Clarifying Truthiness
I think need to clarify some things on my article about truthiness in information architecture. I may have come across as a bit of a luddite or somehow opposed to using information architecture. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth, so I think I may need to explain a bit of my philosophy.
While it may seem surprising to some, the nature of truth is still very much up for debate within the realm of philosophy. The two types of thought that seem to be at odds are foundationalism and coherentism.
A foundationalist believes that:
- A complete philisophical system can be built from basic beliefs.
- In a system, basic beliefs cannot be questioned.
- Basic beliefs can be used to justify more beliefs, which can in turn be used to justify other beliefs, and so on and so on.
- A belief is only justified if it is a basic belief or if it has been justified by a chain of beliefs.
- A statement is true if it can be ascribed to a basic belief.
A coherentist believes that:
- Truth is primarily a property of the entire philisophical system.
- Any belief within the system can be questioned.
- The truth of a statement can only be determined according to their coherence with the whole.
BTW, if this stuff interests you I would recommend taking a look at the Philosophy Portal at Wikipedia.
In my experience, I have found that most technologists subscribe to foundationalism, but most organizations function under coherentism. This difference in worldviews is a primary source of misunderstanding and conflict between the two parties, often on an unconscious level.
Based on this, I have come up with some ideas of my own …
Morgan’s Conjectures on Organizational Truth
- Within for a given organization, it is entirely possible to have two or more different ideas of the “truth” for the same set of facts.
- The quantity and variety of “truths” will increase as an organization grows.
- Each of these “truths” may be valid and necessary for the organization to function on a basic level.
- An information architecture that does not consider this will not be useable and efficient over the long-term.
This is getting a bit long, so I will discuss this more later …
technorati tags:information quality, data quality, etl, automation, design , truthiness
