A Philosophy of Data

We argue that while this discourse on data ethics is of critical importance, it is missing one fundamental point: If more and more efforts in business, government, science, and our daily lives are data-driven, we should pay more attention to what exactly we are driven by. Therefore, data ethics should include a debate on what fundamental properties constitute data. It should be explicit about how the concept of data might differ between disciplines, as well as technologies, and how these differences interrelate with the concerns raised. In this paper, we provided one possible definition of statistical data. We define statistical data as the coming-together of substantive and numerical properties and differentiate between categorical and quantitative data. To exemplify how our definition can help ground ethical and social concerns, we highlight two dynamics of datafication that implicitly but profoundly alter our conception of the world of ourselves. First, data may influence with which degree of specificity we look at reality. Second, the quantitative operationalization of properties in statistical data can be understood as an influential ontological practice. In doing so, our goal is not necessarily to provide an authoritative definition of data but to demonstrate why we need an intensified debate about what exactly data is.