The Blind Men and the Elephant: Towards an Organization of Epistemic Contexts †

In the last two decades of knowledge organization (KO) research, there has been an increasing interest in the context-dependent nature of human knowledge. Contextualism maintains that knowledge is not available in a neutral and objective way, but is always interwoven with the process of knowledge production and the prerequisites of the knower. As a first step towards a systematic organization of epistemic contexts, the concept of knowledge will be considered in its onto- logical (WHAT) and epistemological (WHO) including methodological (HOW) dimensions. In current KO research, however, either the contextualism is not fully implemented (classification-as-ontology) or the ambition for a context-transcending universal KOS seems to have been abandoned (classification-as-epistemology). Based on a combined ontology and epistemology it will be argued that a phenom- ena-based approach to KO as stipulated by the Leon Manifesto, for example, requires a revision of the underlying phenomenon concept as a relation between the known object (WHAT) and the knowing subject (WHO), which is constituted by the application of specific meth- ods (HOW). While traditional subject indexing of documents often relies on the organizing principle "levels of being" (WHAT), for a fu- ture context indexing, two novel principles are proposed, namely "levels of knowing" (WHO) and "integral methodological pluralism" (HOW).