Presentation by Philippe Lacour at PhiloWeb 2012 (WWW 2012), Lyon, France.

1. WWW2012 Conference
Lyon, April 16-20 2011
PhiloWeb Workshop
Philippe Lacour –ENS Paris
Web Metaphysics between Logic
and Ontology
TheTraduxio Project as an example
License: CC-by-nc-nd Attribution- Non Commercial - No Derivs 2.0 France

2. Content

3. Content

4. Thinking the Web
• The Web: a genuine object of just a fashion?
• From a general to a precise point of view
• Two possible orientations: logic or ontology
• Questioning the ontological question:
semantics
• Unveiling the unconscious bias in the way we
frame the problem

5. Content

6. Ontology (so they say)
• Multiplication of ontologies
• Confusion: metaphysics or misconception
• A historical perspective: logical positivism
• The Logical tradition: lexical semantics
• The Rhetorical / hermeneutical tradition
• From ontology to semantics

7. Content

8. A logical (semantic) inquiry
• Berners Lee’s Web: positivist vision
• Semantic Web as a socio-semantic Web
• Interpretation is not secondary
• Not a layer cake but a triangle: documents,
interpretation, intersubjectivity
• The entlightening case of translation

9. Content

10. A logical (semantic) inquiry
• G.-G. Granger and the dream of
contemporary reason: « create machines
that could produce singularities »
• E.g.: automatic translation
• Two cases of machine translation
(grammatical, statistical rules)
• Singularity as the sign of creativity
• Translate from a text to another text

11. The TraduXio Project
• A computer assisted translation device
• Online, free, open source
• Meant for multilingual translation
• Aiming at precision: concorder
• Collaborative: a digital workbench
• Building reflexive corpora
• Ontological problems are semantic ones

12. Beyond the language pair system
The « star » stystem (e.g. Google translator’s
toolkit)
Japanese
Version
Korean
French
Version
Version
Original
Version
(English)
Turkish Russian
Version Version

13. The Google Translator’s Toolkit

14. Originality
1. Beyond the language-pair system
Literature/Zulu
Moteur de recherche Récupération et encodage
Version A
Version B
Version C

15. Hamlet translated into German/Spanish/French

16. Multiple Translation from the Qur’an

17. Originality
2- Relevant suggestions
Africa
Poetry
Traitement
20th c.

18. Multilingual Concordance

19. Relevant suggestions

20. Concordance : reverse

21. Originality
3- The collaborative spirit
• Revision History
• Managing Texts privileges
• Social tagging
• Discussions forums
• Wiki, social networks…

22. Privileges Management

23. Custom Privileges Management

24. Tagging a Text

25. Content

26. Web Philosophy as Psychoanalysis of
Digital Culture
• A web of Meaning: documents, not datas
• Semantic unconscious, below the ontological
concern
• Socio-semantic Web, interpretive semantics
• Critical role of philosophy: not kantian but a
cultural psychoanalysis, which also goes
beyond Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of
knowledge
• Automatic translation misconceives the role of
translation in the philosophy of language

27. Follow TraduXio
• « TIC, traduction, collaboration: vers de
nouveaux laboratoires de translocalisation
culturelle », Meta Journal for Translators, 55(4),
december 2010 (now online).
• “Towards a Collaborative Platform for Cultural
Texts Translators”, BÉNEL Aurélien and LACOUR
Philippe. In Pierre MARET ed. Virtual Community
Building and the Information Society: Current and
Future Directions. Hershey (Pennsylvania): IGI
Global (January 2011).

28. Thank you

http://traduxio.hypertopic.org