Читать книгу An Introduction to Text Mining - Gabe Ignatow - Страница 58

Critical realism, as pioneered by Bhaskar (1975/2008), combines the realism of correspondence theory with the sociocultural reflexivity required by constructionism. Critical realism involves a distinction between the production of knowledge by human beings and knowledge that is of things or grounded within things. In critical realism, some objects are understood to be more socially constructed (or more “transitive”) than others. The critical realist ontology perceives reality as external to humanity but “considers our intellectual capacities to be unable to fully understand opaque and confounding truth” (Howell, 2013, pp. 50–51).

For text mining research, critical realism implies that because documents produced by social groups and communities are forms of knowledge produced by human beings, they are socially constructed and our understanding of them is always partial and limited at best. Yet unlike constructionism, critical realism also implies that there are elements of texts that are “intransitive,” meaning they can be treated as objective facts that are measurable and amenable to scientific research.