Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 189

as information in order for it to affect multiple agents. So ultimately meaning must
involve others , where the meaning is precisely the effect of content upon behavior, is
repeated in different circumstances and mediates the collective behavior of multiple
agents.
Strangely enough, there is a deep metaphysical affinity between both the descrip-
tivist and causal theories of reference as they both depend crucially on the notion
of the undeniably true and yet private notion of direct acquaintance by individuals
with sense-data. Kripkean baptism is just a sort of ostentative relationship between
sense-data and a name, exemplified by the act of saying 'the name of that is the
Eiffel Tower.' This supposedly 'causal' account of baptism is precisely the same
as Russell's account of the use of names via direct acquaintance. A Russellian
descriptivist would simply have some sense-data that they could label with 'that
is an iron tower' and then generalize to other sets of 'sense data' to which one can
apply the terms 'iron' and 'tower' via more complex logical statements involving
towers and their descriptions. Likewise, the idea of direct acquaintance with sense-
data equally underpins both Putnam and Berners-Lee, as both think that reference
should be determined by expertise, for instead of just labeling a patch of sense-data
with the term 'iron tower,' the scientists would label the sense-data with a name like
'iron tower' only after it successfully passed some authoritative test, such as a test
for the chemical composition of iron.
The infamous example of the 'duck-rabbit' is Wittgenstein's attack on the notion
of this true yet subjective sense data, and so undermines the very idea of establishing
a referent via direct acquaintance and baptism (Wittgenstein 1953). If one cannot
determine that a simple sketch is of a 'duck' or a 'rabbit,' then how can anyone
objectively and without ambiguity attach a name to any patch of sense-data? 3 The
indeterminacy of the infamous 'duck-rabbit' shows that, at least in some cases, there
is no determinate nature of our phenomenological sense-data. Having disposed of
the notion of ostentation somehow providing direct access to sense-data, Kripkean
baptism is attacked next.
Wittgenstein holds that any act of baptism is incapable of assigning a name if
the act is done by a private individual, “naming appears as a queer connection of a
world with an object - and you really get such a queer connection of a word when
a philosopher tries to bring out the relations between name and thing by staring at
an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word 'this' innumerable
times” (Wittgenstein 1953). Indeed, such a relationship between a name and a thing
must be social if it is not to descend into some sort of occultism. Only in a very
rarefied imagination is this even possible because “naming is so far not a move in
the language-game any more than putting a piece in its place on a board is a move
in chess. We may say: nothing has so far been done, when a thing has been named.
It has not even got a name except in the language game. This is what Frege meant
too, when he said that a word has meaning only as part of a sentence” (Wittgenstein
3 This point of Wittgenstein directly foreshadows the argument for the indeterminacy of translation
of Quine (1960).