Social Epistemology from Jesse Shera to Steve Fuller

This article examines the project of Jesse Hauk Shera (1903–82), carried out originally in association with his colleague Margaret Egan, of formulating an epistemological foundation for a library science in which bibliography, librarianship, and the then newly emerging ideas about documentation would be integrated. The scholarly orientation and research agenda of the University of Chicago’s Graduate Library School provided an appropriate context for his work for social epistemology, though this work was continued long after he left the University of Chicago. A short time after his death, a group of philosophers that included Steve Fuller (1959– ) began to study the collective nature of knowledge. Fuller, independently of Shera, identifi ed, named, and developed a program of social epistemology, a vehicle for which was a new journal he was responsible for creating in 1987, Social Epistemology. Fuller described his program as an intellectual movement of broad cross-disciplinary provenance that attempted to reconstruct the problem of epistemology once knowledge is regarded as intrinsically social. Fuller, like other philosophers interested in this area, acknowledges the work of Shera. “The Renaissance of Epistemology” Nineteenth-century philosophy, and especially its branch of epistemology, was dominated by neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism. The twentieth century opened with a new and naturalistic interest in epistemology, a reaction against German metaphysical idealism. Luciano Floridi describes Tarciso Zandonade, Associate Professor, Department of Information Science and Documentation, Faculty of Economics, Administration Accountancy, and Information Science and Documentation, University of Brasilia, Caixa Postal 04561, 70919–970, Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil 811 zandonade/jesse shera to steve fuller this period as “The Renaissance of Epistemology” in the fi rst half of the twentieth century—between the two world wars—which formed “a bridge between early modern and contemporary philosophy of knowledge” (Floridi, 2003). This young Italian philosopher at Oxford University identifi es the roots of this philosophical reaction in Europe and in the United States. He suggests that, in German philosophy, this antimetaphysical movement originated from Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz’s (1821–94) scientifi c interpretation of Immanuel Kant (1874–1904), from Franz Brenato’s (1838–1917) phenomenology, and from Ernst Mach’s (1838–1916) “neutral monism.” In France, Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) positivist movement prepared this reaction. In Britain, the critical realism at Oxford and the philosophy of George Edward Moore (1873–1958) and Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) at Cambridge repelled Hegelianism. In the United States, Floridi describes how Kant’s and Hegel’s idealism was directly confronted by the new pragmatist epistemology of William James (1842–1910) and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who introduced the term “pragmatism”; John Dewey (1859–1952), who introduced the terms “experimentalism” and “instrumentalism”; Clarence Irving Lewis (1883– 1964); and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). By the turn of the twentieth century, major advances in mathematics, logic, and physics prompted new methodological interests in the philosophy of science, and central topics in epistemology came to be reexamined mainly as “a reconsideration of the role of philosophy as a critical exercise of analysis, rather than as an autonomous and superior form of knowledge” (Floridi, 2003, p. 531). The second half of the nineteenth century in the United States was the age when many of the contemporary liberal professions and the academic disciplines that supported them intellectually were institutionalized. The trend was not different for such an old humanistic profession as that of librarianship. In the United States, a strong demand for a “national union catalog” to link major libraries in the country was voiced at the fi rst conference of American libraries in 1852, while British librarians were gathering around the “public libraries movement” at almost the same time in their country. Librarians had developed by then the whole basic apparatus for the proper organization of books in library collections (Egan and Shera, 1953). But concurrently the periodical, or scientifi c journal—the “archive of science”—at around its bicentennial was reaching the landmark of one thousand titles (Price, 1961). This event brought a problem for the library, since the tools to organize this new medium of scientifi c publication were not readily available. An augur of things to come, William Frederick Poole, at Yale College in 1848 devised a “collective index” to enable access to the content of individual periodical articles. Twenty-eight years later, at the fi rst American Library Association (ALA) conference, Poole reported on the constraints he had gone through to bring his index to a second edition by 1853. He then suggested that the conference had the powers to organize a 812 library trends/spring 2004 practicable plan of cooperation to proceed with a new edition of the index. He was adamant in maintaining that the burden and labor of producing such a work should not be laid upon one person (Library Journal, 1876). The library profession, however, was unable to unite around a cooperative venture of this sort, partly because management resources were still scarce, and partly because they were not then convinced of the importance of “micro-documentation” at the level of the “thought unit,” as against “macro-documentation” for the “publication unit” (Egan and Shera, 1949; Ranganathan, 1963, p. 29). Meanwhile, even before the establishment of ALA, calls were recorded for the creation of a “librarians’ association,” and the philosopher and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson identifi ed the need for a “professorship of books” to teach readers how to make the most of library resources (Emerson, 1870). The Birth of a New Social Science (Library Economy) from an Old Profession (Bibliography and Librarianship) Library Apprenticeship A “library and information profession” has existed ever since mankind adopted writing to record graphically on any physical object their knowledge and imagination. By mid-nineteenth century, the library profession, both in the United States and in Britain, was becoming aware of its responsibility to provide a sophisticated library service. However, a formal profession entrusted with the duty to manage the graphic record for the benefi t of society—and a matching overruling institution for library and information education and research—did not emerge in the United States until 1876, when the American Library Association was founded, and in Britain until 1877, when the