Abstract. The problem of identity and reference is receiving increasing attention in the (semantic) web community and is emerging as one of the key features which distinguish traditional knowledge representation from knowledge representation on the web with respect to data interlinking and knowledge integration on a large scale. As part of this debate, the OKKAM project proposed the creation of an Entity Name System which provides rigid identifiers, named OKKAMids, for any type of concrete and particular entities, and links OKKAMids to existing identifiers which have been created elsewhere for the same entity. The introduction of these identifiers raises some practical and conceptual concerns. In this paper we address them by extending two proposed ontologies (IRE and IRW) to accomodate the notion of OKKAMid, describe their formal properties, illustrate why they may play an important role in the construction of the Semantic Web and discuss how they can be integrated with other approaches for mapping URIs onto each others.
Theories of reference are a crucial research topic in analytic philosophy. Since the publication of Kripke's Naming and Necessity, most philosophers have endorsed the causal/historical theory of reference. The goal of this paper is twofold: (i) to discuss a method for testing experimentally the causal theory of reference for proper names by investigating linguistic usage and (ii) to present the results from two experiments conducted with that method. Data collected in our experiments confirm the causal theory of reference for people proper names and for geographical proper names. A secondary but interesting result is that the semantic domain affects reference assignment: while with people proper names speakers tend to assign the semantic reference, with geographical proper names they are prompted to assign the speaker's reference.
Martí argued that referential intuitions are not the right kind of empirical evidence for testing theories of reference. Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc replied with a survey aimed at providing evidence that referential intuitions are in sync with truth-value judgments and argued that truth-value judgments provide empirical data from linguistic usage. We present the results of a survey indicating that Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc's experiment fails to overcome Martí's objection: The truth-value judgements tested by Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc do not provide data relevant for testing theories of reference.
Since Machery et al. Cognition 92, B1-B12 (2004) attacked Kripke’s refutation of classical descriptivism, their experiment has been repeated several times, in its original version or in some revised ones, by theorists with contrasting intents. Some repeated the experiment for confirming its results, others for proving them unreliable. One striking characteristic of those surveys is that they mostly replicated the data collected in Machery et al.’s Cognition 92, B1-B12, 2004 experiment: less than 60% of Westerners showed preference for the causal-historical response. We side with the critics of Machery et al.’s experiment. In this paper, we present the results of a survey that tests some hypotheses for explaining that percentage of Westerners’ preferences without taking it as evidence that more than 40% of Westerners have descriptivist intuitions on semantic reference. The aim of our paper is not merely to question the reliability of Machery et al.’s experiment. In sections 4 and 5 we assess the impact of our survey on the current debate in experimental semantics. We provide a novel account of the nature of the epistemic ambiguity that affects experiments in theory of reference and explain the consequences that our account of the epistemic ambiguity has for subsequent works trying to avoid ambiguities.
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