Читать книгу An Introduction to Text Mining - Gabe Ignatow - Страница 54

The first philosophical position that provides a foundation for social research, correspondence theory, is a traditional model of knowledge and truth associated with scientific positivism. This position considers that there exists a correspondence between truth and reality and that notions of truth and reality correspond with things that actually exist in the world, be they earthworms, comets, chemical reactions, or people’s thoughts and ideas. It is understood that there are relationships between things that exist in the world and the concepts we use to describe and understand them, and the truth of concepts is gauged by how they relate to an objective reality that exists independent of how people think and talk about it. Thus, truth and knowledge are universal and absolute, and the goal of theories, be they from the social, natural, or physical sciences, is to accurately reflect objective reality through the precise use of thoughts, words, and symbols.

An implication of correspondence theory for text analysis research projects is that the goal of such projects should be to learn objective facts about online groups and communities based on the documents they produce. If text mining and analysis methods are properly applied, they ought to be able to uncover facts about social groups that are objective and therefore incontrovertible.