Introduction - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 3

“three kinds of cognitive science or artificial intelligence: classical, connectionist,
and (something like) embodied-embedded” (2008). While countless papers have
been produced on the technical aspects of the Web, very little has been done
explicitly on the Web qua Web as a subject matter of interest to philosophy.
This does not mean there has not been interest, although the interest has come
in particular more from the side of those engineers working on developing the
Web rather than those already entrenched in philosophy, linguistics, and artificial
intelligence (Halpin et al. 2006; Bouquet et al. 2007 2008). In this spirit, what we
will undertake in this thesis as a whole is to apply many well-known philosophical
theories of reference and representation to the phenomenon of the Web, and see
which theory survives - and finally, if the Web points a way to a new theory of
semantics, which we surmise may be a social semantics.

1.1 Scope

The World Wide Web is without a doubt one of the most significant computational
phenomena to date. Yet there are some questions that cannot be answered without a
theoretical understanding of the Web. Although the Web is impressive as a practical
success story, there has been little in the way of developing a theoretical framework
to understand what - if anything - is different about the Web from the standpoint of
long-standing questions of representation and semantics in philosophy. While this
situation may have been tolerable so far, serving as no real barrier to the further
growth of the Web, with the development of the Semantic Web, a next generation
of the Web “in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling
computers and people to work in cooperation,” these philosophical questions come
to the forefront, and only a practical solution to them can help the Semantic Web
repeat the success of the hypertext Web (Berners-Lee et al. 2001). At this moment,
there is little doubt that the Semantic Web faces gloomy prospects - and perhaps
for good reason. On first inspection, the Semantic Web appears to be a close cousin
to another intellectual project, known politely as 'classical artificial intelligence'
(also known as 'Good-Old Fashioned AI') an ambitious project whose progress has
been relatively glacial and whose assumptions have been found to be cognitively
questionable (Clark 1997). The initial bet of the Semantic Web was that somehow
the We b part of the Semantic Web would somehow overcome whatever problems
the Semantic Web inherited from classical artificial intelligence, in particular, its
reliance on logic and inference as the basis of meaning (Halpin 2004).
This thesis is explicitly limited in scope, concentrating only on the terminology
necessary to phrase a single, if broad, question: How can we determine the meaning
of a Uniform Resource Identifier (a URI, such as http://www.example.org ) onthe
Web? Although the thesis is interdisciplinary, as it involves elements as diverse
as the philosophy of language and machine-learning, these elements are only
harnessed insofar as they are necessary to phrase our central thesis and present
a possible solution. Due to constraining ourselves to the scope of the Web and