Exploring the Potential of Dooyeweerd’s Aspects and Critical Realism for Evaluating Robustness of Ontology in Information Systems

Complex IS artifacts, such as the Internet and surrounding ontology, remain little understood within Information Systems. The usage of varying systems of thought, derived from competing understandings of reality, when applied on an artifact such as the Internet, leads to incommensurable perspective positions that cannot be easily reconciled. Consequently, attempts at constructing normative ontologies through reductionist epistemology or naïve realism often produce contradictory results. As the a priori theoretical constructs of an evaluator distort the ontology’s lifeworld, an IS ontology is subjected to a narrow understanding of reality that does not lead towards a holistic understanding of it. Furthermore, the incommensurability of such developed ontologies makes it difficult to establish their robustness. Secondly, ontology development efforts in IS have traditionally led towards iterative and experiential methods for establishing the robustness of the ontology, as against utilizing a framework for investigating its coherence on a holistic scale. This research paper explores the potential of using Dooyeweerd’s philosophy in conjunction with Critical Realism to construct a model that can be used for evaluating ontology within its old lifeworld and establish its robustness and coherence.