Knowledge Organization for a Sustainable World: Challenges and Perspectives for Cultural, Scientific, and Technological Sharing in a Connected Society, 2016
This paper presents an analysis of Popper's ideas on knowledge organization systems with an empha... more This paper presents an analysis of Popper's ideas on knowledge organization systems with an emphasis on the foundations of critical-rationalist epistemology, particularly objective knowledge. Knowledge Organization as a field of study is concerned with the processes and knowledge organization systems aimed to develop more qualitative proposals to other fields of knowledge. Knowledge organization systems are representations of structures whose contents, organized in controlled vocabularies of terms, represent concepts. The function of concept organization and representation is the most important characteristic of these systems that relates them to Popper's objective knowledge theory. The knowledge organization system and Popper's objective knowledge, shown in his Table of Ideas, and the relationship between concepts and theory formulation are analyzed. The results demonstrate that epistemological aspects can be applied to knowledge organization systems. It can be concluded that analyses of Popper's objective knowledge and Epistemology in general provide further development of theoretical issues in knowledge organization. Introduction: some concerns and epistemological research Knowledge Organization (KO) as a human activity is linked to cognition in social, professional, and intellectual actions and is part of the daily life of every person. In the same way, knowledge areas, such as Chemistry, Physics, Biology, etc., have a continuous development and, for this reason, they must be systematized and organized by creating specific terminologies and using taxonomies to meet their needs. These ideas encourage thinking about some theoretical approaches between KO and Epistemology. The first one comes from the Theory of Knowledge, the most remote origin of KO since the Ancient Times (Hjørland, 1994, Barité, 2001), although its institution as a field of knowledge only occurred when the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) was founded. Another epistemic approach is the conceptual one, pointed out by Dahlberg (2006), who considers KO as a new science formed by a huge set of concepts and that it complies with the anthropological and propositional concepts of Alwin Diemer's science (1970 and 1975). More than theoretical approximations, the question would be: how will Epistemology be capable of clarifying the foundations of the epistemic construction of KO and strengthen such theoretical studies? Epistemology was taken into consideration by Japiassu (1977, p. 9, 25) after analyzing studies by authors, such as Blanché, Carnap and Lecourt. According to him, Epistemology would be the "genesis, development, structuring and articulation processes of scientific knowledge" or the "critical study of the principles, hypotheses and results of several sciences". Japiassu views science discourse as a strategic theory and science historicity as essential to an epistemological critique. The key concept is knowledge derived from scientific knowledge, which was initially linked to knowledge-state and, afterwards, to knowledge-process, understood as becoming
Uploads
Papers by Lena Pinheiro