Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2
Selection Power and Selection Labor
Selection Power
Selection power is understood as the human ability to make informed
choices between objects or representations of objects. It is adopted here
as the primary value or aim for information retrieval systems, in contrast
to the stress of query transformation in the experimental research tradi-
tion. Selection power is not arbitrarily asserted; its epistemological and
ontological status is clarified, its content conveyed through exemplifica-
tion, and its value supported by the presence of analogous concepts in
separate scholarly and ordinary discourses.
Definition and Elucidation
Like other fundamental concepts, selection power may be difficult to
define without becoming tautological. The difficulty of definition could
suggest the concept's significance. In the classic sense of decomposition
into more primitive concepts, definition is deliberately avoided and would
be difficult given the fundamental nature of the principle, but the term is
still elucidated and a refusal of explication similarly avoided.
Questions regarding the classic practice of definition as decomposing a
concept into known entities appear somewhat playfully in literary sources,
partly by implication in linguistics and most explicitly in philosophical
texts. When Pip is inducted into written literacy in
Great Expectations
,
Dickens plays upon the inevitable circularity of definitions:
“Your sister's a master-mind. A master-mind.”
“What's that?” I asked, in some hope of bringing him to a stand. But Joe was
readier with his definition than I had expected, and completely stopped me by
arguing circularly, and answering with a fixed look, “Her.”
