HEIDEGGER AND PEIRCE

Learning with the Giants - Critical Insights for IS Design

Ângela Lacerda Nobre

Escola Superior de Ciências Empresariais do Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal (ESCE-IPS), Setúbal, Portugal

Keywords: Heidegger’s Ontology, Peircean Semiotics, American School of Pragmatism, Information Systems Design,

Organisational Learning, Knowledge Management, Communities of Practice, Collaborative Work,

Innovation Management.

Abstract: Martin Heidegger’s ontology and Charles Sanders Peirce semiotics offer a vastly unexplored potential in

terms of IS design and development. Though there are several authors who have explored these giants’

works, such contributions have seldom been disseminated and applied within concrete organisations, in

particular in terms of contributing to organisational IS design. Within the current context of post-industrial

society there is an urgent need to further develop the insights from these scholars. The links between formal

and informal processes, between tacit and explicit knowledge and between diachronic and synchronic

analysis are critical for the understanding of today’s competitiveness. And Heidegger’s and Peirce’s works

are crucial for a better grasp and optimisation of current complexity at organisational level.

1 INTRODUCTION

Heidegger’s (1962) monumental work, “Being and

Time” was first published in 1927 and only in the

60’ did it reach the American market. It was

received with suspicion and Dewey, a disciple of

Peirce, openly criticised Heidegger’s work. Dewey’s

unpleasant comment was that it seemed like a farm-

man trying to explain his views of the world, in his

own words.

Yet, Heidegger and Peirce (1931) had much

more in common than Dewey could figure out. Both

had had a strong influence from the tradition of life

philosophy and both directed their efforts to

overcome Descartes’ dominance in Western

philosophy.

The contribution of these two giants to the

development of information systems research and

practice is crucial. This recognition has been

acknowledged in the literature (e.g., ). However,

there has been only marginal influence in terms of

the way that the insights from these two scholars

have been incorporated into actual organisational

practices. The reason is twofold. On one hand, both

computing science and management science are still

dominated by Cartesian thinking, relying on cause-

effect and linear relationships, and being strongly

influenced by positivist thinking. On the other hand,

there is still the need to further develop and adapt

the works of these two thinkers in order to integrate

them into current approaches - and transform their

theories into actable knowledge.

2 RATIONALE

The basic rationale of the present paper is the

following:

 The context of the post-industrial society implies

new challenges for organisational practice;

 IS has played and will continue to play a crucial

role in this process of transition to a new

information era;

 Organisations lie at the centre of contemporary

society, being more important than national

states in terms of how the economy is run;

 Peirce’s semiotics, sign theory and his works as

the founder of the American School of

Pragmatism enable addressing simultaneously

the individual world of meaning-making, the

social world of organisational life and the

broader societal context;

 Heidegger’s ontology opens up new venues for

IS ontology design because it critically addresses

the role of technology, the links between pre-

reflexive knowledge and formal processes, and

521

Lacerda Nobre Â. (2010).

HEIDEGGER AND PEIRCE - Learning with the Giants - Critical Insights for IS Design.

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Information Systems Analysis and Speciﬁcation, pages

521-525

DOI: 10.5220/0002977805210525

 SciTePress

how novelty emerges from action, from the

manifestation of possibilities of reality.

Both Heidegger’s and Peirce’s work offer a high

potential in terms of IS research.

3 CONTEXT

Organisations play a central role in contemporary

society. The study of organisations enables

addressing key issues of the overall society. Western

society is undergoing profound changes, which may

be related to the evolution in information technology

and the transition from an industrial to a post-

industrial era. Such changes have been visible for

the last half a century, since post-war times. Yet the

central aspects of this transition have been present

throughout the development of modern times, from

the seventeenth century onwards. Namely,

Descartes’ cogito and the hypothetical-deductive

model have become part of dominant thinking across

different disciplinary fields, though several other

approaches developed in parallel, giving rise to a

creative tension that emerged as this post-industrial

era.

