The Blind Men and the Elephant: Towards an Organization of Epistemic Contexts†

In the last two decades of knowledge organization (KO) research, there has been an increasing interest in the context-dependent nature of human knowledge. Contextualism maintains that knowledge is not available in a neutral and objective way, but is always interwoven with the process of knowledge production and the prerequisites of the knower. As a first step towards a systematic organization of epistemic contexts, the concept of knowledge will be considered in its ontological (WHAT) and epistemological (WHO) including methodological (HOW) dimensions. In current KO research, however, either the contextualism is not fully implemented (classification-as-ontology) or the ambition for a context-transcending universal KOS seems to have been abandoned (classification-as-epistemology). Based on a combined ontology and epistemology it will be argued that a phenomena-based approach to KO as stipulated by the León Manifesto, for example, requires a revision of the underlying phenomenon concept as a relation between the known object (WHAT) and the knowing subject (WHO), which is constituted by the application of specific methods (HOW). While traditional subject indexing of documents often relies on the organizing principle “levels of being” (WHAT), for a future context indexing, two novel principles are proposed, namely “levels of knowing” (WHO) and “integral methodological pluralism” (HOW). † This contribution is based on a translation of a conference paper presented at the 13th Meeting of the German ISKO “Theory, Information, and Organization of Knowledge,” Potsdam, 19 March 2013. The author would like to thank Peter Ohly, Vivien Petras and Birger Hjørland for their support to improve the quality of this paper. Received 2 May 2013; Accepted 16 May 2013