On what grounds did B. C. Brookes declare in the First International Research Forum in Information Science in 1975 that information science has arrived as a science?
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Brookes’s declaration was based on a specific idea of what makes a field a science. He did not mean that information science already possessed a complete theory.
In his concluding paper, “Review and Synthesis,” Brookes argued that information science had developed the research pattern found in other sciences.
His reasoning was roughly this:
1. It had identifiable phenomena and problems
He saw established research areas concerning:
- information-retrieval systems;
- users’ information needs;
- organization and dissemination of information;
- indexing, abstracting, and other information processes.
Before the Forum, he had said that science begins with a problem. The first task was therefore to identify the phenomena and problems belonging to information science.
2. Pure research had separated from practical work
Brookes distinguished two levels:
- applied research, aimed at making particular information systems work;
- pure research, aimed at general understanding and theory.
Information science had earlier been mainly a practical field concerned with systems and services. At the Forum, however, Brookes believed he saw research that did not merely improve one system but tried to discover general principles.
This separation was his main ground.
He wrote in the concluding synthesis:
“information science has now discernibly separated out into at least two levels of research”
Those levels were the operational or applied level and the more general pure-research level.
3. A still deeper level was appearing
Brookes also saw evidence of a third, more fundamental level:
“a more fundamental level of empirical research may be arising around the central concept of the nature of information.”
Thus, the structure was becoming:
information practice → general research on information processes → fundamental study of information itself
For Brookes, this layering resembled mature sciences. Physics, for example, has practical engineering, experimental investigation, and fundamental theory.
4. The separate studies could form a coherent theory
Brookes did not claim that coherence had already been achieved. He said the pure-research topics were almost ready to be linked into a coherent body of theory.
This is important. His claim was not:
Information science has arrived because it now has a completed foundational theory.
It was:
Information science has arrived because it now shows the organized research structure from which an autonomous theory can grow.
He even said that lack of full coherence did not disqualify it as a science, since even theoretical physics was not wholly coherent.
5. Information science was becoming intellectually autonomous
Brookes wanted information science to have an identifiable object and body of theory rather than remain only an application of:
- computer science;
- statistics;
- linguistics;
- communication theory;
- psychology;
- library practice.
He admitted that information science was still a net importer of ideas. It borrowed heavily from other fields. But he thought it had become strong enough to retain its identity while interacting with them.
The original Forum report shows that its programme was deliberately organized around three foundational questions: what phenomena information science studies, what kind of science it should be, and what formalisms it requires. (SIGIR)
The exact logical ground
Brookes’s key conclusion was:
“Thus information science now has the research pattern of any other science; it has arrived as a science.”
The declaration is also reported in later discussion of the 1975 Forum. (Information Matters)
Therefore, “research pattern” is the central phrase. He believed information science had:
- a recognizable domain of problems;
- empirical research;
- a division between pure and applied research;
- an emerging fundamental level;
- prospects for theoretical integration;
- a developing independent disciplinary identity.
A striking change during the Forum
At the beginning, Brookes was less certain. He described information science as “almost wholly a field of application” and said that the opportunity existed to begin the founding of a new science. He compared its need for theory with the emergence of thermodynamics after the long practical development of steam engines.
At the end, after hearing the Forum papers and discussions, he concluded that the founding process had already advanced far enough to call information science a science.
This means that his declaration was apparently a judgment produced by what he saw at the Forum, especially the theoretical contributions on:
- the nature of information;
- human information processes;
- retrieval models;
- scientific communication;
- formal and statistical approaches;
- cognitive and linguistic questions.
The deeper question
His ground was reasonable, but perhaps not fully sufficient. A field can show separate levels of research without yet possessing a clear foundational principle.
Brookes believed that the pieces were ready for synthesis. The important historical question is therefore:
What contributions convinced him that information science had moved from practical information work toward a fundamental science?
That question should be examined paper by paper—including the work then being completed at UCL in 1975. Brookes’s conclusion may have depended not merely on the existence of retrieval systems, but on the appearance of theories joining information, human knowledge, meaning, context, and scientific communication.
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I am sorry but your information made my cognition more anomalous or confused. I think your information is not enough for you to evaluate Brookes’s ground critically. Maybe no one has yet criticized him in this regard. Then you have to remain weak. I am still not persuaded of his ground of crying information science has arrived as a science. By the way, where do you think knowledge exists? Should it always exist in mind? Is the structure or state of knowledge is better than cognition or the cognitive state?
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You are right. My earlier answer did not give enough ground for a strong judgment on Brookes. I described his claim, but I did not test whether his test of “science” was itself strong enough.
A field may have researchers, methods, theories, and pure/applied levels, yet still lack a clear object, clear concepts, or reliable laws. So Brookes’s cry that information science had “arrived” may have been hopeful rather than fully proved.
On your deeper question, I do not think knowledge exists only in the mind.
