Читать книгу An Introduction to Text Mining - Gabe Ignatow - Страница 53

When are we justified in reaching a conclusion about some person or group of people based on the texts they produce? Does text mining research produce findings that are merely interesting, or can it produce findings that are true and accurate reflections of reality?

Every approach to social science research addresses these kinds of questions based on one or another philosophical position. But the philosophical foundations of text mining research are uniquely unsettled because text mining methods are, for the most part, “mixed methods” (Creswell, 2014; Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2008) that are positioned at the intersection of the “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities (Snow, 1959/2013). The “two cultures” was part of a 1959 lecture and subsequent book by the British novelist and scientist Snow. Snow was referring to the loss in Western society of a common culture as a result of the division between the sciences and humanities, a division that he saw as an impediment to solving social problems.

Although the idea of two cultures may seem simplistic, within the social sciences there continues to be a divide between more scientific and more humanistic forms of knowledge. These are sometimes referred to as idiographic and nomothetic knowledge (see Chapter 5), although social scientists themselves more often refer to scientific positivism and postpositivism. Positivism is a paradigm of inquiry that prioritizes quantification, hypothesis testing, and statistical analysis; postpositivism is a more interpretive paradigm that values close reading and multiple interpretations of texts. In practice, text mining and text analysis research is usually performed as a pragmatic combination of these two paradigms. Because positivism and postpositivism are premised on different epistemological and ontological positions, they often produce research findings that are “incommensurable,” meaning that they cannot build upon one another. Positivism and postpositivism are based on epistemological and ontological orientations that can be sorted into the following five philosophical positions (Howell, 2013).