Budd, Jesse Shera

Jesse Shera, Sociologist of Knowledge?

Jesse Hauk Shera (1903-1982) • librarian / scholar / theoretician /philosopher / educator

“An early pioneer in the electronic organization of information and library catalog automation, Jesse Hauk Shera was born in Oxford, Ohio, on December 8, 1903, the son of a dairyman. He grew up in Oxford, graduating from McGuffey High School in 1921. While in high school, Shera was a member of the debating team as well as a cheerleader. Initially interested in a career in chemistry, a visual impairment, poor eyesight, prevented him from pursuing this goal. Instead, he remained in Oxford and graduated with honors with an A. B. in English from Miami University in 1925. He continued his educational career at Yale University, graduating in 1927 with a master's degree in English. As employment for English professors was scarce in the pre-depression era, Shera was unable to procure a teaching position and returned to Ohio, where he joined the library staff at Miami University.” (From: http://www2.msstate.edu/~jeg98/JShera.htm)

Social Epistemology / Sociology of Knowledge

knowledge = justified true belief

(social) epistemology = the limits of knowing / justification of belief + examination of the social dynamics of knowledge claims

sociology of knowledge = primary focus is on the social dynamics (including the creation and maintenance of culture, the construction of rules, tacit or otherwise, of action and behavior, and the governance of group belief) that influence human action (Budd, p. 425)

Jesse Shera, Sociologist of Knowledge?

• LIS = epistemological discipline (a body of new knowledge about knowledge itself

• Engagement with the social processes of knowledge creation, distribution, and use

• recorded knowledge = graphic record (Shera) … and beyond

Jesse Shera, Sociologist of Knowledge?

underlying assumptions of SE (Shera & Egan 1952: Budd 2003, p. 426)

1. DIRECT & IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE: “knowing” based on immediate environment or personal experience with the environment

2. REMOTE AND VICARIOUS EXPERIENCE: “knowing” through instruments of communication developed by society to assume “knowing” about the total environment that is beyond personal experience; the symbols that enable such translation to personal experience

3. SOCIAL KNOWING: Coordinating the differing knowledge of many individuals the society may transcend the knowledge of the individual.

4. KNOWLEDGE AS INTEGRATED ACTION: Social action, reflecting integrated intellectual action, transcends individual action.

Geertz, Common Sense

Common Sense as a Cultural System

common sense

• Discuss Zande vs. Evans-Pritchard’s ‘common sense’ (what is the underlying system?).

• Why is it useful to look at categories that cross cultures (e.g. hermaphroditism)?

• Give own examples of common sense systems:• that have shifted historically

• that demonstrate cultural relativity

Common Sense as a Cultural System

common sense

• How is common sense knowledge system built?

• What are transmission systems for common sense knowledge systems?

• Give examples of how common sense can regulate activities of the society (e.g. economic, agricultural, etc.). What are the limitations?

Common Sense as a Cultural Systemcommon sense

• Give examples of how anomalies in the system of commonsense thought can be explained away? (Zande: witchcraft)

• Discuss each of the stylistic features (quasi-qualities) of common sense

naturalnesspracticalnessthinnessimmethodicalityaccessibleness

Common Sense as a Cultural System• traditional occupation of anthropologists to find out

about systematized knowledge in different cultures

• systematized knowledge found in the elementary forms of [religious life among the Australian aborigines, native botanical systems in Africa, spontaneous sense of design on the Northwest Coast, ‘concrete’ science in the Amazon]

• common sense ignored form of knowledge (not systematized)

Common Sense as a Cultural System

• Geertz seeks to understand “roughcast shapes of colloquial culture vs. worked-up shapes of studied culture”

• Geertz claims that “given the given, not everything else follows” -- common sense is not a human universal

Common Sense as a Cultural Systemcommon sense

• immediate deliverance of experience • realm of the given and undeniable, matter-of-fact, self-

evident realities• ‘just life’ with ‘world as its authority’• if it rains it is common sense to step into the house• ‘what everyone with common sense knows’

Common Sense as a Cultural Systemcommon sense

• not a tightly integrated system but based on conviction by those who have it on its validity; dimension of culture not usually conceived as forming an ordered realm

• frame for thought and a species of it• as totalizing as any other frame of thought• it is just an illusion to give truth to things as they are

Common Sense as a Cultural Systemcommon sense

• epistemology of common sense is external reality contrasted to:

religion -- revelationscience -- methodideology -- moral passion

• common sense (problem of ‘everyday experience’, how we construe the world we biographically inhabit)

• interpretation of experience; constructed; cultural system; what leads to what

• system of thought based on pre-suppositions

Common Sense as a Cultural SystemSo What? skepticism, justification (regress argument)

Formal statement of the Regress argumentAssuming that knowledge is justified true belief:(1) Suppose that P is some true belief. For it to count as knowledge, it must be justified.(2) That justification will be another statement – let’s call it P'; so P' justifies P.(3) But if P' is to be a satisfactory justification for P, then we must know that P' is the case.(4) But in order to know that P' is the case, it must itself be justified.(5) That justification will be another statement – let’s call it P"; so P" justifies P'.(6) We are now back in the same position as in (3), but in this case with P" in place of P'.

This presents us with three possibilities: the sequence never finishes; or some statements donot need justification; or the chain of reasoning loops back on itself. Therefore, we accept some foundation and coherence for the world, based in common sense.

Common Sense as a Cultural Systemcommon sense justification

• common sense method: why not assume what nobody ever doubts?

• provides solution to the regress argument

• do not need criteria in order to judge whether proposition is true or not

• can take some justifications for granted according to common sense (acceptable assumptions)

• there is no infinite regress or circle of reasoning because the buck stops with the principles of common sense

Common Sense as a Cultural System

• common sense / everyday experience• contains categories organized by association• transmitted body of knowledge• natural symbols• basis for formalized knowledge: information

infrastructures• Why skepticism about common sense? moral order

creates meaning, justifies social order, determines what is legitimate knowledge and what is not

Osborne, Locating Identity

Locating Identity• Explain the ‘places of memory’ concept. Give

examples of such 'places' that you are familiar with. How is memory organized around space and time?

• Why is memory related to identity of groups? Why is it important for groups to have 'memory' organized a certain way? What are the channels of transmission for group memory (say, in a family, an institution, a nation).

Locating Identity

• Give examples of mnemonic devices (landscapes, verse, objects, etc.). Which ones among them could serve as collective markers, and which ones organize personal memories. How do they differ?

• Discuss how memory can be individual, collective, and hegemonic.

Locating Identity

• Why does the author say that systems of remembering and forgetting are socially constructed. How is 'forgetting' part of the process of remembering?

Locating Identity

• What, in your opinion, is the significance of memory research for managing memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums)? What do they have in common as connection to building collective identity? What are the pitfalls for these institutions?