Theories of Semantics on theWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 89

So, how can sense be determined, or at least detected? After all, almost anything
counts as meaningful behavior. While sense determination is a difficult and context-
ridden question that seems to require some full or at least 'molecular' language
understanding, one account of sense detection so far is given by the earlier notion
of assertoric content of Dummett, which is simply that an agent can be thought
of as interpreting to a sense if they can answer a number of “yes-no” binary
questions about the sense in a way that makes 'sense' to other agents speaking
the language (Dummett 1973). There is a tantalizing connection of Dummett's
assertoric content as answers to binary questions to the information-theoretic
reduction of uncertainty through binary choices (bits), as the content of information
cannot be derived without enough bits in the encoding. Overall, Dummett's notion
of sense as grounded in actual language use naturally leads to another question: Is
sense objective?
The reason the notion of sense was thought of as so objectionable by many
philosophers like Russell and Kripke was that sense was viewed as a private,
individual notion, much like the Lockean notion of an idea . Frege himself clearly
rejects this, strictly separating the notion of a sense from an individual subjective
idea of a referent, which he refers to as an 'idea.' Far from a mere subjective idea
or impression of a referent, Frege believed that sense was inherently objective ,“the
reference of a proper name is the object itself which we designate by using it; the
idea which we have in that case is wholly subjective, in between lies the sense,
which is indeed no longer subjective like the idea, but is yet not the object itself”
(1892). A sense is objective insofar as it is a shared part of an inherently public
language, since a sense is the “common property of many people, and so is not a
part of a mode of the individual mind. For one can hardly deny that mankind has
a common store of thoughts which is transmitted from one generation to another”
(1892). While the exact nature of a sense is still unclear, its main characteristic is
that it should be whatever is objectively shared between those competent in the use
of names in a language.
Ever since Frege's attempted to define it, this notion of meaning as an objective
sense has been considered counter-intuitive and controversial, and so with a few
exceptions most philosophers of language would rather throw the notion of sense
out the window and instead ground theories of meaning in subjective impressions
of 'sense-data.' Furthermore, unlike Fregean sense, these theories of semantics have
actually been debated in the context of the Web. So before buying into a Fregean
notion of sense on the Web, let's see how these alternatives to sense fare in their
encounter with the Web.

4.3 The Logicist Position and the Descriptivist Theory

of Reference

The origin of logicist semantics is in what is popularly known as the descriptivist
theory of reference. In this theory of reference, the referent of a name is given
by whatever satisfies the descriptions associated with the name. Usually, the