ABSTRACT
The disciplinary uniqueness of library and information science (LIS) lies in its focus on knowledge as a material good. This point seems to be taken more seriously by those outside than inside the field. Underwriting LIS's perceptiveness about the material character of knowledge is the field's 'root metaphor', to recall the phrase the philosopher Stephen Pepper coined for a paradigmatic image in terms of which all of reality might be understood. Two narratives run through the history of information science, one dominant and the other subordinate. The dominant narrative boasts iconic Greek roots in Pythagoras and Plato but was explored more deeply in the Biblically inspired attempts of Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars to infer the rules by which God named, and hence gave order to, Creation. The subordinate LIS narrative runs virtually alongside the dominant one. It too is 'combinatorial' in the sense of presupposing a reality in which complexes are constructed out of simples.
