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Abstract

Information retrieval - the retrieval, primarily, of documents or textual material - is fundamentally a linguistic process. At the very least we must describe what we want and match that description with descriptions of the information that is available to us. Furthermore, when we describe what we want, we must mean something by that description. This is a deceptively simple act, but such linguistic events have been the grist for philosophical analysis since Aristotle. Although there are complexities involved in referring to authors, document types, or other categories of information retrieval context, here I wish to focus an one of the most problematic activities in information retrieval: the description of the intellectual content of information items. And even though I take information retrieval to involve the description and retrieval of written text, what I say here is applicable to any information item whose intellectual content can be described for retrieval-books, documents, images, audio clips, video clips, scientific specimens, engineering schematics, and so forth. For convenience, though, I will refer only to the description and retrieval of documents. The description of intellectual content can go wrong in many obvious ways. We may describe what we want incorrectly; we may describe it correctly but in such general terms that its description is useless for retrieval; or we may describe what we want correctly, but misinterpret the descriptions of available information, and thereby match our description of what we want incorrectly. From a linguistic point of view, we can be misunderstood in the process of retrieval in many ways. Because the philosophy of language deals specifically with how we are understood and mis-understood, it should have some use for understanding the process of description in information retrieval. First, however, let us examine more closely the kinds of misunderstandings that can occur in information retrieval. We use language in searching for information in two principal ways. We use it to describe what we want and to discriminate what we want from other information that is available to us but that we do not want. Description and discrimination together articulate the goals of the information search process; they also delineate the two principal ways in which language can fail us in this process. Van Rijsbergen (1979) was the first to make this distinction, calling them "representation" and "discrimination.""