Documento e informação : as questões ontológica e epistemológica

Abstract

Document, collection, fonds, cultural heritage (bibliographical, archival, cultural ...), culture, knowledge and communication are undoubtedly the basis of a discourse rooted in Modernity that has come to increasingly include the vague, but highly fashionable, concept of Information. This concept transverses many sectors of activity and can be easily appropriated and used by any socio-professional group or by any anonymous individual, showing its exponential and potentially dangerous use, resulting from its semantic ambiguity. Therefore, a discussion of the ontological and epistemological issues becomes an absolute requirement for any scientific discipline endeavouring to establish a solid base, as well as openness to a challenging and inexorably progressive dynamic. This aim is naturally transposed to our field of work, Information Science. In this text, part of a tetralogy that began with an essay on ‘Knowledge and Information’ and which will be followed by two more (‘Culture and Cultural Heritage in the Information Age’ and ‘Information and Communication’), it is our aim to emphasize the human and social phenomenon underlying such common, yet insufficient, terms, as document/documentation, which, strictly speaking, only refer to an intermediate stage in the psychosomatic phenomenality of creation/assimilation of information (mentally encoded representations from language to image), to the communication processes with one or more interlocutors/receivers. Consequently, the document is the materialization of Information (registered on a physical medium), which advances communication. The latter, however, is only fully consummated when a complete adjustment and interaction between sender and receiver occurs.