TY - JOUR

T1 - Political versus Apolitical Epistemologies in Knowledge Organization

AU - Hjørland, Birger

N1 - Accepted for publication in Knowledge Organization's special issue "The Politics of Knowledge Organization"

PY - 2020/10/6

Y1 - 2020/10/6

N2 - Section 1 raises the issue of this article: whether Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) and Knowledge Organization Processes (KOP) are neutral or political by nature and whether it is a fruitful ideal that they should be neutral. These questions are embedded in the broader issue of scientific and scholarly research methods and their philosophical assumptions: What kinds of methods and what epistemological assumptions lie behind the construction of KOS (and research in general)? Section 2 presents and discusses basic approaches and epistemologies and their status in relation to neutrality. Section 3 offers a specific example from feminist scholarship in order clearly to demonstrate that methodologies that often claims to be or are considered apolitical represent subjectivity disguised as objectivity. It contains 4 subsections: Feminist views on 3.1: History; 3.2 Psychology; 3.3 Knowledge Organization and 3.4. Epistemology. Overall, feminist scholarship has argued that methodologies, claiming neutrality but supporting repression of groups of people should be termed epistemological violence and they are opposed to social, critical, and pragmatic epistemologies which reflect the interaction between science and the greater society. Section 4 discusses the relation between the researchers’ (and indexers’) political attitudes and their paradigms/indexing. Section 5 considers the contested nature of epistemological labels, and Section 6 concludes that the question of whose interest is a specific KOS, algorithm or information system serving should always be at the forefront in information studies and knowledge organization (KO).

AB - Section 1 raises the issue of this article: whether Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) and Knowledge Organization Processes (KOP) are neutral or political by nature and whether it is a fruitful ideal that they should be neutral. These questions are embedded in the broader issue of scientific and scholarly research methods and their philosophical assumptions: What kinds of methods and what epistemological assumptions lie behind the construction of KOS (and research in general)? Section 2 presents and discusses basic approaches and epistemologies and their status in relation to neutrality. Section 3 offers a specific example from feminist scholarship in order clearly to demonstrate that methodologies that often claims to be or are considered apolitical represent subjectivity disguised as objectivity. It contains 4 subsections: Feminist views on 3.1: History; 3.2 Psychology; 3.3 Knowledge Organization and 3.4. Epistemology. Overall, feminist scholarship has argued that methodologies, claiming neutrality but supporting repression of groups of people should be termed epistemological violence and they are opposed to social, critical, and pragmatic epistemologies which reflect the interaction between science and the greater society. Section 4 discusses the relation between the researchers’ (and indexers’) political attitudes and their paradigms/indexing. Section 5 considers the contested nature of epistemological labels, and Section 6 concludes that the question of whose interest is a specific KOS, algorithm or information system serving should always be at the forefront in information studies and knowledge organization (KO).

U2 - 10.5771/0943-7444-2020-6-461

DO - 10.5771/0943-7444-2020-6-461

M3 - Journal article

VL - 47

SP - 461

EP - 485

JO - Knowledge Organization

JF - Knowledge Organization

SN - 0943-7444

IS - 6

ER -