Social Epistemology From Jesse Shera To Steve Fuller
Social Epistemology From Jesse Shera To Steve Fuller
Social Epistemology From Jesse Shera To Steve Fuller
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, identi-
fied, 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.
Documentation
At the end of the nineteenth century, while in the United States the
education for library service swiftly expanded in the presence of challeng-
ing obstacles, English librarians also gathered around their Library As-
sociation and for a period of time shared with their American peers the
same (American) Library Journal, a periodical “devoted to library economy
and bibliography” (Library Journal, 1876) By this time, the focus of de-
velopment shifted to Brussels, where the Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and
Henri La Fontaine undertook—under the name of “documentation”—to
develop new approaches to the organization of access to all sources of
knowledge. In 1892 Paul Otlet met Henri La Fontaine, who was engaged
in collecting documentary material on the social sciences at the Société
des Études Sociales et Politiques in Brussels, Belgium. Scientific periodicals
were reaching the mark of 10,000 titles at the turn of the twentieth century,
and the European pioneers worked fast and hard to build the “Répertoire
Bibliographique Universel,” which would include classified references to
the entire universe of subjects and literatures. The activity of documen-
tation soon became institutionalized in what has been up until recently
the International Federation for Documentation and Information (FID)
(Bradford, 1953; Rayward, 1975).
Library Service
In the United States the growth in the number of library schools led
to the setting up of the Association of American Library Schools in 1915.
In the early 1920s the Carnegie Corporation took an interest in the educa-
tion of librarians and in 1923 issued what became known as the Williamson
Report, Training for Library Service. This along with Minimum Standards for
Library Schools, published in 1925 by the newly created American Library
Association Board of Education for Librarianship, set in motion a normative
function for the new library-based area of research and professionalized
education. On the other side of the Atlantic, the first British library school—
814 library trends/spring 2004
Jesse Shera
Formative Years
Jesse Hauk Shera (1903–82) was born in Oxford, Ohio, on December
8, 1903. He graduated with honors at Miami University, in Oxford, in 1925
with an A.B. in English. He then went to Yale University, graduating in 1927
with a master’s degree in English literature. Shera had planned to teach
English language and literature at a university, but he was prevented from
getting a teaching post because of his poor eyesight. He returned to his
native Oxford and got a position as assistant cataloguer at the library of
Miami University. The head of the library, Edgar King, pressed him to apply
for a job as a library science lecturer. He effectively was offered such a job
in 1928 by Charles C. Williamson, dean of Columbia University’s library
school, of which Edgar King was himself a graduate. Shera instead took a
position as a bibliographer and research assistant at the Scripps Foundation
for Research in Population Problems, at Miami University.
Shera worked at the Scripps Foundation from 1928 to 1938 under
Warren S. Thompson, a sociologist from the University of Columbia and a
famous demographer. To conduct population studies at Scripps, Jesse Shera
worked with perforated cards and related equipment, the same equipment
that Herman Hollerith had devised to cope with the volume of the 1890
census data. This was Shera’s first experience using automatic equipment
to organize information (Presnell, 1999).
From 1938 to 1940 Jesse Shera enrolled in the doctoral program at the
Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago. After his practical
years at Scripps, GLS was the crowning period of his formative years. The
ideas he encountered at Chicago about librarianship matched and un-
derscored his own thinking (Kaltenbach, 1980). Douglas Waples was later
named by Shera as the one responsible for setting down the foundations
of “social epistemology,” Shera’s main academic project: “A generation
ago Douglas Waples, of the Graduate Library School of the University of
Chicago, devoted many years to the consideration of the social effects of
reading, but he was never able to do more than to ask the fundamental
questions of the new discipline that I have subsequently called social epis-
temology” (Shera, 1976, p. 49). Again, at the University of Chicago, Shera
made close acquaintance with philosophical ideas, especially John Dewey’s
epistemology and Karl Mannheim’s developing sociology of knowledge.
