Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
Andy Powell disagrees with my explanation of why we will complain about the Semantic Web. "Success or failure of the Semantic Web does not rest with context - there is plenty of semantic work in that area it seems to me, typically referred to as the graph or the social graph." Ah, but no. The 'social graph' is not context - it's just another layer of semantics. In pragmatics, meaning varies with use - the meaning of a term is not found within the symbol set, but only exterior to the symbol set. You can describe context with language, but you cannot create context with language -- just as you can describe a knowing glance with language, but you can't create a knowing glance with language. The route to pragmatics does not lie through semantics (let's call this one the 'cognitivist fallacy').

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2024 02:42 a.m.

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