Social epistemology from Jesse Shera to Steve Fuller

Library Trends, Spring, 2004 by Tarcisio Zandonade

ABSTRACT

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, identified, 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 this period as "The Renaissance of Epistemology" in the first 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 identifies 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) scientific 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 first 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 scientific journal--the "archive of science"--at around its bicentennial was reaching the landmark of one thousand rifles (Price, 1961). This event brought a problem for the library, since the tools to organize this new medium of scientific 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 first 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 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 identified the need for a "professorship of books" to teach readers how to make the most of library resources (Emerson, 1870).