Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 194

7.3 A Statistical Semantic Web

If there is anything to be learned from this encounter of philosophy and the Web,
it is that one can never escape philosophical problems, even on the Web. They
cannot simply be ignored. The philosophy of language has had a large influence
on knowledge representation languages in general, in particular the influence of
logical theories of reference on artificial intelligence that has continued to influence
the Web via Pat Hayes. Yet strangely enough, it is the philosophically untrained
Berners-Lee that ends up arguing what has been accepted in philosophical circles
as the causal theory of reference, a theory of reference that is widely accepted in
some circles to be correct. Even more surprisingly, it appears that search engines
like Google embody an alternative theory of meaning, one based on an objective
notion of sense implicitly given by Wittgenstein. So how does social semantics play
out for the Semantic Web?
The Semantic Web has yet to be widely deployed, and it could be precisely due
to the persistence of these very problems of the philosophy of language regarding
meaning and reference. We have argued that the debates over the meaning and
reference of URIs can be seen as a return of the debate between the causal and
descriptivist theories of reference in the philosophy language, with this time the
subject being URIs rather than natural language names. In this way, it has been
shown that in the course of the practice of computer science, even in such a
new undertheorized and undisciplined frontier like the Web, robustly philosophical
problems arise. In stumbling on the difficult philosophical problem of reference and
meaning, it appears that the success of the Semantic Web, one of the most ambitious
projects of knowledge representation so far, has been stymied. Unfortunately due
to the hold of the descriptivist and causal theories of reference on the minds
behind the Semantic Web, the 'Semantic' Web has no meaning for most users,
but is a meaningless jumble of URIs threaded to together by a hard-to-understand
knowledge representation language.
Wittgenstein says “to invent a language could mean to invent an instrument for a
particular purpose” (Wittgenstein 1953). The purposes of evolved natural languages
are incredibly varied, but new formal languages are invented for a purpose as
well. What is the purpose of the Semantic Web? Why would anyone participate
in this particular language game rather than the language game of the hypertext
Web, or some other language game altogether? On this point, the Semantic Web is
positively schizophrenic, vacillating between a first-generation vision of classical
artificial intelligence replete with inference-driven agents, and a second-generation
vision of opening databases according to the principles of Web architecture for
applications that cannot yet be imagined. Obviously, these purposes have mostly
been successful at attracting artificial intelligence researchers to the fold. The
purpose of the Semantic Web is to find and incorporate new information into our
form-of-life, into our very ontology.
The social semantics position on the Web can now answer our original question:
What is the meaning of a URI? Since the Web, including the Semantic Web, is a form