Towards a philosophical understanding of documentation: a Dooyeweerdian framework
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410410548135 |
| Date | 01 August 2004 |
| Published date | 01 August 2004 |
| Pages | 352-370 |
| Author | A. Basden,M.E. Burke |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Towards a philosophical
understanding of documentation:
a Dooyeweerdian framework
A. Basden and M.E. Burke
University of Salford, Salford, UK
Keywords Document management, Philosophy, Change management,
Knowledge management
Abstract Documents as we encounter them in everyday life are complex and diverse things,
whether on paper, computer disk or on the World Wide Web. They play many roles vis-a
`-vis
human beings, and the humans engaged with them have diverse responsibilities that are not
always easy to fulfil. Added to this is the issue of how a document or literary work can change and
yet retain its identity, as found in maintenance, drafting and versioning of documents. This paper
explores how the meaning-oriented philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd may be used to understand
the complex nature of documents, to throw light on the roles, responsibilities and culture
surrounding them, and to tackle issues of identity and change.
1. Introduction
“The book in my hand is no longer new”, said the philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd
(Dooyeweerd, 1955, Vol. III, p. 3), “Its cover is loose and its margins are filled with
notes, yet in my experience, it is the same book I originally purchased. [...] There is,
however, a limit to the amount of change that is compatible with our experience of the
identity of a thing. When I throw a book into a fire, and it is consumed, the thing itself is
consumed”. With this account, Dooyeweerd drew attention, as a philosopher, to some
of the difficulty in understanding documentation.
He himself was particularly interested in how and when a thing might change and
still be the identical thing, but his statement also speaks of issues like responsibilities
and ownership: for example, who may rightly make marks in the margin or destroy a
book? But, as we shall see, using his philosophical approach we can address a number
of issues currently being discussed, including some of those about which Hjørland
(2000) says “I find it extremely urgent to build a more solid theoretical basis for our
field”.
Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) was Professor of Jurisprudence at the Free
University of Amsterdam, and a contributor to many debates on Dutch government
strategy and policy. He sought philosophical roots for his work, and published a
comprehensive Encyclopaedia of Law (Dooyeweerd, 2002). He was a thinker in the
Dutch Calvinian tradition who was dissatisfied with Western philosophy, from its
roots in ancient Greek thought, through mediaeval and scholastic thought, to modern
and early postmodern thought. This was because he believed that all these div erse
kinds of thought were heavily influenced by a presupposition of the self-dependency of
theoretical thinking or some other thing or activity in the cosmos, and this, he argued,
inevitably led the theoretical thinking of a community into antinomies or reductions.
Not content to demolish and criticise, he took the challenge of constructing a new
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
JDOC
60,4
352
Received 16 July 2003
Revised 19 December 2003,
22 January 2004
Accepted 25 January 2004
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 60 No. 4, 2004
pp. 352-370
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/00220410410548135
framework of thinking (that he wished to be criticised in turn) starting from a different
standpoint. His framework is of interest because it is oriented towards meaning rather
than being, and so, in understanding documentation, would direct us to ask firs t what
documentation means (in a human context) rather than what documentation is in itself.
His framework is inherently interdisciplinarity and contains an intrinsic normativity.
This led to him posing and discussing at length a number of questions like the one
cited above about the nature of the document as it is used and it changes in use. We
wish to explore the presuppositions and a number of implications they might have for
our understanding of documentation in order, maybe, to throw fresh light on a number
of issues. Despite our philosophical starting point, we will draw out a number of
practical implications for the management and use of both paper and electronic
documentation and knowledge management repositories. It might be expected that our
discussion would take the conventional route of identifying a problem and showing
how Dooyeweerd’s philosophy could solve it, but such an incremental approach is
inappropriate when considering a new paradigmatic framework such as Dooyewe erd
offers. Instead, we will identify a number of broad issues and suggest how fresh light
can be thrown on them.
1.1 Issues in LIS
It is not the primary purpose of this paper to address issues that are currently being
debated within the field of LIS, but it is interesting to note that there are a number of
discourses currently in progress that relate to what we shall discuss here. Though it is
difficult to separate out the issues being debated, we will consider two:
(1) The relationship betw een information and communication.
(2) The importance of organisational culture within which documentation is used,
especially for knowledge management.
Perhaps the first and most fundamental issue is what documentation actually is.
Buckland (1997) suggests that the deliberations of a number of mid-twentieth
century thinkers are now becoming relevant again in the light of electronic
documentation. Paul Otlet (1934) for example, believed that documentation included
not only texts but also “natural objects, artifacts, objects bearing traces of human
activity (such as archaeological finds), explanatory models, educational games, and
works of art”. Walter Schuermeyer (1935) wrote: “Nowadays one understands as a
document any material basis for extending our knowledge which is available for
study or comparison”. Suzanne Briet (1951) examined documents in the context of
cultural anthropology and held that “A document is evidence in support of a fact”.
She suggested that, whereas a star in the sky, a stone in a river and an antelope in
the wild are not documents, a photo of the star, the stone in a museum and the
antelope in a zoo may be seen as documents. Any “found” object, of interest to
archaeology, for example, may be treated as a document. Buckland (1997) believes
that Briet’s rules for holding a thing to be a document involves that the thing is
physical, it is intended to be treated as evidence, it is made into a document, and it
is perceived to be a document, and notes that her position is reminiscent of
discussions of how an image is made art by treating it as art. Rangana than (1963),
in contrast, held a much more restricted notion of documentation, as an “embodied
micro thought” on paper “or other material, fit for physical handling, transport
A philosophical
understanding of
documentation
353
To continue reading
Request your trial