The Epistemological Dimension of Knowledge Organization

Resumo

Epistemology is the science of knowledge. Knowledge organization is the science of the order of knowledge. The domain of knowledge organization is a discourse community in which inquiry takes place concerning knowledge, and its various orderings or sequences. The products of the domain are ordered segments of knowledge, and the rules either for discovering their natural orders, or the rules for imposing a useful sequence. This paper brings together some results from meta-analysis of the knowledge organization domain. Knowledge organization is a coherent domain with an ontological base, its extension, along a dimension stretching from concept theory (or semantics) to applied knowledge organization systems and an underlying teleology, which is the attempt to grasp the order of knowledge. The domain has common hypotheses—first, that knowledge is made up of concepts; and second, that these concepts can be ordered in diverse and useful ways. There is epistemological consensus forming a dimension stretching from empiricism to rationalism. Finally, there are consistently marked dimensions within the domain, such that a) there is a trajectory from theoretical to applied on a conceptual continuum; and b) there is another trajectory from empirical to rational on an epistemological continuum.