughly divided into two categories: The cybernetic and the semiotic-pragmatic. They are further divided into three and foursubcategories, respectively. The cybernetic conception of information, which comprisesboth the mathematical-statistic and the logical-semantic approaches, misses some aspectsof information and knowing, that are important in economics and technology studies, among others. The semiotic-pragmatic approach presumes the existence of several modesof being of information, as well as connects certainty and ambiguity to information in adifferent way from how the cybernetic approach does. These two general approaches toinformation and knowing are strikingly different, especially in their analysis of ignoranceor incomplete knowledge. None of the cybernetic conceptions, and only some conceptionswithin the semiotic-pragmatic approach, can vindicate the elusive intuition of the potentialpositive role of ignorance. This comparative, philosophical discussion of the modes ofignorance may be taken as a challenge for cybernetics and computational philosophy tomake better sense of incomplete knowledge.