The reality of information systems research - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 33

has similarities with the approach of Franz Brentano to mereology. The common-sense
world is complex and is divided in different ways and at different levels. Mereology
concerns the basic organising relationships of part to whole, part to part within a single
whole, of identity, overlapping and discreteness.
Most of the work done by Rosch and other cognitive scientists is based on studies of
entities of tabletop space such as tools, small pets or of abstract items such as colours
and diseases. Smith and Mark (1999) were interested in determining whether these ap-
proaches could be applied to geographic categories. Their experimental framework
consisted of two complementary phases: traditional ontological work (largely deductive,
introspective and formal) and research with human subjects (empirical, inductive). The
ontological theories were used as the starting points for the design of experimental
protocols to test the degree of fit of the ontological theories. This data can then be used
to refine the ontological theories to form the basis for further iterations.
Conclusions
We have established that the information systems research domain is diverse. We have
also established that the approach of Roman Ingarden provides a suitable way to discover
the nature of information systems literature - the real world artefacts of information
systems research. His work plays a significant part in studies of fiction, plays and poetics.
So far, to our knowledge, no exemplars of a research methodology applying his ap-
proaches to scientific works exist.
Roman Ingarden's philosophy is in harmony with common-sense realism such as that
espoused by Roderick Milton Chisholm and Barry Smith. Common-sense realism provides
for perspectival views capturing the diversity of the information systems research domain.
It is likely that this project will require the sort of empirical validation undertaken by
Smith and Mark (1999). However, the real objects in their research were not based on
intentional acts. Consequently, we believe that no method is directly applicable to un-
dertake this empirical validation, and this remains an active line of enquiry.
The results of this investigation are promising in that a number of different studies, using
a common philosophical approach, have been found. When these studies are taken to-
gether, they point towards a soundly based, novel methodology for developing a cat-
egorial scheme that can be applied in a domain characterised by diversity and, more
specifically, diversity of intentionality.