Invisible landscapes of the Nitecki trilogy: from Aristotle and Plato to Lenin and Trotsky

Abstract

Objective: It proposes to investigate the cartographic-epistemological method of the Nitecki Trilogy and its main results for understanding the historical epistemology of Information Science.
Methodology: From a methodological point of view, the pragmatics of language, under Wittgensteinian influence for diachronic research, is the basis of the result of this research, of descriptive culture, with a focus on the historical epistemologies in Information Science. The metaphor-tool of the cartographies, as a metamethod, is adopted and applied as the lens of analysis. Such tool-metaphor is accompanied by the narrative of novelist and short-story writer Italo Calvino in As Cidades Invisíveis.
Results: Nitecki Trilogy leads us to some important elements of the Information Science epistemology and the discussion on the metaepistemological task constituted in the 1990s by the researcher, with emphasis on the forgotten historical epistemology, the terminological dispute of the field and the passage from the universal to the particular. On the other hand, the problems of the Trilogy are critically observed, centrally, the closed Anglophone influence, the non-deepening in previous Anglophone cartographies and the absence of critical theory, or dialectics as a metaepistemological method for a transversal reading of cartography constituted by the Niteckian road.
Conclusions: Information Science cartographic-epistemological development represents one of the central conclusive elements of the research, from the horizons revisited by the Nitecki Trilogy, together with the diachronic perspective of its cartographic literacy. Finally, it indicates the need for an anti-epistemicidal becoming to be placed at the core of future cartographies of Information Science.