Truth and fiction on the Net Yannick Maignien The Internet and the World Wide Web are often praised for their prodigious informational power, but criticised at the same time for the difficulty of determining the veracity of information obtained. The present article attempts to reflect on the necessity of moving beyond this contradiction. With the advent of the Web, fundamental questions regarding the relation of language to the world are once again at stake. Thus, relationships of reference, denotation, veridiction, symbolic denotation and fiction, proposed by logical and analytic philosophy, should be increasingly employed. Moreover, the patterns of human behaviour underlying the Web could be more accurately analysed using pragmatic theories, in order to integrate procedural metadata. Finally, the question of the emergence of fictional or “possible” worlds within the Web heuristic seems essential if we hope to move beyond the error/truth dichotomy. Automatic linguistic tools (metalanguage, RDF syntax) must take into account richer logical dimensions than those currently envisaged. Date of publication: 25 November 2002
