Patterns of knowledge communities in the social sciences - Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Library Trends, Fall, 1996 by Robert Pahre

Abstract

The study, of science and scientific communities is dominated by philosophies and sociologists. These disciplines naturally take different approaches to the subject, the one epistemological and the other sociological. While recognizing the role of society in shaping science, this article emphasizes the way that the epistemology of science influences scientific society. The epistemological status of various scientific discourses also shapes scientific communities. Discourses about methods have different effects on communities than discourses about theories; positivist discourses and nonpositivist discourses also shape communities differently. The best way to think about science and scientific communities is a dialogue between two hybrid approaches - i.e., a social epistemology and an epistemological sociology. Each presents some challenges to information science.

Introduction

Knowledge is found in communities built by individuals. Our efforts to systematize, categorize, or reorganize that knowledge must consider not only the individual knower but also the knowledge communities. In other words, studying knowledge presents a sociological problem in addition to an intellectual or philosophical one.(1) For this reason, most contemporary studies of science treat science purely as a sociological issue.

In contrast to this literature, it will be argued here that knowledge communities present not just a sociological problem. The substance of science, and what is labeled here as the "epistemology" of science,(2) affects the pattern by which scientific knowledge is organized. In particular, the epistemological status of a scientific discourse shapes the sociological structure of a scientific community. To understand knowledge communities, then, we need an epistemological sociology (ES) of science. This approach joins both the social and intellectual reasons why knowledge communities look the way they do.

While a polemical argument is made for such a sociology elsewhere (Pahre, 1995), this article will evaluate both the sociological and the epistemological reasons for the pattern of scientific organization, generally with reference to the social sciences. Four perspectives toward the problem of understanding disciplines and cross disciplinary research are discussed: (1) a purely epistemological approach, (2) a purely sociological approach, (3) a social epistemology, and (4) an epistemological sociology. These perspectives are lenses through which we can see different aspects of the organization of knowledge. Because neither of the two pure approaches is adequate for understanding how knowledge is organized, our studies of disciplines must be interdisciplinary.

Within this general project, special attention will be given to the twin issues of boundaries and boundary crossing. After all, being a community entails having boundaries of some sort, whether they take the form of walls or transitional zones between one community and another. Information science must deal with both intraboundary and interboundary communities. For instance, cataloging is an attempt to get the boundaries right, while reference librarianship must inevitably confront boundaries that are useful for one purpose and yet hinder the information search at hand. This is especially important because innovative knowledges are most likely in exactly those areas that are most difficult to classify and organize (Dogan & Pahre, 1990).

Like other contributors to this issue (see Dogan's and Klein's articles in this issue of Library Trends), the goal here is to describe patterns of knowledge creation today and not to propose how information science can meet the needs of the knowledge creators (for a discussion of this topic, see Palmer's and Searing's articles in this issue of Library Trends). Simultaneously, the pattern of knowledge creation and organization has implications for information science that will be touched upon throughout this article. Where there are epistemological reasons for a given pattern of scientific organization, then these presumably provide us with good reasons for organizing information services around them. Where scientific communities are organized for (nonepistemological) sociological reasons, the solution to problems of information will be less clear cut because intellectual and social principles of organization do not coincide.(3)

A Purely Epistemological Approach

To Knowledge Communities

For the most part, university curricula and administrative divisions assume the existence of coherent fields of knowledge and groups of fields within identifiable boundaries. The naive view is that these fields and the boundaries around them are found in nature: the objects of natural science are distinct from those of social science, pure science is epistemologically distinct from applied science, and scientific knowledge is distinct from nonscientific knowledge. These are "epistemological" claims about scientific communities since the alleged division between pure science and applied science rests on the difference between an epistemology appropriate to the search of knowledge for its own sake as opposed to an epistemology for seeking knowledge as a means to another end.