1. Social epistemology, classification theory and information retrieval Birger Hjørland, August 16., 2017 Royal School of Library and Information Science, University of Copenhagen

2. Overview Jesse Shera on social epistemology and classification
Social epistemology as a member of a broad family of approaches
What is social epistemology opposed to?
Examples of contemporary classifications
Don Swanson on information retrieval
Conclusion.

3. 1. Jesse Shera on social epistemology and classification

4. 1. Jesse Shera on social epistemology and classification
The term social epistemology (SE) originated in library science in an article about classification by library scientist Jesse Shera (1951). Shera considered classification/knowledge organization to be the core of library science (and so have many others considered classification both before and after him).

5. 1. Jesse Shera on social epistemology and classification
Egan and Shera (1952) is often mentioned as the first paper on SE, but Shera (1951) also used the term (without defining it). To me, the 1951 paper provides a better grasp of what SE is (or might be).

6. 1. Jesse Shera on social epistemology and classification
Shera (1951, p. 82, emphasis added): “Even a cursory examination of the history of classification of the sciences emphasized the extent to which any attempt to organize knowledge is conditioned by the social epistemology of the age in which it was produced. This dependency of classification theory upon the state of the sociology of knowledge will doubtless be even more strongly confirmed in the future. Here, then, is an implicit denial of Bliss’ faith in the existence of a ‘fundamental order of nature,’ a rejection of the belief that there is a single, universal, logically divided classification of knowledge.”

7. 1. Jesse Shera on social epistemology and classification
Formerly Shera wrote: “If one may learn anything from such a cursory examination of the history of classification it is that every scheme is conditioned by the intellectual environment of its age or time; that there is not, and can never be, a universal and permanent classification that will be all things to all men; and that each generation may build upon the work of its predecessors, but must create its own classification from the materials that it has at hand and in accordance with its own peculiar needs” (Shera 1951, p. 77).

8. 2. Social epistemology as a member of a broad family of approaches
Shera expressed the pragmatic approach very clearly and thereby demonstrated the close connection between pragmatism and social epistemology: “The pragmatic approach to classification through meaningful units of knowledge must be based on recognition of the obvious truth that any single unit may be meaningful in any number of different relationships depending on the immediate purpose. Thus, it is the external relations, the environment, of the concept that are all-important in the act of classifying. …

9. 2. Social epistemology as a member of a broad family of approaches
… A tree is an organism to the botanist, an esthetic entity to the landscape architect, a manifestation of Divine benevolence to the theologian, a source of potential income to the lumberman. Pragmatic classification, then, denies the existence of the “essence” of tree, for each of these relationships owes its existence to different properties of the tree. Relationship is not a universal, but a specific fact unique to the things related, and just as these relations reveal the nature of the relata, so the relata determine the character of the relationship. (Shera 1951, pp ; italics in original).

10. 2. Social epistemology as a member of a broad family of approaches
In my manuscript (distributed to you) I provide arguments about SE’s relations (as understood by Shera, 1951) also to: • Domain analysis; • Postmodern philosophy; • Social constructivism; • Paradigm theory and hermeneutics; • Critical theory & feminist epistemology: • Semiotics and activity theory.

11. 2. Social epistemology as a member of a broad family of approaches
I am not claiming that all these theoretical positions are identical, just that it might be fruitful to consider them a family of related approaches, which may have important similarities in their implications for LIS (and are opposed to less fruitful, but more influential theories).
For example, there are important similarities between Shera’s SE and Mai’s (1999) postmodern theory of knowledge organization.

12. 3. What is social epistemology opposed to?
1. Most logically, social epistemology is opposed to individual epistemology. The difference between SE and individual epistemology is described by Goldman and Blanchard (2016, Section 3.1) in the following way:

13. 3. What is social epistemology opposed to?
“Epistemologists often speak of epistemic ‘sources’, which refers roughly to ways we can get knowledge or justified belief. Standard examples of such sources in traditional (individual) epistemology are perception, introspection, memory, deductive and inductive reasoning, and so forth. When turning to social epistemology, we quickly encounter an ostensibly new kind of source, viz., testimony. Knowledge or justification can be acquired, it seems, by hearing what others say or reading what they write (and believing it).”

