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Interdisciplinary communication, and thus the rate of progress in scholarly understanding, would be greatly enhanced if scholars had access to a universal classification of documents or ideas not grounded in particular disciplines or cultures. Such a classification is feasible if complex concepts can be understood as some combination of more basic concepts. There appear to be five main types of concept theory in the philosophical literature. Each provides some support for the idea of breaking complex into basic concepts that can be understood across disciplines or cultures, but each has detractors. None of these criticisms represents a substantive obstacle to breaking complex concepts into basic concepts within information science. Can we take the subject entries in existing universal but disciplinebased classifications, and break these into a set of more basic concepts that can be applied across disciplinary classes? The author performs this sort of analysis for Dewey classes 300 to 339.9. This analysis will serve to identify the sort of 'basic concepts' that would lie at the heart of a truly universal classification. There are two key types of basic concept: the things we study (individuals, rocks, trees), and the relationships among these (talking, moving, paying). IntroductionTo what extent is it possible to define or classify concepts such that these can be understood in a similar way across disciplines and cultures? If this is possible, then a universal classification of documents or ideas not grounded in particular disciplines or cultures might be possible. If not, then information scientists might wish to focus on domain-specific classifications and translations across pairs of these. Many information scientists take the latter point of view. In particular, Hjørland (2009) has argued that a pragmatic philosophical perspective supports only domain analysis. I have disagreed with this conclusion in several places (Szostak, 2008a(Szostak, , 2008b(Szostak, , 2010a(Szostak, , 2010b. Received March 7, 2011; revised July 18, 2011; accepted July 19, 2011 © 2011 ASIS&T • Published online 31 August 2011 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/asi.21635 The crux of our disagreement, it turns out, rests on whether complex concepts can be broken into a set of basic concepts that can be understood similarly across groups. Hjørland would argue that breaking complex concepts into basic concepts, which can then be understood similarly across disciplines, reflects a "rationalist" epistemology. (He would argue that all concepts can only be understood in terms of theories and thus a web of other complex concepts that will inevitably differ across communities.) Yet he would admit that a pragmatic epistemology does not exclude taking a rationalist approach as long as this works (see Dousa, 2010, for a discussion of the implications of different types of pragmatism).The disagreement is important precisely because interdisciplinary communication, and thus the rate of scholarly advance, would be encou...

Classification, Interdisciplinarity, and the Study of Science Purpose-This paper responds to the 2005 paper by Hjørland and Nissen Pedersen by suggesting that an exhaustive and universal classification of the phenomena that scholars study, and the methods and theories they apply, is feasible. It is argued that such a classification is critical for interdisciplinary scholarship. Design/Methodology/Approach-Literature-based conceptual analysis, taking Hjørland and Nissen Pedersen (2005) as its starting point. Hjørland and Nissen Pedersen had identified several difficulties that would be encountered in developing such a classification; the paper suggests how each of these can be overcome. It also urges a deductive approach as complementary to the inductive approach recommended by Hjørland and Nissen Pedersen. Findings-An exhaustive and universal classification of scholarly documents in terms of (at least) the phenomena that scholars study, and the theories and methods they apply, appears to be both possible and desirable. Practical Implications-The paper suggests how such a project can be begun. In particular it stresses the importance of classifying documents in terms of causal links between phenomena. Originality/Value-The paper links the information science, interdisciplinary, and study of science literatures, and suggests that the types of classification outlined above would be of great value to scientists/scholars, and that they are possible.

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