Information Technology Reference
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will introduce formal (symbolic) logic to expose the underlying rigor of
the argument. Connectives from formal logic are fully sufficient to cap-
ture relations between the “atomic fact[s]” distinguished (Wittgenstein
1922/1981, § 2.062); atomic facts are understood to include both con-
cepts and activities (for instance, selection power as a concept and selec-
tion labor as an activity). By embedding formal logical exposition in a
summary discursive recapitulation and complementing it with a diagram,
we will sustain intelligibility for readers familiar with ordinary discourse
but not fully conversant with formalism. Thus, complementing the dis-
cursive development with a more formal presentation should clarify and
reveal the rigor of the argument and also maintain strong correspondence
to reality.
Synthesis
The first concept we treated was selection power, received as an atomic
fact or primitive term that is open to elucidation but not definition in
the sense of decomposition into more primitive terms. Selection power
was understood as human faculty for discrimination, which could be aug-
mented by technologies but still remain a quality of human conscious-
ness. Therefore, our first proposition asserted selection power's
value for
information retrieval.
Labor was regarded as comparably fundamental to selection or intel-
ligence and an inescapable condition of human existence. Labor was fur-
ther understood to include mental as well as physical labor, both as an
adjunct to physical or productive labor and as a separate activity. A spe-
cific concern involved selection labor as a form of mental labor. Thus,
selection labor could also be asserted as a primitive activity, although
inescapably imposed by the need for selection power and not implicitly or
explicitly sought after as a good.
We have developed a central proposition connecting the primitive con-
cept and activity—that selection labor produces selection power under a
range of historical conditions: emerging when orality transformed into
literacy; fully realized with literacy, or premodern, information technolo-
gies; and continuing, although transformed, with modern technologies.
This proposition has empirical correlates in historical and current descrip-
tion processes for documents, objects, and people. Under premodern con-
