Political versus Apolitical Epistemologies in Knowledge Organization

In: Hjørland , B 2020 , ' Political versus Apolitical Epistemologies in Knowledge Organization ' , Knowledge Organization , vol. 47 , no. 6 , pp. 461-485 . https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2020-6-461

Abstract

Is knowledge neutral? Can it be? Are there ways to produce neutral and objective knowledge? Different theories about knowledge and science have implications for how research is done and how different knowledge organization systems (KOS) and knowledge organization processes (KOP) are made and understood. Such questions are epistemological. This article starts considering how feminist researchers have questioned the objectivity of research about women and introduces the concept "epistemological violence". It further takes a broad view of the main families of epistemological theories and demonstrate trends towards historical, interpretative and pragmatic perspectives in the understanding of knowledge and research. The main emphasis in the article is given to the question of whether knowledge is neutral or political and concludes that it is better to have explicit subjectivity than subjectivity disguised as objectivity. The article also discusses the importance of these perspectives for information science and knowledge organization. ; Section 1 raises the issue of this article: whether Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) and Knowledge Organization Processes (KOP) are neutral or political by nature and whether it is a fruitful ideal that they should be neutral. These questions are embedded in the broader issue of scientific and scholarly research methods and their philosophical assumptions: What kinds of methods and what epistemological assumptions lie behind the construction of KOS (and research in general)? Section 2 presents and discusses basic approaches and epistemologies and their status in relation to neutrality. Section 3 offers a specific example from feminist scholarship in order clearly to demonstrate that methodologies that often claims to be or are considered apolitical represent subjectivity disguised as objectivity. It contains 4 subsections: Feminist views on 3.1: History; 3.2 Psychology; 3.3 Knowledge Organization and 3.4. Epistemology. Overall, feminist scholarship has argued that methodologies, claiming neutrality but supporting repression of groups of people should be termed epistemological violence and they are opposed to social, critical, and pragmatic epistemologies which reflect the interaction between science and the greater society. Section 4 discusses the relation between the researchers' (and indexers') political attitudes and their paradigms/indexing. Section 5 considers the contested nature of epistemological labels, and Section 6 concludes that the question of whose interest is a specific KOS, algorithm or information system serving should always be at the forefront in information studies and knowledge organization (KO).