Document (#28649)

Author

Wilson, P.

Title

Subjects and the sense of position

Source

Theory of subject analysis: a sourcebook. Ed.: L.M. Chan, et al

Imprint

Littleton, CO : Libraries Unlimited

Year

1985

Pages

S.306-325

Abstract

One knows one is in the presence of "theory" when fundamental questions of a "why" nature are asked. Too often it happens that those involved in the design of bibliographic information systems have no time for brooding. It is thus noteworthy when someone appears an the bibliographic scene who troubles to address, and pursue with philosophic rigor, fundamental questions about the way we organize information. Such a person is Patrick Wilson, formerly philosophy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and since 1965, an the faculty of the School of Library and Information Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Bibliographic control is the central concept of Wilson's book Two Kinds of Power. It is represented as a kind of power-a power over knowledge. That power is of two kinds: descriptive and exploitive. Descriptive power is the power to retrieve all writings that satisfy some "evaluatively neutral" description, for instance, all writings by Hobbes or all writings an the subject of eternat recurrence. Descriptive power is achieved insofar as the items in our bibliographic universe are fitted with descriptions and these descriptions are syndetically related. Exploitive power is a less-familiar concept, but it is more important since it can be used to explain why we attempt to order our bibliographic universe in the first place. Exploitive power is the power to obtain the best textual means to an end. Unlike the concept of descriptive power, that of exploitive power has a normative aspect to it. Someone possessing such power would understand the goal of all bibliographic activity; that is, he would understand the diversity of user purposes and the relativity of what is valuable; he would be omniscient both as a bibliographer and as a psychologist. Since exploitive power is ever out of reach, descriptive power is used as a substitute or approximation for it. How adequate this approximation is is the subject of Wilson's book. The particular chapter excerpted in this volume deals with the adequacy of subject access methods. Cutter's statement that one of the objects of a library catalog is to show what the library has an a given subject is generally accepted, as though it were obvious what "being an a given subject" means. It is far from obvious. Wilson challenges the underlying presumption that for any document a heading can be found that is coextensive with its subject. This presumption implies that there is such a thing as the (singular) subject of a document and that it can be identified. But, as Wilson Shows in his elaborate explication, the notion of "subject" is essentially indeterminate, with the consequence that we are limited in our attempts to achieve either descriptive or exploitive power.

Footnote

Nachdruck des Originalartikels mit Kommentierung durch die Herausgeber
Original in: Wilson, P.: Two kinds of power: an essay on bibliograpical control. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1968. S.69-92.

Theme

Inhaltsanalyse

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