from Harmer, 1952, p. 282), the record creator is an English king, who writes formally to his subordinates: King Edward sends greetings I inform you that I have given to Bishop Giso the land at Wedmore An even earlier (and less formal) example is a business letter written by a cattle overseer in ancient Egypt, about 3000 years ago (translation from Wente Meltzer, 1990, p. 31): This is a missive to inform my lord that I am carrying outevery assignment that has been charged to me. I am writing to inform my lord that a message should be sent Modern equivalents using the word 'inform' can easily be imagined: Dear Ms Bloggs, I write to inform you that the Board has decided Even when creators of 'assertive' records do not use a word such as 'inform', the propositions they state ('We have sold the property'; 'I have completed the task'; 'The Board has resolved to issue new shares') could perhaps be seen as information that they wish to convey to readers of the records concerned. Advocates of the view that records 'contain information' rarely discuss propositions, but what they mean by 'information' would seem to be the propositions that record creators state. Suppose, for example, that a Board Secretary writes: Dear Ms Bloggs, The Board has agreed the terms of the new share issue Here, a proposition is the only explicit content of the record. The Secretary is stating a proposition about what the Board has agreed to do, but the record appears to be conveying autonomous information, because the act of making a statement remains implicit and is concealed from the reader. However, any concept of information must take account of the possibility of misinformation. It is legitimate to ask how far records can be said to contain or provide information, if some of the propositions set out in them seem inaccurate, mistaken, biased, or distorted to tell of an ideal past. It could be argued that the cattle overseer supplied his manager with the information that he was carrying out every task assigned to him, even if several of his tasks had actually remained untouched. But it is also possible to contend that, when propositions are fallacious, they cannot appropriately be labelled as information. For Luciano Floridi (2004, pp. 42-46), a 'general definition of information' does not require information to be truthful; truthfulness is a condition only of a 'special definition of information'. This distinction remains characteristic of Floridi's work. Other philosophers have considered the issue without resolving it. Some speculate that information could be either true or false; others insist that falsehoods cannot be information (Hennig, 2014, pp.251-252). Truth, of course, is itself a contested notion; not every commentator would accept that propositions can be characterised as definitively true or false. A less foundational stance suggests that propositions can only express perceptions of the world, and that stating a proposition entails consciously or unconsciously selecting one way of representing the matter to which the proposition refers, while excluding others that could be equally plausible. Stating a proposition is a social practice that necessarily reduces complex realities to manageable verbal forms. Whenever record creators assert propositions, a cautious approach may lead us to conclude that those propositions are open to dispute or at least to variable interpretation. The studies cited earlier in this chapter, which seek to demonstrate that medical records or social work files are tendentious, all focus on records that depend on the assertion of propositions about past events. Because these records are almost always constructed at an interval of time after - and often also at a place distant from - the actions and events they describe, they are liable to distortion or bias in favour of the interests of their creators or the organisations for which their creators work. Concerns about the reliability of propositions asserted by records creators need not be limited to records that report retrospectively on past events. Making a statement of any kind entails producing a particular representation of the way things were, are, or are thought likely to be, and it cannot be a neutral practice. Of course, a simple assertion of, for example, a cost estimate offers less scope for improvisation than more discursive or creative forms of record, but all assertions involve record creators in choosing to present their message in a particular way. Even when institutions or legal systems attempt to impose regulated vocabularies, there is almost always space left for authorial choice, which in turn may lead us to question the objectivity of the propositions asserted in a record. Almost certainly, however, when we encounter such propositions, we will be less inclined to deny that the creator of the record has asserted them. Although we may choose not to believe the Egyptian overseer's claim that he was working on each of his assignments, we will be unlikely to doubt that he asserted a proposition to that effect. Likewise, when we read a file of job application forms, we may question the veracity of statements made by individual applicants, but such questioning does not diminish our understanding of the file as a record of the statements that were made during the application process.15 Seeing records of this kind as 'information' is less fruitful than seeing them as representations of propositions asserted and of the acts of asserting them. In contrast to the popular view that information wants to be 'free' and enjoy 'a life of archives in liquid times 108 geoffrey yeo information, records, and the philosophy of speech acts 15 We can draw very similar conclusions about the metadata, or descriptions, that records' custodians or other agents create. Records professionals seek to secure the contextualisation of records by surrounding them with appropriate metadata, but metadata are not exempt from error, distortion, social constraints, or human judgement. Metadata are created at specific moments of time; they always have contexts of their own, and they can be understood as records of propositions that were asserted in the course of a descriptive process. Although metadata are commonly characterised as 'data about data', it is equally possible - and, from a speech-act viewpoint, more productive - to see them as records of assertions made about other records, entities, or relationships. 109

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