A Dialectical Approach to Information Retrieval: Exploring a Contradiction in Terms

Information retrieval (IR) is the process of representing the meaning of documents so that people who want the information they contain can retrieve them. It is, therefore, centrally concerned with information and meaning. It is concerned with them both on a pragmatic level in terms of designing and making IR systems, and on a theoretical level in terms of why and how these systems work and what this could have to do with the nature of meaning and information. This thesis is primarily about the theoretical and philosophical issues in IR. The main question discussed is the extent to which an investigation into the relationship between the subjective and the objective can improve our understanding of how meaning and information operate in IR. My thesis is that this relationship is a dialectical one, the subjective and the objective exist in a mutually antagonistic and dependent relationship, and that this new perspective on its nature can be theoretically useful for IR. Thus I develop a new theoretical perspective, the dialectical model, which is then used to improve conceptual clarity in a number of difficult and intractable IR problems. The aim is not to solve these problems but to provide a clearer insight into their nature

IR and the dialectic of meaning

The aim of this paper is to provide some elucidation of the tensions inherent in the problem of meaning and use this to inform both theoretical and pragmatic issues in IR. The difficulties of theory in IR are discussed and a new model of meaning as a dialectic is introduced. This model consists of two dialectics: objective versus subjective and individual versus shared. It is shown that this model assists IR in revealing some of the difficulties in its theoretical assumptions and thus provides a clearer focus for improvements in practice. 1 Theories of Meaning The general aim of any theory is to provide a way of understanding the nature of a particular phenomenon and as a result to have a tool for explaining and predicting its behaviour. In developing a theory of meaning then, the first step must be to examine what kind of thing meaning is. This process raises many questions including: what is the relationship between a word and its meaning; what happens when we understand the meaning of a word; how can we tell that other people use words in the same way; why is meaning sometimes ambiguous. It is a complex problem and even the most superficial study of meaning reveals that it involves a wide range of different factors. Many philosophers and linguists have developed ideas as to how language works but there is no clear consensus on the nature of the problem [1-5]