14. 3. What is social epistemology opposed to?
This quote corresponds to Patrick Wilson’s (1983) concept second hand knowledge: What you observe is firsthand knowledge, what you are told by other is secondhand knowledge. But this is not primarily what Shera’s (1951) classification was about, and this is not what is described above as social epistemology in the in the ground swell of Kuhn (1962).

15. 3. What is social epistemology opposed to?
What Shera and Kuhn claimed was that individual epistemology or firsthand epistemology is socially and culturally influenced. The way persons classify some elements are influenced by the tradition in which they have been trained or socialized, and by implication that all epistemology is social.

16. 3. What is social epistemology opposed to?
2. Essentialist classification. Aristotle is often attributed the standpoint of essentialism, that objects have essential properties or attributes and those should be used in classification and provides objective classifications based on logical divisions. This attribution is both true and false (see Richards, 2016, for a very important correction of a widespread myth about essentialism).
Shera (1951, pp ) clearly dissociated himself from Aristotelian essentialism.

17. 3. What is social epistemology opposed to?
3. Shera and Ranganathan were friends and Ranganathan has claimed to be a social epistemologist – and thereby the whole school of facet analysis would belong to SE. But is this really the case?

18. 3. What is social epistemology opposed to?
4. Numerical taxonomy. The use of statistical methods to identify clusters of similar elements, where each element is described by a large number of attributes (which are not selected theoretically, because this would introduce a kind of subjectivity not approved by empiricism). This approach claim independence of the researcher/classifier, and turns out to conflicts with social epistemology. 5. (There are more opposing views, of course).

19. 4. Examples of contemporary classifications
1. Ørom’s study of classifications of arts (Ørom, 2003)
2. The classification of mental diseases (Cooper, 2017; Hjørland, 2016).
3. The Classification of celestial bodies (Dick, 2013)
4. The classification of birds. (Fjeldså, 2013).

20. 5. Don Swanson on information retrieval
Swanson (1986) claimed: 1. Potentially there may exist important knowledge in libraries, journals and database that has not been “discovered”. (“Undiscovered public knowledge”). One of Swanson’s brilliant examples was the hypothesis that dietary fish oil might benefit patients with Raynaud's disease. None of the articles claiming that fish oil reduces blood viscosity cites any articles on Raynaud's disease and vice versa. By studying the medical literature, Swanson was able to make an important medical discovery (!)

21. 5. Don Swanson on information retrieval
2. If people working on a task a search in the literature, some relevant documents may not be retrieved because any search strategy is a theory that may be refused, but can never be finally proved. A search strategy is refused if it is possible to discover just one relevant document which has been missed by that strategy. Swanson concluded (1986, 114): “Any search function is necessarily no more than a conjecture and must remain so forever”.

22. 5. Don Swanson on information retrieval
3. It is not just the search strategy that represents a hypothesis or theory. All the underlying "searchable attributes" such as title words, index terms, descriptors, subject headings, or classification symbols are also constructed on theoretical assumptions that may turn out to be more or less adequate for a given search.

23. 5. Don Swanson on information retrieval
All this seems extremely important for the theoretical basis of IR, and it is worth considering that Swanson’s important analysis is based on epistemology. He explicitly criticized a positivist understanding and based his insight on the critical rationalism of Karl Popper. It is annoying that his work has not inspired more information scientist to consider these philosophical problems because problems of IR are deeply connected to the theory of knowledge.

24. 5. Don Swanson on information retrieval
However, it might be claimed that Swanson (and Popper) in some respects represents an individualist epistemology and that social epistemology (SE) may contribute a new important level of understanding. Swanson views information and queries as individual and IR as a random ”trial and error”-process.