Library Association (LA) was founded. Before the emergence of a formal profession, prospective librarians were chosen for their “housekeeping” skills, and the chief librarian directly supervised their training during an apprenticeship period. We take into account only the American and British library profession and education development because this is where the strongest early developments occurred. Library Economy During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the leading character of Melvil Dewey commanded the library scene in the United States. As a professional librarian, in 1876 alone, amongst other ventures, he published his Decimal Classifi cation and was instrumental in the creation of the American Library Association (ALA), becoming its fi rst secretary and then its president for several terms. As a library educator, he made a proposal to ALA for a fi rst School of Library Economy. The creation of the school was approved by ALA, although not without some resistance from opposing quarters, and it started operating in 1887 at Columbia College. 813 zandonade/jesse shera to steve fuller In comparison to the young and already wealthy science of economics, the establishment of a librarianship course seems now to have been opportunistic but still in accordance with the title the new academic area received at the formation of ALA. Dewey tried hard to fi nd a suitable academic cradle for his newborn scientifi c discipline. An appropriate name for the program was already inscribed on ALA’s “birth certifi cate.” In fact, on the last day of the congress [in Philadelphia], Friday 6 October 1876, those present were invited to append their signatures to the following: For the purpose of promoting the library interests of the country and of increasing reciprocity of intelligence and good-will among librarians and all interested in library economy and bibliographical studies, the undersigned formed themselves into a body to be known as the AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION. (Munford, 1977, pp. 17–18; emphasis added). Documentation At the end of the nineteenth century, while in the United States the education for library service swiftly expanded in the presence of challenging obstacles, English librarians also gathered around their Library Association and for a period of time shared with their American peers the same (American) Library Journal, a periodical “devoted to library economy and bibliography” (Library Journal, 1876) By this time, the focus of development shifted to Brussels, where the Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine undertook—under the name of “documentation”—to develop new approaches to the organization of access to all sources of knowledge. In 1892 Paul Otlet met Henri La Fontaine, who was engaged in collecting documentary material on the social sciences at the Société des Études Sociales et Politiques in Brussels, Belgium. Scientifi c periodicals were reaching the mark of 10,000 titles at the turn of the twentieth century, and the European pioneers worked fast and hard to build the “Répertoire Bibliographique Universel,” which would include classifi ed references to the entire universe of subjects and literatures. The activity of documentation soon became institutionalized in what has been up until recently the International Federation for Documentation and Information (FID) (Bradford, 1953; Rayward, 1975). Library Service In the United States the growth in the number of library schools led to the setting up of the Association of American Library Schools in 1915. In the early 1920s the Carnegie Corporation took an interest in the education of librarians and in 1923 issued what became known as the Williamson Report, Training for Library Service. This along with Minimum Standards for Library Schools, published in 1925 by the newly created American Library Association Board of Education for Librarianship, set in motion a normative function for the new library-based area of research and professionalized education. On the other side of the Atlantic, the fi rst British library school— 814 library trends/spring 2004 now the School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies (SLAIS)—was opened in 1919 at the University College, University of London. Outside the U.S.-U.K. axis, but somewhat related to it, in Brazil the fi rst school of librarianship was opened at the Bibliotheca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro in 1910 and started operation in 1915; it was designed after the model of the French École des Chartes in Paris. Then, in 1929, the librarian of the Mackenzie Institute library in São Paulo, Adelpha Silva Rodrigues, received a scholarship from the American Association of University Women to study librarianship in the United States. To replace and train Miss Rodrigues in advance of her studies abroad, the institute brought from the United States the young Miss Dorothy Muriel Geddes, later Mrs. Arthur E. Gropp, who opened the fi rst training course for librarians at Mackenzie and became the true founder of modern librarianship in São Paulo (Rodrigues, 1945, pp. 8–9). From the Library Economy to Library Science The most infl uential drive toward the emergence of a library science was—without any doubt—the establishment of the Graduate Library School (GLS) at the University of Chicago in 1926, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation (Richardson, 1982). The school faculty was drawn from wellestablished scientifi c disciplines to support a strong program of research related to what they saw as the theoretical foundations of library science. Highly signifi cant in this context was the infl uence exerted on GLS by the philosophy of John Dewey, amongst other scholars of the day. His small treatise on “the sources of a science of education” (Dewey, 1929) became required reading at GLS and was eventually “translated” into library science by GLS faculty member Pierce Butler (1933). Following Dewey’s approach to creating a science of education, Butler stated that the three essential problems of a library science as an autonomous discipline are sociological, psychological, and historical. The scholarly work of the school obtained an outlet after the founding of a new journal, Library Quarterly. Another member of the school faculty, Douglas Waples (1939), prepared one of the fi rst handbooks on library research methodology. This was especially tailored for students supervised through correspondence courses (Waples, 1939, p. viii). On the other hand, this seemingly distinct improvement that library science received from this all-graduate program and from the “Chicago School” environment during the 1920s and 1930s did not come unquestioned. The library profession did not entirely agree to a swift change from its traditional “pragmatic” mainstream, and adjustments had to be negotiated between GLS and the profession (Richardson, 1982). 815 zandonade/jesse shera to steve fuller