AI Applied to Philosophy: A Contribution to the Wittgenstein Ontology Project
Jakub GOMUŁKA
AGH University of Science and Technology, Kraków , Polandhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-9100-0334
Abstract
The paper focuses on the Wittgenstein Ontology Project run by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB). The project is an attempt to apply Semantic Web (SW) technology to the task of making Wittgenstein’s philosophy available as a searchable knowledge base on the Internet. The SW is one of the paradigms of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2) research and is a descendant of the symbolic AI research programme (also known as ‘Good Old-Fashioned AI’ or GOFAI). After a brief introduction to the SW technology, the paper discusses the main difficulties in applying it to the humanities and to the philosophy of Wittgenstein in particular. Next, it turns to the WAB team’s attempts to deal with these difficulties, especially a much discussed perspectival approach that would allow for a representation of competing or contradictory claims. Finally, some original solutions are proposed: namely, the implementation of the perspectival approach with the help of the RDF reification mechanism and a new mechanism of reasoning that allows rules of inference to be generated from the content of a knowledge base. The latter solution requires a significant change in present-day technologies; that is, in the SPARQL interpreter. However, it is also a rather promising extension of the present paradigm that can potentially allow the merging of GOFAI with the artificial neural network approach.
Keywords:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Semantic Web technology, computational ontology, symbolic artificial intelligence (AI)References
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AGH University of Science and Technology, Kraków https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9100-0334
