The Constitutional Force of Perspective Phenomenology: Philosophical Unification in Information Systems

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