Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 185

When Wittgenstein was arguing with Piero Sraffa that everything in the world
must be expressible by the grammar of logic, Sraffa made a flicking of his fingers
underneath his chin, asking Wittgenstein, “What was the grammar of that?” (Monk
1991). Realizing that no logical grammar did justice to Sraffa's act, Wittgenstein
abandoned his view of language as logic and rephrased it in terms of a “language
game” (1953). The term language-game is “meant to bring into prominence the fact
that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Wittgenstein
1953). So, languages are composed of actions in the world . Wittgenstein also points
out that all the terms in a language derive their meaning from this interwoven
web of action and words, so that the words compose a language in virtue of their
relationships to other words and actions, for “these phenomena have no one thing
in common which makes us use the same word for all - but that they are related
to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or
these relationships, that we call them all 'language' ...” (Wittgenstein 1953). He
illustrates language-games by reference to the Augustinian example of commanding
a builder to stack building blocks in a certain order (1953), an example curiously
computationalized by Terry Winograd in his famous SHRDLU program, where the
point is not to refer to 'true' states-of-affairs but the creation of an actual building
(1972). 1 Words are uttered with the extent intention of bringing into purpose a
change of state of affairs of the world. 2
To contrast this position with the direct reference position, the meaning of a URI
is not determined by whatever referent is assigned to it by its owner, unless the
owner and other agents actually can come to an agreement on its meaning. Social
semantics does not give the owner of a URI any particular privilege, except for the
obvious asymmetric technical privilege of having the ability to influence the use of
the URI through hosting an accessible web-page or redirecting it to another URI.
This radically undermines any 'special' knowledge of meaning given to experts by
Putnam (1975), or any magical powers of naming thought to take place in a Kripkean
1 “Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language
is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B . A is building with
building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in
the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words
“block,” “pillar,” “slab,” “beam.” A calls them out; - B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring
at such-and-such a call ...”(Wittgenstein 1953).
2 We concur with Dummett that any account of meaning will have in essence three layers, where the
outer layer has priority over the inner layers. First, the “core” would be the “theory of reference”
while “surrounding the theory of reference will be a shell, forming the theory of sense” so that
“the theory of reference and the theory of sense form together one part of the theory of meaning:
the other, supplementary, part is the theory of force” (Dummett 1993b). Dummett calls force ,
the intended use of the sentence, as shown syntactically by mood (1993b). Wittgenstein also
fails to be a strict behaviorist, for he also endorses a notion of purpose, by stating “It is in
language that an expectation and its fulfillment make contact” (1953). We leave it to other theorists
like Millikan to discuss a thorough exploration of intended purpose (1989), perhaps by deriving
how the Darwinian notion of proper function can serve as an account for sense and intended
purpose - and so contradicting Wittgenstein's statement that “Darwin's theory has no more to
do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science” (1921).