2. Einstein's life and work reflected the disruption of societal certainties and moral absolutes in the modernist atmosphere of the early twenti eth century. Imaginative nonconformity was in the air: Picasso, Joyce, Freud, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and others were breaking conventional bonds. Charging this atmosphere was a conception of the universe in which space and time and the properties of particles seemed based on the vagaries of observations. (3)

Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

"What points of contact existed between these languages?": James Joyce, Albert Einstein, and Interdisciplinary Study

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 to clearly demonstrate that methodologies that often claim to be or are considered apolitical represent subjectivity disguised as objectivity. It contains four subsections: 3.1 Feminist views on 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 that 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 a specific KOS, algorithm, or information system is serving should always be at the forefront in information studies and knowledge organization (KO).

https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/0943-7444-2020-6-461.pdf

Political Versus Apolitical Epistemologies in Knowledge Organization

Scientific certainty for uncertain times

Denna artikel ar en skriftlig sammanstallning av en forelasning som holls for Stockholm stads skolor, larare och skolledare den 7 september 2016. I sammanstallningen ges en mer utvecklad kontext ti ...

Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

Citations

"What points of contact existed between these languages?": James Joyce, Albert Einstein, and Interdisciplinary Study

Political Versus Apolitical Epistemologies in Knowledge Organization

Scientific certainty for uncertain times

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The Philosophy of Scientific Debate Traditions

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