Structuralist Informatics: Challenging Positivism in Information Systems

It is often assumed that the information representations used in interactive information systems are grounded firmly and objectively in mathematics. This positivist view is at odds, however, with contemporary mathematics and philosophy of science, which sees subjective, social, and situated symbol systems — semiology — at the base of all human information use. We describe some of the reasons behind the paradigm shifts away from positivism in mathematics and linguistics, relate them to the information access approaches of information retrieval, collaborative filtering and the path model, and so argue that a similar paradigm shift away from ‘folk informatics’ is not only needed, but