Michael A. Peters 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 games’ and a ‘form of li