Il terzo mondo di Popper e i mentefatti

POPPER’S THIRD WORLD AND MENTEFACTS The philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) theorized the existence, alongside the physical world of matter and the psychological world of thought, of a ‘third world’ reserved for the ‘objective knowledge’ contained in theories, narratives, technologies, works of art and other creations (especially, but not exclusively, the abstract ones) of human beings, not entirely reducible - in his opinion - to the corresponding psychic phenomena that occur in the minds of certain people. This theory, rather fortunate in the field of information sciences, however, involves many inconsistencies and implausibility, largely due to the excessively disparate types of content that Popper, in his numerous writings on the subject, places within his third world. Among the various attempts to resize, rationalize and make Popper’s third world more coherent and usable, it is particularly promising (although not entirely problem-free) the one linked to the concept (chronologically prior to Popper's theory) of ‘mentefact’, outlined by the sociologist Earle Edward Eubank (1887-1945), introduced in information sciences by Barbara Kyle (1913-1966) and recently revived by Claudio Gnoli in two articles published in 2018 and 2019. Mentefacts, for Eubank, Kyle and Gnoli, are all abstract (or immaterial) entities created by human beings, which are opposed to concrete (or material) objects built by humans themselves, called ‘artefacts’, and which should not be confused with the corresponding psychological phenomena, which are merely subjective. A typical relationship between artefacts and mentefacts of particular interest for information sciences is the one which identifies intentional human documents in the union of an artefact (physical carrier) with a mentefact (information content)