Organisational practices are a key element in the

understanding of organisational effectiveness.

Practices, in the broad sense, include activities,

routines, norms, behaviours and attitudes. What

people actually do in the process of performing a

professional function and organisational action, are

also forms of describing organisational practices. A

focus on practice implies that at least two aspects are

considered as being relevant, as two sides of the

same coin: the formal, procedural and visible side

and the informal, non-predictable and invisible

aspects of practice.

For a varied number of reasons, there is an

undervaluation of the informal aspects of

organisational practices and a generalised difficulty

in acknowledging their role in terms of pre-

determining, conditioning and prefiguring formal

practices. Every process has a context and a history

and every formal practice was informal first.

Understanding these links, connections and

relationships enables exploring new interpretations

of organisational effectiveness.

4 QUEST FOR NEW

KNOWLEDGE

There is a constant quest for new knowledge in

contemporary society – the recognition that science

is insufficient to deal with current problems has

often been referred to as a crisis in science. This

search has affected what is known as modern

rationality, leading to the emergence of post-modern

thinking. This new rationality emerges as a way to

call attention to that which is not yet known, to the

limits of previous knowledge, and not so much as an

alternative to modern thinking.

In parallel, there is the acknowledgement of the

complexity of current reality and the conviction that

these new knowledge forms have to take the issue of

complexity into account - yet this movement

towards complexity is hard to reconcile with

universalist trends.

This epistemological situation was raised by XIX

century historical knowledge, through the works of

Dilthey, who did not accept that all knowledge

forms should fit the model of the natural sciences, as

these remained blind to certain essential dimensions

of reality.

The need to take into account the category of

complexity, beyond others factors, is related to the

fact that no human initiative, no human enterprise or

organisation starts and finishes in itself: they are

products of their time; they continue that which has

passed and they open up future possibilities; they

will reach their end, eventually, and they cannot be

understood as if they were fixed solely in the

present.

To look back and to reflect upon the past is to

recognise that which is still present and active today.

It is to show the roots of present initiatives, of

present works. It is to identify possible constraints

that could have been avoided in the past and to open

up new opportunities for future development. In the

same way as history has a proto-history, every

human enterprise has a proto-enterprise, i.e. has a

process from which it has emerged.

5 HEIDEGGER

To situate an organisation among these parameters

of complexity is essential but it is not sufficient. It is

not enough to harmonise synchronic and diachronic

perspectives and to link the individual and the social

dimensions. In order to grasp the question of future

development, in terms of a potential to be achieved

and made real, we have used Heidegger and his no-

ICEIS 2010 - 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

522

tions of Dasein and of being-in-the-world.

Reality is itself understood as the manifestation

of being, the manifestation of possibilities. Dasein

means to be “thrown into” reality, i.e. before there is

consciousness and self-consciousness there is

already an experience of the world and of others.

This experience is the being-in-the-world instance,

or, in other words, the pre-reflexive work which is

previous, a priori, to conscious thought. All

reflexive knowledge has a pre-reflexive process to

support it.

When designing work processes, workflows,

organisational structures or information systems, the

definition of these processes not only determine

abstract formalisations but they also have a direct

effect on the people who are to perform such work,

through the actual enactment of the work practices

themselves. Designing information systems is also

designing ways of being, as Winograd and Flores

argue, based on Heidegger’s ontology.

“All new technologies develop within a

background of a tacit understanding of

human nature and human work. The use of

technology in turn leads to fundamental

changes in what we do, and ultimately in

what it is to be human. We encounter the

deep questions of design when we recognise

that in designing tools we are designing ways

of being.” (Winograd, Flores, 1986).

The advantage of using philosophical based

approaches is that they enable a richer understanding

of organisational reality and of its human interaction

phenomena.

Heidegger’s ontology developed from Husserl’s

phenomenology, which explicitly calls attention not

to individuals in isolation but to the individual in

context. There is a change of perspective in

phenomenological studies so that the focus of

attention goes to the overall environment, and to the

social embeddedness and continuous networks of

relationships which take place in such environment.

