Social Epistemology as an Epistemological Foundation for Library and Information Science

Despite its fundamental concern with knowledge acquisition and dissemination, Library and information science (LIS) lacks a clearly articulated epistemological foundation. This paper addresses two related questions: what kind of epistemological foundation best serves LIS, and how libraries – as a central site of LIS theory and practice – should be conceived for epistemic evaluation. In response to the first, I challenge the claim that social epistemology (SE) is unsuited to LIS because of its epistemologically prescriptive nature. Drawing on the distinction between evaluative and prescriptive normativity, I show that SE can offer evaluative standards to inform LIS without being prescriptive about adherence to those standards. In response to the second, I argue that libraries can be conceived as social epistemic systems and examine two contextual factors that explain how they function as such: their role as epistemic environments and the social practices that partially constitute them. Analysis of these practices reveals that ethical and political considerations are embedded in libraries’ epistemic functioning. These arguments reveal the limits of purist conceptions of epistemic performance and motivate an integrated approach to SE as a foundation for LIS – one that remains veritistic while also drawing on empirical insights and attending to ethico-political concerns.