The meaning of a document

• From: Seth Russell <seth@robustai.net>
• Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 09:14:45 -0800
• To: "RDF-LOGIC" <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
• Cc: "aaron Swartz" <aswartz@upclink.com>
• Message-ID: <004f01c16f8b$5b563c40$657ba8c0@c1457248a.sttls1.wa.home.com>

Tim Berners-Lee said in [1]:

   "1) The meaning of a document is the conjunction
        of the meanings of its statements."

I would like to propose a more practical approach:

   '1) The meaning of a document is the effect of it's transmission.'

Now, that being said,  I don't think that the W3C needs to be deciding this
issue which has been debated by Philosophers for centuries.  But for a
standards body in the 21st century to so casually legislate away the wisdom
of  philosophers like Pierce and James with a stoke of the pen is going to
be taken by some of us as quite arrogant.

I suggest typing in "pragmatism" at Google and starting to read.

[1] http://ilrt.org/discovery/chatlogs/rdfig/2001-11-16

Seth Russell

Received on Saturday, 17 November 2001 12:15:58 UTC