Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 184

Chapter 7
Social Semantics

Language is the body of the mind.
Anton Pannekoek (1912)

7.1 Introducing Social Semantics

As sense is objective, existing theories of representation must be reconstructed in
order to create a theory of semantics that places this insight at its core. Yet is it
really so odd to find in tag-clouds and search engine queries an objective notion of
meaning? It should not be, as all of our examples so far have relied upon natural
language, an everyday form of representation whose existence is objective by virtue
of being public. It is precisely the social and thus public notion of language that has
been strangely missing from the debates on reference and meaning on the Web so
far. This is not a new philosophical insight: Wittgenstein points to a social and public
notion of language when he says, “Do not ask yourself 'How does it work with me?'
- ask 'What do I know about someone else?' ” (Wittgenstein 1953). The use of
language to co-ordinate action is public and inexorably social, involving more than
one agent. So a third position, in contrast to both the logical and direct reference
positions, can now be staked.
The social semantics position states that meaning in language exists due to a
form-of-life, and so names have a sense as a mechanism for the co-ordination of
actions among multiple agents . Importantly, social semantics enables us to advance
an even more general theory of representation: namely that semantics as a clear
and unambiguous mapping to a referent does not exist, but that representations are
actually temporal-spatial extensions of things themselves, a kind of new collectivity
that challenges any notion of a pre-given ontology.
The core of Wittgenstein's radical shift away from the logical atomism-as-
metaphysics he espoused in Tractatus to his later work as exemplified by Philo-
sophical Investigations was his own personal encounter with a form of embodied
language that seemed to resist the straightjacket of logically-organized sense-data.