Introduction - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 1

Chapter 1
Introduction
You have abandoned the old domain, the old concepts. Here you
are in a new domain, for which new concepts will give you the
knowledge. The sign that a real change in locus and problematic
has occurred, and that a new adventure is beginning, the
adventure of science in development.
Louis Althusser (1963)
This topic is an inquiry into representation. Given the almost impossibly wide
scope of possible kinds of questions pertaining to representations, we will deploy
an analysis that is simultaneously both historical and scientific by restricting our
inquiry to an investigation of representations on the World Wide Web. Yet regardless
of our careful scoping, we will nonetheless be blindly driven into the realm of
semantics , the hard question of how meaning is assigned to representation - a
question that is as hard, it seems, as that of the more popular hard problem
of consciousness (Chalmers 1995). The nature of representation is no longer
fashionable to even pursue in philosophy or even in artificial intelligence; it is
a problem whose immensity overwhelms us. As a subject matter the apparent
phenomenon of reference , the suspiciously mysterious - and so perhaps even non-
existent! - connection between a representation and that which it represents, verges
upon the totality of our social relationship with the world. From Plato's Theory of
Forms to the evolution of representation in artificial life (Halpin 2006), science is
littered with theories of the semantics, all of which equally purport to solve this
thorny matter in one way or another. One would be forgiven in thinking, given the
lack of clear success of any theory so far, that perhaps the question is unscientific
or simply intractable in nature, yet that compels us with only a more irresistible
attraction.
At first glance, representation and semantics seem strangely old-fashioned,
particularly given the current enthusiasm for embodiment in cognitive science,
which in its more extreme versions leads to claims of “intelligence without represen-
tation” (Brooks 1991). Yet this fetish for embodiment may be strangely disciplinary