Cartografia de controvérsias científicas acerca da natureza interdisciplinar da Ciência da Informação: traduzindo rastros e inscrições de cientistas da informação

Abstract

Information Science is an area of scientific knowledge, whose disciplinary network is built from historical, epistemological, political-economic and cultural aspects, juxtaposing, fragmenting and/or integrating different knowledge in its most varied contexts of technoscientific production. There is a stabilization movement in its scientific production that tries to naturalize interdisciplinarity as one of its epistemological foundations, justifying itself through the complexity of information (taken as a scientific object of the area) and the approaches with different disciplines, such as librarianship, the documentation and information retrieval. It problematizes the inscription process of an interdisciplinary information science by nature, symbolically, materialized in the literature by Saracevic (1992), considering scientific controversies around its own agonistic field of production. It assumes that some discourses aim to develop a process of naturalization of interdisciplinarity, justifying themselves through the “myths of origin” (SALDANHA, 2008; SOUZA, 2011), as conditions for the production of relations between knowledge in the area, disregarding a game of controversies and the complexity of interdisciplinary production. In general, it aims to map the scientific controversies surrounding this application process regarding the interdisciplinary nature of information science. Specifically, it aims to enter its discursive production network, access the inscription devices that materialize this discourse and map the networks of controversies related to the enunciation of an “Interdisciplinary Information Science by nature”. Therefore, it uses the theoreticalmethodological framework of Actor-Network Theory and Controversy Cartography, as well as some notions of Derridian grammatology, as a semiotic-material approach. Empirically, it develops a translation of traces and inscriptions related to the process of naturalization of interdisciplinarity in the area through the application of questionnaires together with Brazilian and foreign researchers in the area, as spokespersons for the research. It observes that there is a multiplicity of tracks duly registered as human and non-human actors, whether researchers, authors, concepts, theories, among others, as quasi-subjects and quasi-objects, whose registration process concerns the characteristics of the interdisciplinarity of the area and to its agonistic field of production. Furthermore, it describes a series of inscriptions that materialize scientific controversies around the enunciation of an Information Science called interdisciplinary in nature, either positively, counter-arguing or denying this process of interdisciplinary naturalization in the area. It concludes that the interdisciplinary nature of Information Science is an effect of controversial relationships between human and non-human actors, (inter)mediated by a (naturally) complex and (socially) complicated network of interdisciplinary production of scientific knowledge.