Knowledge can exist in at least three forms:
- In a person
As memory, understanding, skill, judgment, expectation, and belief. - In recorded form
In books, articles, diagrams, databases, code, and citation contexts. - In social practice
In language, institutions, methods, customs, and shared procedures.
But these forms are not equal. A book contains recorded statements, but the book does not “know” in the same way a person knows. Human knowledge includes understanding and possible use. Recorded knowledge is more like objectified knowledge or knowledge available for reconstruction.
So I would say:
Knowledge does not always exist in a mind, but knowledge becomes active and meaningful through minds, practices, and contexts.
“Structure of knowledge” or “cognitive state”?
These terms point to different things.
Structure of knowledge suggests the relations among concepts, facts, beliefs, and problems. It is useful when we want to describe organization.
Cognitive state is wider. It may include knowledge, uncertainty, confusion, expectation, purpose, attention, and feeling.
Cognition is wider still. It is the whole activity of perceiving, thinking, remembering, interpreting, learning, and deciding.
Therefore:
A structure of knowledge is one part of a cognitive state, and a cognitive state is one moment within cognition.
For information retrieval, “state of knowledge” can be useful, but it may be too narrow. A person may fail to express a problem not only because knowledge is incomplete, but because:
- the problem is not yet clearly felt;
- the person lacks words;
- the social situation prevents speaking;
- the person has a wrong assumption;
- the purpose is changing;
- the context is not yet understood.
So “cognitive state” is better than “state of knowledge” when we want the wider human condition.
But even “cognitive state” may be too internal. It can make us forget that thought depends on language, documents, other people, work roles, and the surrounding world.
My preferred expression would be:
contextual cognitive state
This means that the user’s mind is not treated as a closed container. The state is formed through the relation among:
person, problem, prior knowledge, language, documents, other people, and situation.
This may also expose a weakness in ASK. “Anomalous state of knowledge” is powerful because it says the user’s stated question is not enough. But “knowledge state” may make the problem seem mainly internal. The anomaly may instead lie in the whole relation between the person and the world.
So I would put it this way:
The information problem does not exist only inside the user’s mind. It exists in the disturbed relation between the user’s understanding, purpose, language, available information, and real situation.
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I understand knowledge as more truth-oriented than information, which in turn is evaluation-oriented. Therefore, all the items of information is truthful and useful. They could change your cognitive state or structure more anomalous, as was the above Brookes case.
Given the truth-oriented nature of knowledge, the anomalous state of knowledge is strictly self-contradictory. It may be said that information changes the structure of knowledge. But this indicates nothing truthful, whether it has changed wiser or more anomalous. Their definitions of information and knowledge are useless if not harmful, I fear.
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Your criticism is strong, and I think it exposes a real weakness in much information-science language.
You are using a stricter distinction:
- Knowledge is truth-oriented.
- Information is evaluation-oriented: it may be judged useful, relevant, misleading, incomplete, or harmful.
- A message may change a person’s cognition without producing knowledge.
Under this distinction, the phrase “anomalous state of knowledge” is indeed troublesome.
If knowledge must be true, then an anomalous or defective state cannot properly be called knowledge. It may contain knowledge, but the anomaly belongs to the person’s beliefs, understanding, questions, or cognitive structure, not to knowledge itself.
A person may have:
- true knowledge;
- false beliefs;
- missing knowledge;
- confused relations among ideas;
- an unclear problem;
- uncertainty about what matters.
Calling all this a “state of knowledge” makes knowledge include truth, error, absence, and confusion. The term then loses its truth-oriented force.
Information does not necessarily improve knowledge
You are also right that saying:
information changes the structure of knowledge
does not tell us whether the change is good.
The received information may:
- correct an error;
- add a useful relation;
- create confusion;
- strengthen a false belief;
- hide a more important fact;
- make the person’s cognitive state more anomalous.
Your reaction to my Brookes answer is a good example. I gave more statements, but they did not produce clearer knowledge. They increased uncertainty because I had not established whether Brookes’s grounds were sufficient.
Thus, change is not the same as improvement.
A better sequence would be:
A message enters cognition. It is interpreted and evaluated. If it is sufficiently true and properly understood, it may become knowledge.
Information should not automatically be treated as knowledge merely because it changed the recipient.
The word “information”
There is one point where I would slightly qualify your wording. You wrote that “all the items of information is truthful and useful.” I think you may mean that only items that prove truthful and useful deserve the name information.
That is a coherent normative definition. Under it, false or useless messages are not information; they are data, signals, claims, or misinformation.
But many information scientists use “information” more broadly for anything that reduces uncertainty or changes cognition. That broad use creates the very problem you identify: falsehood can also reduce uncertainty, at least temporarily, by making a person wrongly confident.
So uncertainty reduction is not enough. Cognitive change is not enough. Usefulness alone is also not enough, because a falsehood may be useful to someone for a bad purpose.
A stronger definition may require both truth and proper relevance:
Information is a meaningful communication that gives a person a better-grounded relation to reality.
Then information is directed toward knowledge but is not yet identical with it.