25. 5. Don Swanson on information retrieval
From a SE-perspective, however, IR is not totally random because it is possible to describe documents and requests according to research traditions or “paradigms”. Swanson (1986, 115) has an example: an engineer who wants all available information on the mathematical analysis of how a child pumps a swing.

26. 5. Don Swanson on information retrieval
“I believe that even the well-informed layman, librarian, or experienced database searcher would probably not come very close to a good search function on the first try. Very little can be found by combining words related to pumping and to swings. A far greater quantity of relevant literature can be found by searching for articles and books on parametric amplifiers. That example is far from unique and illuminates the difficulty of trying to construct any retrieval aid such as a thesaurus that would include a connection between parametric amplifiers and the pumping of swings.”

27. 5. Don Swanson on information retrieval
But what does this example tell us? It tells us that you need domain knowledge in order to know the relevant search terms. Such domain knowledge is associated with disciplines and social bodies of people and knowledge. What lay people cannot do, is to consider a specific problem (such as children pumping swings) as something that can be considered as an example or application of a more general principle (such as parametric amplifiers).

28. 5. Don Swanson on information retrieval
Seen in this perspective IR is not a totally random process because different people have different “semantic distances” to the information they need. To optimize IR is first to consider subject knowledge and second to consider not just what Fuller (2010) calls disciplinary “short term memory”, but also “long term memory”. Such overviews of literatures have always been the mark of a qualified (subject) librarian. For the qualified information specialist, IR is not trial and error, but based on insight.

29. 5.0 Conclusion
The term SE was first used Shera (1951) and his view of classification theory is probably more accepted today than ever before. (See for example the conclusion about the Colon Classification in Satija (2017) based on Mai (2002). In addition it has been argued that SE is a fine candidate to provide for a much better understanding of IR. In others words: Can we afford to neglect the contribution from SE?

30. Thanks for your attention!

31. References
Cooper, R. (2017). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM) Knowledge Organization, in press. Also available at: Dick, S. J. (2013). Discovery and classification in astronomy: Controversy and consensus. New York: Cambridge University Press. Egan, M. E., & Shera, J. H. (1952). Foundations of a theory of bibliography. The Library Quarterly 22, no. 2: Fjeldså, J. (2013). Avian classification in flux. In Handbook of the birds of the world. Special volume 17 (77-146). Barcelona: Lynx Edicions. Fuller, S. (2010). Social Epistemology. In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition, Eds. Marcia J. Bates & Mary Niles Maack. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, vol. VI,

32. References
Goldman, A. & Blanchard, T. (2016). Social epistemology. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition). Retrieved from Hjørland, B. (2016). The Paradox of atheoretical classification. Knowledge Organization 43, no 5: Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. Mai, J.-E. (1999). A postmodern theory of knowledge organization. Proceedings of the 62nd annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science, ed. Larry Woods, Medford, NJ: Information Today.

33. References
Mai, J.-E. (2002). Is classification theory possible? Rethinking classification research. Advances in Knowledge Organization, 8, Ørom, A. (2003). Knowledge organization in the domain of art studies: History, transition and conceptual changes. Knowledge Organization, 30(3/4), Richards, R. A. (2016). Biological classification: A philosophical introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Satija, M. P. (2017). Colon Classification (CC). Knowledge Organization, 44(4), Also available at:

34. References
Shera, J. H. (1951). Classification as the basis of bibliographic organization. In Bibliographic Organization: Papers presented before the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Graduate Library School July 24-29, 1950 ed. Jesse H. Shera and Margaret E. Egan, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
Swanson, D. R. (1986). Undiscovered Public Knowledge. The Library Quarterly, 56(2),
Wilson, P. (1983). Second-hand knowledge. An inquiry into cognitive authority. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.