Epistemological and Methodological Eclecticism in the Construction of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) The Case of Analytico-synthetic KOSs

In recent years, Hjørland has developed a typology of basic epistemological approaches to KO that identifies four basic positions—empiricism, rationalism, historicism/hermeneutics, and pragmatism—with which to characterize the epistemological bases and methodological orientation of KOSs. Although scholars of KO have noted that the design of a single KOS may incorporate epistemological-methodological features from more than one of these approaches, studies of concrete examples of epistemologico-methodological eclecticism have been rare. In this paper, we consider the phenomenon of epistemologico-methodological eclecticism in one theoretically significant family of KOSs—namely analytico-synthetic, or faceted, KOSs—by examining two cases—Julius Otto Kaiser’s method of Systematic Indexing (SI) and Brian Vickery’s method of facet analysis (FA) for document classification. We show that both of these systems combined classical features of rationalism with elements of empiricism and pragmatism and argue that such eclecticism is the norm, rather than the exception, for such KOSs in general.