Hilary Putnam once wrote that all these very abstract and seemingly idle philosophical arguments eventually lead to major discoveries in the fields of politics, science, etc. Follo- wing this remark, I would like to draw a connection between two debates. The first one is the famous exchange between Jacques Derrida and John Searle – perhaps the most important confrontation between continental and analytic school of philosophy. The second one, far less known, took place at the beginning of our century on the www-tag mailing list. Here Tim Berners-Lee, creator of World Wide Web, and Pat Hayes, one of the leading figures in the field of Artificial Intelligence, were discussing the future of Semantic Web – a very ambitious project from the borderland of AI and network science.
My goal is not only to highlight some apparent similarities among arguments used in these two debates. Rather, I would like to show that these arguments are embedded in larger discourses, which, consequently, shape the future of our technological environment.