Jesse Shera spent the years of 1940 and 1941 in Washington, D.C.,
working for the war administration and learning about library automation
and management. He received his Ph.D. in 1944, with a dissertation on
the origins of the public library movement in New England from 1629 to
1855, later published as his first monographic work (Shera, 1949). Back
in Chicago, Shera was made the vice-director of the university library and
part-time lecturer at GLS until 1947, when he was made a full-time faculty
816 library trends/spring 2004
member; he kept this position at GLS until 1952, when he was selected dean
of the School of Library Science (SLS) at Western Reserve University, later
Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio. At Case Western he
spent almost two very busy decades teaching, especially the two courses His-
tory of American Libraries and Theory of Classification, starting a doctoral
program at SLS, enlarging the program’s full-time faculty, and running
national meetings and international conferences. He and his associates
conducted research into the foundations of information retrieval and de-
veloped some of the first computer devices for bibliographic organization.
They created the Center for Documentation and Communication Research
(CDCR) at Western Reserve in 1955. Shera was also busy as an editor and
an active professional member of several associations and institutions, and
he was a prolific writer and a born lecturer. His most important work, The
Foundations of Education for Librarianship (Shera, 1972a), was published with
the financial support of the Carnegie Foundation. He was married to Helen
May Bickham, also a librarian. They had two children—Mary Helen (Shera)
Baum, and Edgar Brooks Shera. He died on March 8, 1982.
The Search for Foundations: Bibliography and Library Science
An important early academic milestone for the work of Shera surfaced
at the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Graduate Library School at the
University of Chicago, July 24–29, 1950, on bibliographic organization.
Shera organized this conference with his associate at the GLS, Margaret
Elizabeth Egan (1905–59), and their short article, “Prolegomena to Bib-
liographic Control” (Egan and Shera, 1949), was intended to provide an
agenda for the conference. The article already contained the seeds for
the project of “social epistemology.” At the conference, at a discussion on
the functional approach of bibliographic organization—side by side with
Mortimer Taube, from the Atomic Energy Commission, and S. R. Ranga-
nathan, from the University of Delhi and president of the Indian Library
Association—Shera presented a paper entitled “Classification as the Basis
of Bibliographic Organization,” during which he nonchalantly introduced
the terms “social epistemology” and “sociology of knowledge”:
Even a cursory examination of the history of the classification of the
sciences emphasized the extent to which any attempt to organize knowl-
edge is conditioned by the social epistemology of the age in which it was
produced. This dependence of classification theory upon the state of
the sociology of knowledge will doubtless be even more strongly confirmed
in the future. (Egan & Shera, 1951, p. 82)
Neither of these terms appear in the index to the proceedings (Shera and
Egan, 1951), and the “hidden” references to these new concepts remained
“hidden,” except—as far as I could find out—for a citation by W. Boyd
Rayward (Machlup and Mansfield, 1983, p. 354).
zandonade/jesse shera to steve fuller 817
Twenty years later, this report is still alive. Shera’s contribution to this
project might have been his last. He does not discuss “social epistemology”
but rather talks of “symbolic interactionism.” “I submit,” he says, “that li-
brarians must look for the proper foundations of a theory of librarianship”
in this theory. “First named by Herbert Blumer in 1937,” he observes that
it “is rooted in the social psychologies of William James, Charles S. Peirce,
Charles H. Cooley, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead” (Shera, 1983,
p. 386–388).
With the support of UNESCO and other international agencies, the
field of education for the library profession quickly expanded worldwide to
embrace information. Starting in the late 1960s most of the library schools
in Britain and in the United States took a middle-of-the-road position by
adopting the title of Library and Information Science (LIS) or even—in
a more moderate guise—Library and Information Studies. Other schools
took on additional qualifications, such as Archival Studies, Communica-
tions, Information Management, Policy, Resources, Services, Technology,
Instructional Technology, Learning Technologies, and Media Studies. At
least two schools in the United States went straight into “The School of In-
formation” or “The Information School.” After a few years, library schools
all over the world followed suit in naming themselves.
The lectures were published by Asia Publishing House in 1970 under the
title Sociological Foundations of Librarianship (Shera, 1970; Ranganathan,
1970).
