PREFACE

Logeion - Philosophy of Information journal reaches its eighth year with the certainty that it is fulfilling its role of disseminating and valuing practical philosophy, especially ethics and politics, as well as the theory of knowledge and technical issues. We were able to gather a constellation of authors who offer us their essays and their research results. They are the main reason the journal can guarantee the quality of what is published.

We have been working since the birth of the journal to form and cultivate a readership in the area of Philosophy of Information. It is a small territory that is drawn between Philosophy and Information Sciences, with relevance in a society in which information becomes central in the construction of intersubjective relationships and in the production of goods and wealth, including intangibles. Information always raises many philosophical questions, which begin with the very understanding of what it is: thing, process, content, meaning, etc.

We are living in a strange time, with profound changes in special and temporal references, which reflect on the construction of personality, socialization and the formation of groups. The social isolation imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated disturbances in personality formation and socialization. The disturbances in the pandemic were exacerbated by the crisis in production and consumption, with unemployment and hunger. Deep problems were added to the dynamics of social groups.

A journal that proposes to disseminate the Philosophy of Information must also face current disturbances and problems. In Brazil, we have additional difficulties with mismanagement in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, which left a trail of 700,000 deaths, of which it is estimated that more than half could have been avoided. From the perspective of the Philosophy of Information, the situation worsens because part of the problem happened due to the denial of scientific information and misinformation.

The background of mismanagement in the fight against the pandemic is the existence of a Federal Government that refused to coordinate nationally the necessary measures for social isolation and the actions of the Unified Health System. It was a government that encouraged the use of drugs known to be ineffective against Covid-19, as well as aligned itself with the crudest anti-vaccine rhetoric and delayed the purchase and distribution of vaccines.

This context per se would be challenging for critical thinking, but it is also interspersed with intense and deep political conflict polarized by a federal government that misinforms and denies science, that antagonizes the judiciary and that co-opts a parliamentary bench in the National Congress with benefits. As if that were not enough, the federal government is not embarrassed to make apologies for the military dictatorship. The story of this present is yet to be told, beyond the narrative controversies.

The articles we are now publishing reflect this time. What should be the “information society” becomes a society disaggregated by disinformation. It becomes necessary to defend achievements of modernity, such as education and science. These were areas deeply affected by neoliberal policies of fiscal balance, which, among us, reached the extreme of the legal determination of a ceiling for public spending.

In a society marked by Eurocentric thinking, it is, at the very least, curious to present similarities between our social and political reality and that of the African continent. Different perspectives for similar difficulties contribute to the construction of critical analyses. It is an enormous challenge to think critically about colonized and subaltern Latin America. Reflective research on science and technology cannot abstract our condition as a grain and mineral farm in globalized society.

Brazil's place in neoliberal globalization is the cause and effect of budget cuts and contingencies. The federal government does not shy away from imposing shortages on education, culture, science and technology. The potential for doing research comes up against the wall that is the lack of public resources and the lack of interest on the part of the private sector in what is not useful for accumulating wealth. The structural misery for doing culture, science and technology is deepened with the strategy of public agencies of making controlled competition between artists, professors and researchers for scarce resources.

It should be noted that this issue of Logeion closes with two interesting discussions on mediation. They are consistent arguments about mediation and the social role of mediators, one of them dialoguing with Habermas' Theory of communicative action. In a network society, we must think whether information is something that precedes communication, as in functionalism, or if it is built within communication, as in cognitivism and constructivism.

I would like to conclude this presentation by talking about our Enlightenment beliefs in enlightenment, in learning, in evolution. Never before in the history of this country was it so necessary to be optimistic, and to hope for better days. The terrible darkness of the night precedes the dawn of another day, open to the social construction of history. It depends on each and everyone.

Rio de Janeiro, September 08, 2022

Clovis Ricardo Montenegro de Lima