The Big Schema of Things: Two Philosophical Visions of The Relationship Between Language and Reality and Their Implications for The Semantic Web

paper presents two philosophical views concerning the relationship between language and reality, and shows how those views can influence one's understanding of the enterprise of knowledge representation. Doing so will 1) shed light on the underlying assumptions of existing practice in the relevant community, and 2) help motivate and pave the way for an alternative understanding that has implications for the representation of knowledge in the Semantic Web. In this paper, I show how the two visions relate to the so called "URI-Identity Crisis" (2). This involves a semi-technical discussion of the notion that URIs can be used to identify "resources," followed by a philosophical analysis of the motivation and presuppositions that underlie the perceived need to let Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) play a referential role. The analysis shows how this perception is molded by adherence to what I call "the correspondence vision" of the relationship of language to reality. I then discuss how the notion of "meaning as use," one of the underpinnings of what I call "the holistic vision," leads to an alternative approach to understanding the role of URIs in a Semantic Web language such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF). I conclude by showing how this new approach can naturally and flexibly represent situations where diverse communities of users having substantive disagreements lay claim to having the correct understanding of the use of a term, something that seems to be problematic for the approach to Semantic Web languages based on a correspondence vision.