Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 196

While firmly based on Wittgenstein, the position that the Semantic Web is
an attempt to create a new kind of language goes against a certain quietism of
Wittgenstein, namely that “philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual
use of language; it can in the end only describe it” (Wittgenstein 1953). This
would lend credence to Wilk's position of the primacy of the lexicon (Wilks
1975) Social semantics on the Web is not a mere application of Wittgenstein's
insights, but a profound transformation of them. Berners-Lee responds to such
quietism with a radical riposte, that on the Web “we are not analyzing a world,
we are building it” (Berners-Lee 2003a). This radical outlook that engineering
systems are philosophy given a digital embodiment is best summarized by Berners-
Lee himself in the statement that “we are not experimental philosophers, we are
philosophical engineers” (2003a). So our approach is neo-Wittgensteinian rather
than Wittgensteinian. In contrast to any purely descriptive science, the primary
difference of what has been termed the “science of the Web” is that not only can
engineered systems be constructed to test theories, as done in traditional modeling in
almost all scientific fields, but these models can be released upon the world at large
through the Web (Berners-Lee et al. 2006). We hope by integrating the Semantic
Web with the work of information retrieval as pioneered by Karen Sparck Jones, the
Semantic Web can have a second lease on life and be tested on a large scale as a
truly universal space of data. The initial results as given so far are promising.
Furthermore, just because we find the descriptivist theory of reference insuffi-
cient does not mean logic should be neglected for the future of the Web: to do
such a thing is throwing the impressive computational baby out with the muddled
metaphysical bathwater. Inference could be useful for the Semantic Web. The
question that bedeviled the causal theory of reference was that of ambiguity. Does
ambiguity result from a failed use of language? Ambiguity is built into social
semantics, and the kind of ambiguity that Wittgenstein is concerned with is not the
kind of ambiguity resulting from entailments failing to constrain interpretations. For
Wittgenstein, ambiguity is naturally constrained by the conventions of the language,
which are restricted in turn by the external world. While neo-Wittgensteinian social
semantics would note that there is always some ambiguity in language, worrying
about this ambiguity misses the point, as the point of a language game is not to
pin down names to referents exactly, but instead to share enough of a convention to
accomplish some task or solve some problem. Ambiguity is usually solved by the
embodied or implicit context given in the language. The role of descriptions and
inference is not in determining referents, but rather only when the various agents
in a language-game are not clear about the role of a name in a language game, so
that “an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none in
need of another - unless we require it to prevent a misunderstanding” (Wittgenstein
1953). In this manner, inference and entailments that restrict interpretations, as
defended by Hayes, are a logical analogue to the real-world context that both
constrain ambiguity in a language game, while usually never dispelling it. While
some inferential mechanisms can be useful when errors are made in a language
game, in general inference cannot express all the constraints given by the contextual