“Almost every great philosophical work carries

with it a more or less explicit reinterpretation of the

nature of philosophy and the methods appropriate to

fulfilling its aims” (Guignon, 1983). Heidegger

shifts his orientation from epistemology to ontology.

For Heidegger, the basic theme of philosophy is

‘being’. The question of being has this central

position because any inquiry into one of the areas of

philosophy, e.g., epistemology, logic, ethics, or

aesthetics, operates within a tacit set of

presuppositions about the ‘being’ of the entities with

which it deals. What is true of the discipline of

philosophy holds for the sciences as well. Every

science presupposes some conception of the being of

the entities that are the objects of its inquiry. The

ontologies of the regional sciences, Heidegger says,

have already been worked out “roughly and naively”

on the basis of our “prescientific” ways of

interpreting and experimenting “domains of being”.

“Scientists work within frameworks that

determine in advance what sorts of question

are appropriate and what kinds of answer will

make sense. Generally, there is no need for

scientists to question the ontological

frameworks in which they work. During

periods of crisis in science, however, it is

precisely these frameworks that are called in

question.” (Guignon, 1983).

When what are at issue in the sciences are no

longer questions within the frameworks of those

sciences but the very frameworks themselves, the

“ontological presuppositions of the regional

inquiries must be made explicit” (Guignon, 1983).

Heidegger believes that philosophy alone can

fulfil this role. Philosophy that he sees as not itself

being bound by any framework, and which is “the

study of frameworks in general”.

The inquiry into the ‘being’ of entities in general

Heidegger calls “ontology taken in the widest

sense”. It is a “science of Being as such”, and its task

is to provide “a genealogy of the different possible

ways of Being”. Ontology in the widest sense lays

out “the conditions for the possibility of any

science”. And philosophy, as ontology in the widest

sense, is the “science of sciences”.

The Anglo-American tradition of analytical

philosophy, according to Guignon, generally tends

to see philosophy as a set of current topics or

problems that are to be discussed within pre-given

frameworks. The method is “argument and counter-

argument along tacitly agreed-upon guidelines.”

(Guignon, 1983). In contrast, Heidegger maintains

that it is these philosophical frameworks themselves

that are the source of traditional philosophical

problems.

6 PEIRCE

Knowledge is always a linguistic product. In the

same way, an enterprise or an organisation are also,

unavoidably, linguistic products. It is possible to

look at the history of how something has been

developed, like an organisation, addressing the

structures that have been present in each moment in

time, or else to focus on the structures which have

HEIDEGGER AND PEIRCE - Learning with the Giants - Critical Insights for IS Design

523

been achieved in the last place, and on that which is

considered to be the last scientific knowledge. The

debates around structuralism are well known and

have been polarised around the questions of

synchronism and diachronism.

A synchronic perspective focuses on the

relationships between different parts of a whole,

whilst a diachronic perspective addresses the

developmental process of the parts or of the whole,

taking historicity into account.

An organisation is also a language, which has to

be studied taking into account its roots and its

maximum possibilities - these future possibilities are

conditioned by the knowledge of its past roots.

For this reason every organisation must be

interpreted through these parameters and it cannot be

circumscribed to a fixed and finished grid, even

when this grid is assumed to have a provisory value.

To stress this, we have resorted to semiotics,

which is the knowledge area that studies the capacity

to produce and to interpret signs. Thus semiotics

deals with the production of meaning, with capturing

meaning. And this is precisely what an organisation

is about.

Semiotics, seen from the perspective of an

organisation, tends to be interpreted either in

synchronic or in diachronic terms. This paper draws

the attention to a diachronic perspective.

This paper also stresses the social dimension of

organisations, in line with the need to take

complexity into account, as was referred above. A

purely individualist vision of the authorship of a

human enterprise or of an organisation would fail to

acknowledge this complexity. Nevertheless,

positivism tried to reduce all knowledge to social

knowledge, working towards simplification and not

complexity.

