Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 188

what Wittgenstein would term a 'language-game,' with success in this game being
judged in terms of whether or not a given user can discover a relevant URI via the
right keywords. The terms themselves may be ambiguous, but it does not matter
if a relevant URI is discovered. In this way, the objective sense of a URI can be
considered the search terms that can be used by multiple users to find a particular
URI. What a URI means is precisely the set of search terms that leads multiple users
to discover the URI in the context of satisfying a particular information need.
Tagging can then thought of as simply saving the keywords and even adding
new terms to this game after the initial discovery of the URI to help the user find
it again later, which would be particularly useful if the search engine changed its
underlying algorithm or the terms used to discover the URI were counterintuitive.
While the user may not be aware of it, as it appears that searching the Web using a
search engine is a private experience, it is in fact mediated by a vast amount of web-
pages stored in the search engine's index and the behavior of previous search users.
So, in fact searching the web is both recordable and amendable to computational
analysis, and is a prime example of the Fregean dictum that meaning is objective.
Tagging is only easier for us to understand as public because the tags stored are
usually publicly accessible on most systems (although they do not have to be). It is
precisely this notion of meaning as public and objective that is the foundation for
the later Wittgenstein's work, which in turn serves as the philosophical foundation
for social semantics on the Web.

7.1.2 Against Private Language

One of the hidden presumptions of the descriptivist and causal theory of reference
is the tradition that language can be a private phenomenon, that is possessed and
used by a single agent to accurately describe and refer to the world. Wittgenstein,
whose Tractatus was the original inspiration for this position, returned to refute
this massive misinterpretation of his ideas by Russell, Carnap, and other logical
positivists in his Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953). Wittgenstein
attacks the very idea of a private language, a language that is somehow only
understood by a single person and hence untranslatable to other languages, where
“the individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to
the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot
understand the language” (Wittgenstein 1953). His primary example is the use of a
language to describe sensations of pain. Wittgenstein argues that such a language is
absurd, as there would be no “right” way to use the private word for the sensation, for
“whatever is going to seem right to me is right” (1953). In his second famous attack
on private language, Wittgenstein phrases an attack on private codes of behavior in
the infamous example of rule-following in a game like chess, stating that: “It is not
possible that there should have been only one occasion on which only one person
obeyed a rule” (1953). Meaning in language is social, or it is not meaningful at all (as
in a private language) and instances of language use must be objectively available