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

Abstract

He studied cultural studies, sociology, philosophy, German literature, and obtained a master's degree in library and information science (LIS). He is a second year PhD student at the Berlin School in the information retrieval group and participates in the European PROMISE project. His research area is the theory of knowledge organization, in particular the social influence on classification and concept development. Kleineberg, Michael. The Blind Men and the Elephant: Towards an Organization of Epistemic Contexts. Knowledge Organization. 40(5), 340-362. 91 references.

Phenomena or Noumena? Objective and Subjective Aspects in Knowledge Organization

“…In any case, beyond nuances, denominations and the attempt of both the opposite fronts to annex the moderate intermediate position, I believe that this approach may share the same aspirations to the synthesis between the ontological and epistemological needs expressed by Kleineberg (2013) as to his own theory of knowledge.…”

“…This bipolarization tends both to make anyone who reflects on these issues to take sides with an objectivistic or subjectivistic position and to attribute one of those position also to the theories that, in one way or another, would rather overcome their opposition, as the readers of this article and Kleineberg's (2013) probably will do.…”

“…11) of this article, that Gnoli, one of the authors cited by Kleineberg (2013) as particularly representative of the modernist trend in the studies of knowledge organization, includes in his pattern also the epistemological dimension, typical of the postmodernist trend, as it contains "the disciplines, […] the domains addressed by different research communities, the human activities to which knowledge is intended to be applied, the communicative functions performed in transmitting knowledge, the theories adopted and methods applied, the historical epoch and geographical context in which knowledge is produced and, in general, all viewpoints adopted by authors" (Gnoli 2012b, 271) 2 . Consistently with this "multidimensional" opening, Gnoli himself, during the final debate of the ISKO meeting in Bologna on 20 April 2015, accepted the possibility of adding even a seventh "dimension", relating to the objectives, preferences, habits and constraints of individual users and to the characteristics of different and changing information needs and behaviours of each of them, studied by psychology and information science.…”

“…For example, recently Kleineberg (2013) started from the ancient Indian parable of the blind men that, touching the different parts of a single elephant, give completely different descriptions of it, incommensurable with one another, to illustrate the positions of the two opposite fronts that have been facing in the international studies of the past decades about knowledge organization. On one side are "modernists", that underline how the elephants is, after all, only one, and therefore it must be possible to integrate its various descriptions (different because partial) in a single picture, that focuses on the "what" of knowledge.…”

An automatic approach to weighted subject indexing—an empirical study in the biomedical domain

“…Later, Hjørland () further advocated the domain‐analysis approach for research on indexing and retrieving. More recently, Kleineberg () argued that three dimensions (i.e., ontological, epistemological, and methodological) should be considered to represent the context‐dependent nature of knowledge.…”