Information literacy and its epistemological roots of information science: a focus on the phenomenological approach

Abstract

Information literacy is a social movement and a scientific field that investigates processes related to the search, access, evaluation, communication and use of information. As a scientific field, it is integrated into Information Science, a science which has emerged from the problem of information overload. The article proposes to investigate the epistemological relationship between Information Science and information literacy as a field of study. The existence of three paradigms, presented by Capurro (2003), is identified in the information science: physical paradigm, cognitive paradigm and social paradigm. Also, there are three epistemological aspects, coming from sociology, indicated by Araújo (2003): positivist / functionalist approach, critical approach and social approach. Based on the proposals of Capurro (2003) and Araújo (2003), we conceive the existence of three strands of research on information literacy: the cognitive aspect, with functionalist and positivist approaches, the social aspect and the critical aspect. These epistemological approaches guide the investigations that are currently being developed in this area. Finally, it is argued in favor of phenomenology as a theoretical-methodological principle which is congruent to research in information literacy, since information is a political product, revealed in the social, that suffers interference from the external world.