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baptism (Kripke 1972). Baptizing is actually social and cannot function purely
causally, since the naming convention requires communication between more than
one person. The only way it could be purely causal would be if every person using
the name had some form of direct acquaintance with the referent. The chain between
the act of naming and the use of the name depends on reference. Ambiguities and
errors can happen. For example, Gareth Evans pointed out famously that African
natives may have used the word 'Madagascar' to refer to the African mainland
but when Marco Polo heard it, he thought it referred to an island off of Africa.
What should be clear is that the ambiguity remains, and even Kripke himself says
“a name refers to an object if there exists a chain of communication, stretching
back to baptism, at each stage of which there was a successful intention to preserve
reference” (1972). The notion of success is undefined, but it is clear that the chain
is not just one of causation, but of communication and so subject to ambiguity
since communication often employs description, which by its nature is open to
interpretation.
To contrast social semantics with descriptivist theories of reference, there is not a
pre-given ontology (universe) of things that can even ambiguously serve as referents
to representations by virtue of their satisfaction of descriptions. Instead of thinking
of logic in terms of descriptions that have interpretation mappings to a world, logical
semantics can be thought of as descriptions of an agent's public behavior. In terms
of URIs, Wittgenstein does not equate the meaning of a sentence with truth or the
satisfaction of a model unless these are accepted by all agents that use the URI.
Wittgenstein retorts that only “in our language” can “we apply the calculus of
truth” (Wittgenstein 1953). However, we would hold that Wittgenstein is being too
curt, and that logical-based inference can approximate the shared meaning between
agents, so logic (and logical ambiguity) becomes not a weakness but a strength.
Just as we found analogues of the descriptivist and causal theories of reference in
the positions of Hayes and Berners-Lee, is there an existing computational analogue
of this third position of social semantics? We believe so, and the answer lies in the
theory of meaning implicit in information retrieval: the derivation of meaning via
massive statistics that approximate the 'use' of a URI on the Web.
7.1.1
The Hidden History of Search Engines
The hidden lineage of social semantics comes, rather surprisingly, from exist-
ing Web search engines like Google. Information retrieval, and its data-driven
methodology, are neo-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language given computational
flesh, as held by Wilks (2008b). The discipline of information retrieval is directly
descended from Wittgenstein himself via the under-appreciated philosopher and
linguist Margaret Masterman. The secret history of how Wittgenstein influenced
Web search engines is itself a fascinating trajectory. After all, Wittgenstein's
infamous dictum that “meaning is use” seems often itself meaningless upon first
glance; how can “meaning is use” possibly be operationalized into a basis for a
science of language (Wittgenstein 1953)? The answer is obvious: in studying the
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