Modes of Correspondence between Information System and World

For an information system (IS) to be useful, it must correspond in some way to the world. This is often described as a relationship between the model of the world that the IS maintains and the ‘real’ world outside the IS. But this talk of models and correspondence begs these questions: what does it mean for an IS to correspond to the world, and what is the purpose of this correspondence? Since an IS is a practical artifact, it is not surprising that these two questions, the question of meaning and the question of use, are tightly related. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the relatedness of the questions, to sketch answers to both, relate the discussion to current debate in the field of requirements engineering research, and to ground the discussion in the context of a real example. The focus of this paper is on the type of IS, fiduciary applications, in which people place a lot of trust and invest a part of their personal identity, and for which the theoretical issues discussed herein are of great practical, moral and political significance. 1. Surrogacy, Correspondence and Speech Acts For an information system (IS) to be useful, it must correspond in some way to the world. This is often described as a relationship between the model of the world that the IS maintains and the ‘real’ world outside the IS. But this talk of models and correspondence begs these questions: what does it mean for an IS to correspond to the world, and what is the purpose of this correspondence? Since an IS is a practical artifact, it is not surprising that these two questions, the question of meaning and the question of use, are tightly related. As early writings on database semantics (e.g. Kent 1978) noted, surrogates in the domain of the IS represent phenomena in the world. From this pragmatic perspective, therefore, correspondence between IS and world amounts to the accuracy with which surrogate entities in the IS serve as proxies for the phenomena they keep track of. The database is a model, and questions that users have about the domain of discourse are replaced by queries about this model. If the model is accurate, the answers to queries will be correct answers to questions about the world being modeled. However, not all systems model the world in this way. Multi-user role-playing games ‘model’ imaginary worlds. What does that mean? Word processors ‘model’ documents, but PHISE'06 745