We have established that journals and their contents are real and have an existence separate from readers and authors, and Ingarden has written extensively on the nature of written works of the type in which we are interested. We note that many see information systems as being a diverse community with many different perspectives and disagreements about categorisation. An appropriate comprehensive reference ontology that is consistent with these traits is needed to provide a framework within which the results of the study of information systems research literature can be presented.

A number of ontologies have been used to provide an understanding of information systems. A frequently used ontology is that of Mario Bunge (1977; 1979). Bunge’s ontology is exact and well developed. It is characterised by an approach that considers the real world as known to science and proceeds in a clear and systematic way. Wand and Weber, alone and with others (e.g. Wand, 1996), have used this ontology in many studies of modelling information systems. However, it has been noted that Bunge’s ontology is ‘oriented towards the physical world and therefore does not provide for human perceptions and social context’ (Wand 1996). Indeed, Bunge’s ontology can be categorised as one consistent with the philosophical stream of naturalism wherein it is held ‘that the best methods of inquiry in the social sciences or philosophy are … those of the natural sciences’. Naturalism is ontologically supported by natural science in that it insists that natural science be used ‘in recognising what is real’ (Kim and Sosa, 1995) and that ‘our ontology is constrained by the result that all physical bodies are composed entirely of particles’ (Kim and Sosa, 1995). This position is also methodologically difficult to defend because ‘intentional states … are said to be attributable to individuals only relative to an observer [which is] inconsistent with the objectivity of the methods of natural science’ (Winch, 1958, quoted in Kim and Sosa, 1995).

We have established that scientific works such as those in information systems report true judgments of people written with intentions revealed in the works and, furthermore, that people who come from diverse perspectives and with different intentional states read articles. Naturalism cannot help us, despite rightly being a philosophy committed to realism (the existence of a world separate from our thinking about it).

Another ontological position that seems to be more amenable to use in the area of human perceptions is common-sense realism. Commonsensism holds that we really know most, if not all, of those things which ordinary people claim to know. I know that there exists at present a living human body, which is my body. I know that the earth has existed for many years past. These are unambiguous expressions, the meaning of which is widely understood. It should be noted that there is also an ‘entirely different question of whether we know what it means, in the sense that we are able to give a correct analysis of its meaning’ (Moore, 1925). Commonsensism is not concerned with this latter question. The common-sense world is delineated by our beliefs about what happens in mesoscopic reality in most cases and most of the time (Smith, 1995).

This approach does not dismiss the view of the world based on physics. Various proposals have been made to accommodate the world of physics within common-sense realism. Proposed alternatives have included treating the common-sense world as truly autonomous and the world of physics as a cultural artefact. Smith (1995) proposes that there is an overlap between the common-sense world and the world of physics. Paradigm shifts in science impact on our common-sense understanding of the physical world. However, a common-sense ontology does not necessarily need to be rewritten in the wake of paradigm shifts, contrasting with a naturalist ontology such as Bunge’s.

Common-sense realism holds that there is only one world towards which natural cognition relates, and that this world exists independently of our cognitive relations to it. It concedes that our natural cognitive experiences are in many cases unable to be verified, but points out that common sense is aware of error in cognitive efforts.

An ontology based on common-sense realism, which has received some attention in information systems, is that of Roderick Milton Chisholm (1996). His ontology is consistent with the brand of realism followed in this paper through Husserl, Ingarden, and Brentano. The ontology is robust, located in the common-sense realism school of thought, and deals with static and dynamic aspects. Importantly for the work proposed in this paper, Chisholm addresses the question of perception and the intentional point of view. He states:

Chisholm’s ontology is also able to accommodate ‘noema’ through ‘appearances’ thus helping to explain how people (and groups of people) can have perspectives on reality that change over time and appear to be not quite what they really are:

To present the full coverage of Chisholm’s ontology is beyond the scope of this paper, but his emphasis on the ‘primacy of the intentional’ (Chisholm, 1996) suggests that his ontology may provide an appropriate framework for analysing the reality of information systems research. It may be possible to use this well-respected philosophical research to build a sensible categorisation scheme for information systems research, but the question remains of how this can be done.