Information Technology Reference
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concept from information society discussions. Selection power was taken
from librarianship and indexing, but the preference of those activities and
disciplines for human description was transformed into a fuller under-
standing of the distribution of human semantic labor between description
and searching, and recognition of the possibility of transferring forms of
labor to technology. Query transformation—implicitly valued in classical
information-retrieval research—was incorporated into selection power
both practically and theoretically as a special case, similarly produced
by selection labor. Informational labor, recognized in information society
discussions, was differentiated into semantic and syntactic mental labor,
and human labor was distinguished from machine processes. Technology
has not been repressed but rather has been incorporated explicitly into
the theory. Therefore, we have achieved a synthesis of preexisting theo-
ries that adopts their elements of value and discards aspects that obstruct
understanding.
The relation between the labor theoretic approach and preexisting
theories has a partial and revealing analogy to revolutions in mathemat-
ics. Classically, revolutions in mathematics have changed interpretation
(verbal metalanguage) while retaining form (symbolic object-language),
thus economizing on the accumulated intellectual labor (universal labor)
embodied in known transformations in object-language:
And in thus preserving the form while modifying the interpretation, I am follow-
ing the great school of mathematical logicians who, in virtue of a series of star-
tling definition, have saved mathematics from the sceptics, and provided a rigid
demonstration of its propositions. (Ramsey 1925/1990, 219)
In this instance, we have brought the interpretation into rigorous accord
with essential or inescapable components of form or practice, particularly
through the idea of selection. Selection inherent in the process of retrieval
is matched by the value placed upon selection, and the addition of power
as the fundamental value for information retrieval. Therefore, the value of
selection power is congruent with the process of selection.
The theory then meets a rigorous test for knowledge, as “an ideal repro-
duction of the external world serviceable for cooperative action thereon”
(Childe 1956, 54). The theory has elements of idealization in its abstrac-
tion out of common activities from empirical reality, but the abstraction
gives enhanced understanding of those activities (for instance, the distinc-
tion between semantic and syntactic mental labor and their relation to
