DIALECTICS IN KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION: AN APPROACH
Emília Currás · 2020
This is a study of dialectics in its own right. Originally, it was a pedagogical means of teaching people to think, reason and engage in dialogue. Later on it became a part of logic and at present it is applied to any human activity, whether intellectual or social, to put forward and contrast arguments which clarify the situations in question. Mention is made to the processes of thesis, antithesis and synthesis by means of which something which can be, or has already been demonstrated, is then argued, analysed, seeing the different possible points of concordance or discordance in order to reach a conclusion. This method is applicable, in particular, to the organisation of knowledge in information sciences, such as drafting summaries, indexing, content analysis, classification processes, among other information science techniques, where a text is analysed, minutely examined, pointing out the pros and cons, with an end result in view, whether this be a summary, a few key words which determine the content for database construction, or, for classification purposes, etc.. Finally, it is deduced that there is a case for an approach to "dialectics in information science". Key words: dialectics, dialectics in information science, dialectics in knowledge organization, information systems, information science summaries, content analysis, classification processes, data base construction. The study of dialectics, by means of its features and applications, can prove to be very interesting, almost exciting. Although over the last decades of the twentieth century it has come back into vogue and applications can be found in all branches of knowledge and even in everyday life, dialectics is as old as Humanity itself. We could say that men thought in a dialectic way before they were aware of doing so and before its etymology, definitions and applications were studied. The same way that they used information without knowing what it was, nor which connotations or practices could formally be attributed to it. Nevertheless, in our Western civilisation, we know that around the time of the Greeks dialectics and its applications began to be studied and this continued, on and off, throughout History. It worth noting that the periods of greater interest have coincided with those periods in history of accelerated evolution, of transmutations in the manifestations of thought or of socio-political crises. Nowadays, humankind is going through all these processes at the same time and precisely that is why dialectics has once again come to form a part of the theories and practices of our historical evolution. That is also why this paper deals with and applies dialectics to the organisation of knowledge in information science version. In previous papers, dialectics has been applied to several subjects, such as, the interaction of sciences (Currás, 1990-1996), the relationship between information - information science (Currás, 1990-1995), as well as the study of systems science (Currás 1996, 1993) amongst other works.