In an article published in American Libraries (Shera, 1972b), Shera com-
plained that while “Such terms as ‘social epistemology’, adopted by the
present writer, or ‘social cognition,’” which he thought perhaps might be
more appropriate and was being used quite often to identify this field of
inquiry, “little progress has been made in its exploration.” He indicated
that he knew that “only one conference touching on the subject has been
held on this side of the Atlantic, and that was at Syracuse University in the
summer of 1965.” He did acknowledge that in England, however, Barbara
Kyle “had been investigating the problem until her untimely death.” One
of his fullest treatments of his ideas about social epistemology occurs as
820 library trends/spring 2004
The main ideas from this chapter may be listed as a series of propositions,
as follows:
• The brain deteriorates when deprived of information.
• To avoid decay, a society must make constant provision for the acquisi-
tion and assimilation of new information and knowledge.
• Knowledge and language are essentially inseparable.
• Language is social in origin.
• Language is the symbolic structuring of knowledge into communicable
form.
• Modern society is a duality of action and thought bound together by
the communication system.
• The librarian must also concern himself with the knowledge he com-
municates.
• The study of the nature of knowledge, the relationship between the
structure of knowledge, and the librarian’s tools for intellectual access
to that knowledge have received almost no attention and certainly no
intensive exploration.
• We need a new epistemological discipline, a body of knowledge about
knowledge itself.
• We know how scientific knowledge is accumulated and transmitted from
one generation to another.
• Historians of science are interested in the growth of scientific knowl-
edge.
• Philosophers have speculated about the nature of knowledge, its sources,
methods, limits of validity, and relation to truth.
• Epistemology is a branch of speculative philosophy, concerned with how
we know.
• The evolution of the science of psychology left epistemology relatively
poor in intellectual substance.
• “Scientific epistemology” (coined by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington,
1822–1944) transformed philosophic and speculative approach into
scientific, largely theoretic study.
• “Scientific epistemology” is concerned largely with what man cannot
know, that is, the limits (“constraints” in cybernetics) of human knowl-
edge.
zandonade/jesse shera to steve fuller 821
• The tools and methods of the librarian for the control of his collection
are his classification schemes, subject headings, indexes, and other de-
vices for the subject analysis of bibliographic units.
• The librarian’s tools are based on the assumption of permanent, or
relatively permanent, relationships among the several branches of knowl-
edge.
• The librarian’s tools tend to become inflexible, closed, fragmented, and
non-holistic systems into which each unit of information is fitted.
• The structure and communication of knowledge form an open system
that changes as the functions and needs of the individual and society
shift to accommodate the increasing differentiation of knowledge, as
well as its consolidation resulting from the coalescence to two or more
disciplines.
• Modern philosophy is held captive by the alleged objectivity of sci-
ence.
Jesse Shera designed an explicit proposal for his project of a discipline
of social epistemology in the 1960s. This proposal can be retrieved from
several of his papers but mainly from (Shera, 1972a, pp. 113–114), where
it reads as follows: The theoretical foundations of the librarian’s profession
must eventually suggest solutions to the following problems:
• “The problem of cognition—how man knows.
• The problem of social cognition—the ways in which society knows and
the nature of the sociopsychological system by means of which personal
knowledge becomes social knowledge.
• The problem of the history and philosophy of knowledge as they have
evolved through time and in variant cultures and,
• The problem of existing bibliographic mechanisms and systems and
the extent to which they are in congruence with the realities of the
communication process and the findings of epistemological inquiry.”
(Shera, 1972a, p. 114)
Shera’s Followers
There has been a range of citations to these ideas of Shera. Some of
the papers, essentially by colleagues at Case Western Reserve University,
Shera regarded as themselves works of social epistemology (Shera, 1972a,
pp. 112–113; Goffman and Newill, 1964, 1967; Goffman, 1965, 1966). B. C.
