Ethos, Logos, Pathos or Sender, Message, Receiver?: A Problematological Rhetoric for Information Technologies

In this article I contrast the view of communication in Shannon and Weaver (1949) with Michel Meyer’s rhetorical approach to communication. Meyer’s critique of philosophy is founded on the recognition that every statement is an answer to a question arising from a particular problem. If something can be questioned, it can be debated, and how we debate any issue is a matter of rhetorical practices, all of which involve ethos, logos, and pathos. These concepts, familiar from Aristotelian rhetoric, have their counterparts in information science: sender, message, receiver. Unlike the ethos, logos, and pathos of rhetoric, the concepts of information science are rooted in a technical understanding of sender markedly different from the ethical ethos of classical antiquity, an ontologically based propositional understanding of message, and an abstract understanding of receiver as human or machine with a straightforward, statable, interpretable, and answerable question. Meyer’s rhetorical approach to communication illuminates many aspects of information production and use, from spamming and computer viruses to user supplied metadata and reuse of metadata in different contexts. Of particular interest are the ethical implications of a rhetorical approach to Shannon and Weaver’s “information source,” and the creation of metadata for (1) human users of IT and (2) machine interoperability (e.g., the Semantic Web).