Moore and Semantic Skepticism

Strange, I found the Paglia essay interpenetrating all of my thoughts over the past few days, dredging up language swarms from old Derrida and Feyeraband essays, and dipping over into my work on disambiguation and ontology. See, linguistics-wise, I was once an empiricist with an almost palpable antagonism to the value of knowledge resources like ontologies in solving specific problems. I would reach first for a statistical model that was trained on the contexts of word occurrences, expecting that words can only be known by the company that they keep.

Even the notion that the Semantic Web can achieve any level of crispness in assigning metadata to online content was doubtful in that it was inherently impossible for content authors to assign metadata consistently. The position is postmodern relativism, if you will, derived from the same kind of semantic and pragmatic arguments that have been used to deconstruct machine learning: do I translate this as "terrorist" or "freedom fighter"? Well, what is your frame of reference? What is your meta-narrative?

A radical position is the folksonomy view that folks are themselves are the best determiners of how to tag metadata. In this view, they use whatever tags seem appropriate based on their own intuitions about the content. But does this get us around the Bono issue, below? Unlikely. It seems more appropriate to purely abstract and controversial concepts like "terrorist" or "justice".

So I think we need a gradation of semantic forms that range from relatively simple propositions about identity up through propositions about meaning and intent. The latter are purely Wittgensteinian word games, with agreement and disagreement strewn across the symbol space, but the former have lower average rates of disagreement over referential attachment.

This parallels the notion of post-postmodernism in a way, by accepting fluidity and chaotic symbol/signifier interactions but still anticipating a useful and uncontroversial basis for facts. G.E. Moore would raise his hand in salute.