Open Works
The idea of openness as a political, social, and psychological metaphor has been part of a set of enduring narratives in the West since the time before the flourishing of modern democracy, scientific communication, and the rise of the knowledge economy. Principally these narratives have been about the nature of freedom, the primacy of rights to self-expression, the constitution of the public sphere or the commons, and the intimate link between openness and creativity. The core philosophical idea concerns openness to experience and interpretation such that a work, language, and system permit multiple meanings and interpretations with an accent on the response, imagination, and activity of the reader, learner, or user. The classic work that philosophically develops this central idea is the Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) who draws a close relationship between language as a set of open overlapping speech activities or discourses he calls “language...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bauwens, M. (2005). The political economy of peer production’, C-theory. Retrieved from http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499.
Blair, D. (2006). Wittgenstein, language and information. Dordrecht: Springer.
Hrachovec, H., & Pichler, A. (eds.) (2007). Philosophy of the information, society proceedings of the 30th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria.
Jung, R. E., Gasparovic, C., Chavez, R. S., Flores, R. A., Smith, S. M., Capriha, A., & Yeo, R. A. (2009). Biochemical support for the “threshold” theory of creativity: A magnetic resonance spectroscopy study. The Journal of Neuroscience, 29(16), 5319–5325. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0588-09.2009.
Lessig, L. (2007). Foreword. In M. L. Kembrew (Ed.), Freedom of expression: Resistance and repression in the age of intellectual property. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
May, C. (2006). Openness, the knowledge commons and the critique of intellectual property, Re-public: re-imagining democracy. Retrieved from http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=88|
May, C. (2008). Globalizing the logic of openness: Open source software and the global governance of intellectual property. In A. Chadwick & P. N. Howard (Eds.), Handbook of internet politics. London: Routledge.
McCrae, R. R. (1987). Creativity, divergent thinking, and openness to experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1258–1265.
Mill, Van, D. (2002). Freedom of speech. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/
Momigliano, A. (2003). Freedom of speech in antiquity. In Dictionary of the history of ideas. Retrieved from http://historyofideas.org
Peters, M., & Marshall, J. (1999). Wittgenstein: Philosophy, postmodernism, pedagogy. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Picher, A. (2002). Encoding Wittgenstein: Some remarks on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, the Bergen Electronic Edition, and future electronic publishing and networking. In: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 10/2001ff. Retrieved from http://www.inst.at/trans/10Nr/pichler10.htm
Pink, D. (2005). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. New York: Riverhead Books.
Sampson, T. (2004). The virus in the open system – A virus in info-space: The open network and its enemies. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7(3). Retrieved from http://vx.netlux.org/lib/mts00.html
Saulsman, L. M., & Page, A. C. (2004). The five-factor model and personality disorder empirical literature: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 23, 1055–1085.
Weitz, M. (1956). The role of theory in aesthetics. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15(1), 27–35. Retrieved from http://nanay.syr.edu/Weitz%201956.pdf.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). The philosophical investigations. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore
About this entry
Cite this entry
Peters, M.A. (2017). Open Works, Open Cultures, and Open Learning Systems. In: Peters, M.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-588-4_412
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-588-4_412
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-287-587-7
Online ISBN: 978-981-287-588-4
eBook Packages: EducationReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Education