I define information as that which represents claims about states of affairs. Understood as representations of claims about states of affairs, information embodies claims about what is true, authentic,and right to conscious agents who can respond to those claims by accepting or challenging them on the basis of reasons. Situations are defined relative to these individual, social, and cultural backgrounds. Most of these shared elements always remain unspoken. But it is primarily in cases where participants lack common situation definitions that communication failures appear.
Examples abound among everyday situations, whether at the reference desk, for example, or at home.
Communication community . This concept is based ultimately on Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of a community of inquiry. If we accept some such premises as these, then it follows that student efforts to understand and use information are mediated by the linguistic practices current within their own communication communities on the one hand and those practices current in the community from which an information source originates on the other. Discourses typically arise in response to problems. A common and useful way to thematize problems in a research context is through the use of a research question.