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Philosophies of Social Science: The Classic and Contemporary Readings Edited by Gerard Delanty and Piet Strydom Open University Press Maidenhead 2003 481 pp. ISBN 0-335-20885-1
Keywords Information society, Philosophy
Review DOI 10.1108/00220410410523169
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...