Bibliographic Organization and the Origins of Social Epistemology at the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago

In this paper we investigate the intellectual origins of Egan and Shera’s project of social epistemology at the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago and the importance of bibliographic organization for its development. This can be considered a piece of historical research that mainly relies on the retrieval and interpretation of key publications, some of them not very well known, by some of the main actor and commentators of social epistemology in the past century. We present and discuss the development of the concept of bibliographic organization and its main aspects and characteristics in the context of social epistemology. In our analysis, we focus on its relationship with other key concepts for knowledge organization and social epistemology such as bibliography, classification, cataloguing, and indexing.