“The Personal Meaning Scheme as Principle of Information
Ordering: Postmodernism, Transdisciplinarity, and the Ontology of
Classification”
Jeremy
J.
Shapiro
Human and Organization Development Program The
Fielding Institute
jshapiro@fielding.edu
Shelley
K.
Hughes
Academic Resources The Fielding
Institute
skhughes@fielding.edu
Introduction
Standard bibliographic classification schemes and scientific taxonomies are useful devices for bringing a certain order -- at least an external and abstract order -- into the mass of available information and knowledge. But they have two limitations: (1) People do not necessarily or automatically organize information and knowledge in accordance with them. Individuals -- scholars, researchers, knowledge workers, and human beings in general -- seem to organize information, at least in part, in accordance with meaning schemes and cognitive principles of their own individual personalities and lifeworlds, which are shaped by personal (Kelly 1963) and cultural forces (D'Andrade 1995) as well, of course, as by the classification schemes and taxonomies that have become embedded in them. (2) Reality itself is not necessarily or automatically structured in accordance with these schemes. While it is useful, even essential, to learn about them, they are often limited and corrupted by untenable or outmoded ontological and cosmological assumptions. In this world of increasing complexity and perpetual information flooding and, at least in the humanities and social sciences, increasingly decentered and interdisciplinary knowledge, innovation in research often comes from grasping, exploring, and articulating relationships that fall outside of or between the categories of standard schemes and that arise from a combination of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization and personal meaning schemes. Articulating and representing personal meaning schemes and using them to order information can be a valuable method of cognitive organization that can counteract information overload and contribute to intellectual and cultural creativity. And software tools for doing this are now becoming available.The Present Context
Six features of the present postmodern period create the need for new structures for organizing information:- First, the sheer volume of information available through the combination of digital libraries and the World Wide Web means that general classes and descriptors become increasingly less useful in structuring information, because they are less definitive of and make fewer valuable distinctions within the masses of information that they subsume.
- Second, the progress of the sciences has led to taxonomic complexification, which has rendered obsolete both linear and hierarchical models that underlie current classification systems and led to new modes of cognitive inter-relationship and ordering. As Nicholas Rescher has argued, the new structure, "is not that of a hierarchy at all, but rather that of chain-mail-work interlinkage reminiscent of medieval armor." (Rescher 1979)
- Third, the increasingly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary character of research and scholarship, at least in the humanities and social sciences, is motivated by the quest to understand the real, internal relations of interdependence and mediation that exist in concrete objects of research, and these relations are poorly grasped by disjunctive categories that originate in disciplinary and library classes and descriptors.
- Fourth, postmodern awareness of the limitations of objectivistic and rationalistic frameworks for representing and structuring knowledge has delegitimized the philosophical systems and assumptions that underlie modern information organization and classification schemes. Every scheme for classifying or ordering information is grounded in or implies some ontology or cosmology. The majority of current schemes (e.g. the LC and Dewey Decimal systems) are in effect operationalizations of neo-Platonic, realist ontology and theology, the "Great Chain of Being" (Lovejoy 1936) that asserts the priority of the universal over the particular, of the abstract over the concrete and that see the individual or particular as mere emanations of the abstract and the universal. Despite its own occasionally relativistic limitations, the postmodern critique of legitimating metanarratives and ontologies has removed the ground from both traditional ontology and its idealist, rationalist successors and thereby from the information ordering based on them.
- Fifth, the emergence of hypertext as a novel and characteristically postmodern method of information ordering has become, through the World Wide Web, a global system for organizing information and knowledge with a simple and viable non-hierarchical infrastructure. Through its use in personal publishing on the Web, hypertext and the mode of cognitive and semantic relationships that it encourages have taken on tremendous cultural and psychological force for individuals, organizations, social groups, and information producers and managers (Landow 1992). And hypertext highlights personal engagement and choice as the basis for information ordering.
- Sixth, in postmodern, complex, multi-cultural society, any semblance of a universal, background cosmology, cultural system, or generally shared lifeworld that could serve as an accepted common basis for structuring knowledge and information has dissolved, leaving in its place a multiplicity of diverse lifeworlds, cultural orientations, and individual meaning schemes (Habermas 1992). Thus it would be futile to try to invent a new, more encompassing and universal classification system or taxonomy.