Problems with philosophical engineering
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.

Problems with philosophical engineering
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.