Knowledge organization in the philosophical domain: dealing with polisemy in thesaurus building

This paper focuses on polysemy, the phenomenon by which a word has a network of multiple but related senses, as a characterizing feature of the philosophical lexicon. Many philosophical terms, in fact, are typified by a considerable stratification of meaning, which originates from the history of their semantics, where meanings accumulate over time and past knowledge is continually reintroduced and re-elaborated into new forms of theorizations. Developing a domain-specific knowledge organization system (KOS), like a thesaurus, would be largely affected by this feature. The demand for semantic disambiguation is, in fact, amplified. Furthermore, together with their frequent polysemy, the level of abstraction of the philosophical terms and the conceptual complexity of this domain make the thesaural semantic arrangement, especially the hierarchical structures, rather difficult to be set up. On the basis of a Wittgensteinian conception of meaning and its implication for information retrieval issues, some preliminary ideas on how to proceed on this topic are presented.