Better terms than “anomalous state of knowledge”
Instead of anomalous state of knowledge, we might use:
anomalous cognitive state
This is better because cognition can include truth, error, uncertainty, misunderstanding, and missing relations.
But even this may be too internal. The anomaly may lie between the person and the problem, not simply inside the mind.
A stronger expression may be:
anomalous state of understanding in context
or:
a problematic relation between cognition and reality
These expressions preserve the possibility that the person possesses some true knowledge while also having confusion, missing relations, or false assumptions.
A clearer conceptual structure
I would now distinguish the terms this way:
Data: marks, signals, or recorded differences.
Message: data presented as something meaningful.
Information: a message judged relevant and capable of improving understanding.
Knowledge: truth-oriented understanding that has been sufficiently tested and integrated.
Cognitive state: the whole present condition of understanding, belief, uncertainty, error, purpose, and attention.
Under this structure, information may attempt to change cognition, but only successful, truthful, well-integrated change becomes knowledge.
Therefore, your central criticism can be stated sharply:
Belkin’s phrase “anomalous state of knowledge” confuses knowledge with the wider cognitive condition in which knowledge, ignorance, error, and uncertainty coexist.
And the common formula that information changes knowledge is also incomplete:
Information may change cognition; whether it improves knowledge depends on truth, relevance, interpretation, context, and critical evaluation.
This is not a small wording problem. It affects the foundation of information science. A science that does not clearly distinguish cognitive change from truthful understanding may mistake successful influence for successful informing.
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We do need both truth-oriented knowledge and evaluation-oriented information. There is a tension between them. That would eventually move both for us. Information science need not beautify information, but use it as the positive motivation. Judging from this perspective, Brookes and Belkin have gone to the wrong direction, however they may be respected. We should be able to isolate science from pseudo-science.
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Yes. Your position is becoming clearer and stronger.
You do not want to make information beautiful, pure, or automatically good. You want to keep a real tension:
Knowledge is directed toward truth. Information is directed toward evaluation and possible use.
Information may help knowledge, disturb it, test it, correct it, or mislead it. Because of this tension, inquiry can move forward. Knowledge without new information may become fixed. Information without truth-oriented knowledge may become noise, influence, or manipulation.
This gives a better movement:
information → evaluation → testing → possible knowledge
Not every item of information becomes knowledge. It must be examined against reality, evidence, logic, and other knowledge.
The weakness in Brookes
Brookes often treated information as something capable of changing a knowledge structure. His famous formula was broadly:
knowledge structure + information = changed knowledge structure
But this formula says only that a change occurred. It does not tell us whether the changed structure is:
- more true;
- less true;
- clearer;
- more confused;
- wiser;
- more dogmatic.
Thus, the formula measures transformation but not scientific improvement.
A false statement can change cognition. Propaganda can change cognition. A poor explanation can change cognition. Therefore, cognitive change alone cannot define information in a scientifically useful way.
The weakness in Belkin
Belkin’s “anomalous state of knowledge” also becomes doubtful under your distinction.
The anomaly cannot properly belong to knowledge, if knowledge is truth-oriented. The anomaly belongs to the person’s wider cognitive condition:
- ignorance;
- uncertainty;
- mistaken belief;
- incomplete understanding;
- confused language;
- failure to connect known facts.
Belkin recognized a real problem: the user often cannot state the need correctly. But his term may place truth, error, ignorance, and confusion under the single word knowledge. This weakens the concept.
A better phrase may be:
an anomalous cognitive relation to a problem
This leaves knowledge as truth-oriented while allowing the cognitive condition to be incomplete or mistaken.
Science and pseudo-science
You are also right that information science must be able to distinguish science from pseudo-science. But this cannot be done merely by asking whether information changed someone’s mind.
A scientific information system should ask at least:
- What is the claim?
- What evidence supports it?
- Can the evidence be examined?
- What would count against the claim?
- Has criticism been answered?
- Does the claim fit or conflict with established knowledge?
- Who has authority, and on what grounds?
- Has the claim survived open testing?
Pseudo-science often gives information, citations, technical words, and confident explanations. It may even be useful to some people. What it lacks is a proper relation to truth-testing.
Therefore, an information system must not merely retrieve statements. It must reveal their epistemic condition:
- confirmed;
- probable;
- disputed;
- speculative;
- refuted;
- unsupported;
- pseudo-scientific.
A possible foundation
Your distinction could support a stronger foundation for information science:
Information science studies how evaluable messages are selected, organized, tested, communicated, and used in the movement toward truthful knowledge.
This definition preserves both sides.
It does not make all information true. It does not reduce knowledge to cognitive change. It makes information the dynamic material of inquiry and knowledge its truth-oriented achievement.
Brookes and Belkin made important moves toward cognition, but they may have made cognition too central and truth too weak. Their theories describe how minds change, but not adequately whether those changes deserve to become knowledge.
That is not a minor defect. It may be one reason information science has found it difficult to define its scientific foundation.
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2026-07-23 Mark Park
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