Theories of Semantics on theWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 94

Scott,' who can be identified with 'the author of Waverly,' so that instead of being
a tautology, even a proper name of a person, even if known through acquaintance,
is sort of short-hand for a large cluster of logical statements. To use our previous
example, the 'Eiffel Tower' can be thought of as a short-hand for not only that
'there exists an entity known as the Eiffel Tower' but also the logical statement that
'the aforementioned entity had Gustave Eiffel as its architect.' If someone did not
know that 'the aforementioned entity was also the tallest building in the world up
until 1930,' one could then make a statement such as 'The Eiffel Tower is identical
to the tallest building in the world up until 1930' without merely stating a tautology,
and such a statement would add true and consistent knowledge to a hearer who was
not previously aware of the fact.
As sensible as Russell's programme appeared, there are difficulties in building
any theory of reference on, as Quine put it, such a “slender basis” as elementary
sense-data and logic (1951). One obvious problem for any descriptive theory of
names comes for the use of names of any “kind of abstract entities like properties,
classes, relations, numbers, propositions,” for such entities could not have an
interpretation for any content using such a simple sensory epistemology (Carnap
1950). Carnap's Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology made an argument for basing
such entities purely on linguistic form itself. Carnap believed that, despite the
difficulty of determining the interpretation of names for abstract entities, “such a
language does not imply embracing a Platonic ontology but is perfectly compatible
with empiricism” (1950). His position was that while “if someone wishes to speak in
his language about a new kind of entity, he has to introduce a system of new ways of
speaking, subject to new rules,” which Carnap calls the “construction of a linguistic
framework for the new entities in question.” From within a linguistic framework,
Carnap claimed that to commit to any statement about the “existence or reality of the
total system of the new entities” was to make a “pseudo-statement without cognitive
content” (1950). This particular position of Carnap's was eventually devastated,
as Quine showed that even the most unremarkable of sensory expressions such as
'redness here now' were undermined by multiple problems. For example, there is
the issue of indeterminacy of translation, in which even the verbal expression of
sense experiences assumes a common background, but one can imagine many cases
where two creatures would utter “redness here now” in reaction to actually different
sensory stimuli (imagine a human with color-blindness). Also, there is the problem
where even our sense experiences are not 'raw' but influenced by a complex holistic
network of propositions - one does not experience 'hard iron here now' but the
Eiffel Tower itself (Quine 1951).

4.3.2 Tarski's Formal Semantics

Tarski abandoned the quaint epistemology of logical atomism in terms of direct ac-
quaintance with sensory data and defined reference purely in terms of mathematical
logic in his The Concept of Truth in Formal Languages (Tarski 1935). Reference was