Critical Examination of Information: A Discursive Approach and its Implementations

This paper presents a discursive approach to the critical examination of information and describes its implementation options. The approach provides a set of concepts to ensure that examination dialogs on information objects take place in a systematic way. For this purpose, this paper takes a critical perspective on information, considers structural characteristics of examination dialog, and arranges some basic categories of critical issues and discursive concepts from Habermas’ (1984) discourse theory. In addition, this paper discusses the pros and cons of two implementation options of the theoretical concepts; this concerns their modeling as templates within the existing discourse-support system, Compendium, to provide users predefined-structures for examination dialogs and their implementation as features of a novel prototype, DISCOURSIUM, to facilitate critical discussions. Finally, this paper discusses extensions of the approach and illustrates, by means of a case example from argumentation theory, how the proposed concepts can be instantiated to provide participants of examination dialogs with context-specific questions for criticizing arguments. This research may be of value to practitioners as it provides them with categories of critical issues and with some orienting information on how the categories can be used to design further context-sensitive sets of questions.