Brookes has argued that “Shera’s ‘microbibliography’ or ‘social epistemol-
ogy’ provides not only a subject for theoretical study but that it will also be
needed for the rational design of library and information systems and net-
works of the near future” (Brookes, 1973). It is also interesting to observe
the influence of Shera’s ideas internationally. Some references are just lau-
datory, citing “social epistemology” for its novelty. Others take Shera’s proj-
zandonade/jesse shera to steve fuller 823
Fuller, the youngest in the group, subsequently adopted the term “social
epistemology” from the title of his contribution to Synthese, stuck to this
name, defined clearly what he meant by it, mapped the intellectual and
human resources belonging to what he regarded as a very mixed area, and
designed the structure and dynamics of a new philosophical and empirical
interdiscipline, social epistemology, that combined epistemology and the
sociology of knowledge. Fuller launched the quarterly Social Epistemology: A
Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Policy in January 1987 and has published
several books on the subject (Fuller, 1988, 1993a, 1993b, 1997, 2000a, 2000b,
2002a, 2002b, 2003). The question that opens his Synthese article remains
fundamental to his thinking about social epistemology: “How should the
pursuit of knowledge be organized, given that under normal circumstances
knowledge is pursued by many human beings, each working on a more or
less well defined body of knowledge and each equipped with roughly the
same imperfect cognitive capacities, albeit with varying degrees of access
to one another’s activities?” (Fuller, 1987; 1988; 2002b).
Overview of Fuller’s Program of Social Epistemology
Fuller’s program of social epistemology, to which the fundamental
question given in the passage above from Synthese gives rise, can be split
into four statements and a final question:
• Many human beings pursue knowledge.
zandonade/jesse shera to steve fuller 825
• Each human being works in a more or less well defined body of knowl-
edge.
• Each human being is equipped with roughly the same imperfect cogni-
tive capacities.
• Human beings have varying degrees of access to one another’s epistemic
activities.
• Given these propositions, how should the pursuit of knowledge be or-
ganized?
In Fuller’s view, these propositions may be further investigated through
an empirical approach to the sociology of knowledge and other social
sciences. From the results of this investigation, the epistemologist will be
equipped with the descriptions of the way human beings usually pursue
knowledge, from which he will be able to sift the “norms” for pursuing
knowledge. Fuller suggests that ultimately
the social epistemologist would be the ideal epistemic policy maker: if
a certain kind of knowledge product is desired, then he could design
a scheme for dividing up the labor that would likely (or efficiently)
bring it about; or, if the society is already committed to a certain scheme
for dividing up the cognitive labor, the social epistemologist could
then indicate the knowledge products that are likely to flow from that
scheme. (Fuller, 1987, p.145)
One might summarize this view of social epistemology in these three propo-
sitions:
• Social epistemology answers normatively the question about how the
pursuit of knowledge should be organized: it should arrive at an opti-
mum organization of cognitive labor.
• The change in the social relations of knowledge producers (that is, bet-
ter communication between producers in face of more efficient com-
munication means or otherwise) affects the quality of knowledge of
cognitive pursuits and of products of knowledge themselves.
• The social epistemologist is an ideal epistemic planner because he de-
signs or manages a scheme for dividing up cognitive labor.
Fuller shows that social epistemology is a natural development from
the history of philosophy since Kant. He also examines social epistemology
in its incarnation as “the sociology of knowledge.” This is an area where
confused terminology abounds, and Fuller has attempted, for instance,
to clarify the confusion surrounding the nuclear term “knowledge” in the
English language. In a recent article about the project of social epistemol-
ogy and the elusive problem of knowledge, Fuller writes:
In retrospect, it is ironic that Russell drew rhetorical support from
logical positivist strictures against the reification of natural language,
since a German or French speaker could easily see that only an anglo-
826 library trends/spring 2004
Conclusion
Social behavior toward knowledge production, organization, manage-
ment, and use is certainly changing and will change even more with the
spread of information technologies and as electronic information becomes
more democratically available. Information science has already learned that
information provision will not survive in the near future if supported by
old pragmatic principles. The strengthening of the underlying foundations
concerned with social cognition or the discovery of new, higher-level prin-
ciples seems a significant assignment for contemporary social epistemology.
Here is a new road less traveled in the past but hopefully conducive to a
better future for information science and the professional occupations it
sustains.
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