Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 190

1953). Indeed, naming as a purely private convention serves no purpose. Names can
only exist as part of a wider language. Even what appears to be the most private of
sensory experiences is both determined and expressed by a public language. 4
As championed by Searle's account of “social reality” in natural language, a
name has meaning via the use and acceptance of speech acts in public language, so
that a Kripkean baptism is only one kind of a wide array of possible speech acts
(Searle 1995). To broaden our horizon, descriptions can be considered another kind
of speech act in public language. Without this acknowledgment of a social semantics
creating a shared objective social reality via its effects and usage by participating
agents, we have no choice but to ascribe certain seemingly magical referential
powers to baptism or mysteriously connect logical descriptions with sense-data
via direct acquaintance. The magical connection between words and meaning, and
between representations and referents, is revealed by social semantics to be founded
on nothing other than the deployment of language for collective co-ordination.

7.2 Representations as Dynamic Ontology

We began with an investigation of representations not merely as explanatory factors
in common-sense or scientific knowledge, but as matters of ontological fact. 5 Is
there an objective criterion that can determine whether any thing really qualifies
as a representation, regardless of the epistemological question of whether humans
can know this is the case. This is a very distinct question from whether or not
representations are inside the head - as is the focus of innumerable debates in
artificial intelligence and cognitive science (Fodor 1975). One can accept not
knowing whether or not there is an inner mental language but still accept that on
some level the Mona Lisa is really - in other words, ontologically - a representation.
This is also far beyond any arguments for representations being useful or not useful
in terms of explanations in science (Bechtel 1998). One reason our investigation
of representations has focused on the Web is precisely to take the anti-humanist
position that whether or not something is a representation should be independent of
any human observer - so that its sense can be thought of as objective.

4 This is far from an exhaustive account of the many arguments against private language by
Wittgenstein. The simple Cartesian example of dreaming would suffice to undermine any idea
that sense-data is unquestionably a true given. However, while Descartes would have statements
about 'sense data' made while dreaming be false, Wittgenstein would prefer those statements to
simply be meaningless, neither strictly true or false. As he said in one of his last written statements
towards the end of his life: “Someone who, dreaming, says 'I am dreaming,' even if he speaks
audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream 'it is raining,' while it was in fact
raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain” (Wittgenstein 1969).
5 We use the term 'ontology' in its full philosophical meaning here rather than the more restrained
engineering meaning of the term for the Semantic Web.