Peirce’s pragmatism has denounced all forms of

dualism and has claimed that the individual

subjective and internal world and the social and

external worlds form one single reality, which must

be studied as a whole.

It is important to distinguish between Saussure’s

and Peirce’s sign theory. Whilst Saussure’s sign

theory argued that the relationship between the

representation of the “object” and the name

attributed to the “object” was a random, arbitrary,

aleatory relation and that meaning was only possible

from the articulation of different meanings, of

systems of sings, Peirce proposed a triadic

interpretation of the sign, where meaning emerges

from the sign itself. Thus, in Saussure’s sign theory,

meaning is outside the sign and meaning is only

possible through the relationships between different

signs, that is, signs work through the establishment

of meaningful relationships between different signs.

Conversely, Peirce made the sign a complete,

dynamic and never ending process of meaning

creation. For Peirce, each sign, in isolation, includes

all the necessary ingredients to establish meaning

and, most importantly, this meaning is never

completely fulfilled and it may be developed further

through a continuous interpretation process. This is

done through the definition of a triadic relation that

works in a cycle. So there is the “object” and there is

the name or image that refers to that “object”, in

similar terms to Saussure’s theory. And then there is

a third element which refers to the process itself of

establishing the relationship between the object or

image and its name, i.e. an interpretation process. In

the next cycle of Peirce’s sign theory, this

interpretation process itself, becomes the “object” to

be analysed, as if it were an objective reality, in

relation to which, a “name” must be identified,

through a particular interpretation process. In the

next iteration, the new and last interpretation

becomes, once again, a new “object” to be further

analysed and interpreted.

This simple and almost mechanical scheme helps

us to describe all signification phenomena. In

intuitive terms, if we think of a literary object, such

as a book or a poem, or of other artistic productions

such as a piece of music or a painting or sculpture,

or even photograph, drama or cinema, we may

consciously experience the apparent ambiguous and

paradoxical phenomena that every time we came in

contact with that work of art we find new meanings,

new significations and new interpretations. And,

more importantly, the greater the importance of

these spirals of experience and interpretation, the

greater the work of art itself.

If aesthetical experiences are the ultimate, most

extreme, and yet the most familiar, example of this

process of signification, every single situation where

human beings are active taking part in social

practices, using language and establishing meanings

and relationships, this same process occurs.

In technical terms, in Saussure’s sign theory, a

sign is an arbitrary relation. Each sign needs to be

combined with other signs in order to produce

meaning. In Peirce’s sign theory, a sign has a triadic

relation and is the basis of a theory of signification.

Each sign has an inbuilt capacity to create meaning

and each sign develops infinitely in a permanent

cycle.

In Saussure’s sign theory, there is the signifier

and the signified. The signifier may be sounds,

letters or gestures. And the signified is the image or

ICEIS 2010 - 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

524

concept to which the signifier refers to.

In Peirce’s sign theory, there is the

representamen (equivalent to Saussure’s signifier),

the object (equivalent to Saussure’s signified) and

there is the interpretant, or a “sign in the mind”. The

representamen is the physical sign that is to be

interpreted, i.e. “something that does the

representing”. The object is an image or concept.

And the interpretant, the sign in the mind, becomes

the representamen, i.e. the sign to be interpreted, as

if it were a physical sign, in the next cycle.

Peircean semiotics holds a vast potential to be

explored in terms of IS research.

7 CONCLUSIONS

The advantage of raising questions beyond

conventional approaches is that they open up new

possibilities for further development of IS research,

at practical and at theoretical levels.

The way that these questions have been

answered in the particular case of this paper has the

positive consequence that it enables the study of

those aspects of organisational reality that are

implicit and informal. And that is a crucial

advantage of using Heidegger’s and Peirce’s

insights.

