New Critical Theory or Analytical Empiricism?

On the Merits of Intellectual Masturbation: Critical Theory and Empiricism

In most social sciences, including information systems, empirical research is seen as the gold standard to be aspired to. This paper draws on critical theory in information systems and considers the status of empirical research in this stream of research. Critical research can be defined by the desire to emancipate. Such emancipation must be based on ethical premises. The desire to change the w...

The New Empiricism and the Semantic Web: Threat or Opportunity?

The early AI success stories of the 1970s were based in small ’worlds’ with carefully bounded semantic domains: Winograd’s SHRDLU (WIN72) is perhaps the canonical example. The rapid growth of efforts to found the next generation of systems on general-purpose knowledge representation languages (I’m thinking of several varieties of semantic nets, from plain to partitioned, as well as KRL, KL-ONE ...

Towards a new empiricism

1 Some historical background Linguists in the pre-generative period in American linguistics would happily have referred to themselves as empiricists. Foremost in their understanding of the term was the sense that empiricists were highly skeptical of what they viewed as metaphysical claims, and they shared the view that a rigorous method needed to be invoked in order to make scientific claims. T...

Structural Realism or Modal Empiricism?

Structural realism has been suggested as the best compromise in the debate on scientific realism. It proposes that we should be realist about the relational structure of the world, not its nature. However it faces an important objection, first raised by Newman against Russell: if relations are not qualified, then the position is either trivial or collapses into empiricism, but if relations are ...

Towards a new empiricism: 1.4