Philosophies of Social Science: The Classic and Contemporary Readings

Philosophy is not, on the whole, taken as seriously as it should be, as a basis for the library and information sciences, and the field of documentation. True, a scan through one of the more serious journals of the field will yield a smattering of articles, paying serious tribute or quick lip‐service to some philosopher or school of philosophy. This gives the impression of a somewhat dilitante approach; where LIS is concerned, any philosophy/er will do.

A more thorough look through a database, such as Library and Information Science Abstracts, will show which philosophers are taken as contributing most to the foundations of our discipline. Popper is best represented, from Brookes' (1980) presentation of his work as a suitable basis for information science, and various aspects of his thought have been dealt with since (see, for example, Neill, 1987; Abott, 1997; Robinson and Bawden, 2001; Bawden, 2002). Foucault is, perhaps, second most popular (see, for example, Hannabuss, 1996; Radford and Radford, 1997). But others are not neglected, and we can read about Habermas and collection development (Shipman, 1993), Derrida and archives (Brothman, 1999), Giddens and scholarly communication (Fyffe, 2002), Wittgenstein on classification (McLachlan, 1981), Dretske and semantics (Bonnevie, 2001), and so on.

Lacking, however, are any monographs or major reviews, which could set these individual atomised viewpoints – in what is, by its nature, an area ripe for disagreement and misunderstanding – into helpful context. This journal will address this problem by publication of a special issue, devoted to philosophical aspects of documentation, during 2004.

In the meantime, those interest in setting individual accounts of philosophy in the information sciences into a context may be helped by books such as this, which do an excellent job on a broader scale. In this case, the scope is the social sciences, with a very strong focus on epistemology, which is probably as suitable as anything as a backdrop for our area.

The book is very well produced, and manages to combine a thorough and scholarly approach with genuine readability; quite an achievement for a text of this kind in this subject.

After an initial introduction, dealing with philosophy of social science generally, it is divided into six parts, dealing respectively with: positivism and post‐empiricism; the interpretative tradition; the critical tradition; pragmatism and semiotics; structuralism; and new directions. Each of these parts contains a introduction and outline – which are mainly models of clarity – followed by a series of short reprinted texts. There are 64 such texts, but not quite 64 philosophers, since Habermas gets three goes: in interpretative, critical, and new directions.

Only one of the texts deals in any direct way with the interests of the information sciences, though many raise points of relevance. There is no entry in the index for “documentation”: nor indeed for “library”, “information” or even “knowledge”, though “epistemology” has many references. Relating these texts, chosen for their succinct statement of the author's position on some issue of the social sciences generally, to specific LIS concerns is very much a task for the reader.

The choice of text – obviously an atrociously difficult one for the editors – sometimes seems problematic for our purposes. Popper, for example, is represented by a section from his 1959 Logic of Scientific Discovery, dealing primarily with his claimed solution to the problem of induction. While this is certainly among the most important of Popper's writings, it is some way from his social and political ideas, still more from his Three Worlds epistemology. Similarly, Habermas, Giddens, Derrida and Wittgenstein – to choose some of those noted above – are represented by texts some way from their thoughts of relevance to our disciplines. Only Foucault gets to express his views on knowledge organisation, with a section from the preface to his Order of Things.

Now, this is hardly fair criticism for editors who did not set out to choose material of LIS relevance. Nor does it imply that this book is of no use to those primarily interested in the philosophy of the information sciences. On the contrary, I found that I learnt a good deal from it, and particularly from the editors’ skill in showing relations and developments between the work of a large number of philosophers, of some of whom, I am not ashamed to admit, I had never heard. This would be very valuable background material for anyone seeking to “ground” an interest in a specific aspect or application of philosophical writing. As such, it will be a useful complement to readers on epistemology, to which one commonly turns (for example, Moser and Vander Nat, 1987).

More books and review articles dealing with the philosophy of documentation will certainly be welcome. Until they arrive, this book will fill the gap to an extent, and even afterwards will continue to provide valuable context.