The Origin of Information Science

Information always comes from another person (whether information wants to admit it or not). The process is always social. (Putnam talks about this in *Reason, Truth and History*)

The duplication in print of extant scribal maps and anceint geographical treatises, even while seeming to provide evidence of “backsliding,” also provided a bassi for unprecedented advance. To found knowledge of the whole world “on first hand information” is, literally speaking, quite impossible. Access to a wide variety of secondhand information furnished by reports, ship’s logs, and chartsover the course of many generations is needed for assimilating all the assorted information that may be supplied. Before the outlines of a comprehensive and uniform world picture could emerge, incongruous images had to be duplicated in sufficient quantities to be brought into contrast, compared and contrasted.