ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE AND COMPLEXITY: HISTORICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL ASPECTS

This chapter deals with issues related to Knowledge Organization (KO) in the
context of complex thinking and post-modernity from the perspective of classification
theory. Using a bibliographic review as a methodology, we aimed to record the content of
these issues in the literature of the field. It was found that: a) the post-modern thinking
provides a means, that is, a real and necessary possibility to look at the field of knowledge
organization from a complex perspective; b) complex thinking privileges the ontology of
“becoming”, which, in contrast to a ready and determined world, emphasizes a multiple,
transitory, ephemeral, and emergent reality c) classificatory theories that were created for
a stable and predictable world have been questioned as they no longer respond to the
complex dynamics of contemporaneity. Thus, the centrality of universal classification
is questioned and new ways of organizing the complex map of human knowledge are
emerging in order to provide satisfactory and personalized answers in a world where
differences are respected and no longer embodied in anachronistic conceptions that do
not account for the complexities inherent to the new times.