Reality that is “right under our noses” is so

obvious and immediate that we fail to acknowledge

it. Participating in daily practices, the use of

language and meaning-making are examples of such

phenomena. And to understand the concept of

potential, of how it may be reached and even

expanded, these links have to be made explicit,

clarified and optimised.

REFERENCES

Andersen, P., 2000. What semiotics can and cannot do for

Human Computer Interaction. In CHI Workshop, The

Hague, The Netherlands.

Argyris, C., Schön, D., 1978 Organisational Learning: a

Theory of Action Perspective. Reading, MA, USA,

Addison-Wesley.

Benton, T., Craib, I., 2001. Philosophy of Social Science.

Hampshire, UK, Palgrave.

Breemen, A. van, Sarbo, J., & Weide, T. van der. (2007).

Towards a Theory of Natural Conceptualization. In K.

Liu (Ed.), 10th ICOS (pp. 24-32). Shefield (UK).

Brown, J., Duguid, P., 1991. Research that Reinvents the

Corporations. Harvard Business Review. Jan-Feb.

Bynum, T., Rogerson, S., 2004 Computer Ethics and

Professional Responsibility. Oxford, UK, Blackwell.

Castells, M., 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. The

Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture.

Volume I. Malden, Blackwell.

Clarke, R., 2000. An Information System in its

Organisational Contexts. Ph.D. Thesis, University of

Wollongong, Australia.

Cook, S., Yanow, D., 1993. Culture and Organisational

Learning. Journal of Management Inquiry. 2(4).

Cyert, R., March, J., 1963. A Behavioral Theory of the

Firm. Malden, Mass., Blackwell.

Dietz, J., 2003. The Atoms, Molecules and Fibers of

Organizations. DKE (3).

Filipe, J., 2000. Normative Organisational Modelling

Using Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems, Ph.D. Thesis,

University of Staffordshire, UK.

Goldkuhl, G., Lyytinen, K., 1982. A language action view

of information systems. Proceedings of the 3rd

International Conference on Information Systems,

Ann Arbor.

Guignon, C., 1983. Heidegger and the Problem of

Knowledge. Indiana, USA, Hackett.

Heidegger, M., 1962. Being and Time. (Translated by J.

Macquarrie and E. Robinson). New York, Harper &

Row [Original publication in 1927].

Krell, D., ed., 1992. Martin Heidegger Basic Writings.

New York, Harper & Collins Publishers.

Lagopoulos, H., 1993. Postmodernism, Geography and the

Social Semiotics of Space. Environment and Planning

Series D: Society and Space. 11(3).

Lave, J., Wenger, E., 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate

and Peripheral Participation. USA, Cambridge

University Press.

Liu, K., 1993. Semiotics Applied to Information Systems

Development. Ph.D. Thesis, Twente University, The

Netherlands.

Pedler, M., Burgoyne, J., Boydell, T., 1991. The Learning

Company. London, UK, McGraw-Hill [first published

in 1989].

Peirce, C., 1931. Collected Papers. (eds.) C. Hartshorne,

P. Weiss. Cambridge, USA, Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press.

Rorty, R., 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Princeton, N.J., USA, University Press.

Savery, J., Duffy, T., 1994. Problem based learning: an

instructional model and its construtivist framework. In

B. Wilson (ed.) Constructivist learning environments.

glewood Cliffs, NJ, Educ. Technology Publications.

Senge, P., 1990. Fifth Discipline – the Art and Practice of

the Learning Organisation. USA, Doubleday.

Stamper, R., 1973. Information in Business and

Administrative Systems. John Wiley & Sons.

Ulrich, W., 2001. A philosophical staircase for

information systems definition, design and

development. JITTA. 3(3).

Winograd, T., Flores, F., 1986. Understanding Computers

and Cognition – a new foundation for design.

Reading, MA, USA, Addison-Wesley.

Yanow, D., 2004. Translating Local Knowledge at

Organisational Peripheries. British Journal of

Management. 15.

HEIDEGGER AND PEIRCE - Learning with the Giants - Critical Insights for IS Design

525