Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 191

In Chap. 2, we carefully constructed in our theory of encoding-content duality
what appears to be a thoroughly classical ontological framework for understanding
semantics. This same framework is phrased by Wittgenstein when reading Au-
gustine's “particular picture of the essence of human language” as the following:
“The individual words in language name objects - sentences are combinations of
such names. In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea:
Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the
object for which the word stands” (1953). Think of it in terms of this picture: there
is a world where there are human agents, and inside their heads - inaccessible
to others and so subjective - there is a shining aura, which is a manifestation
of a magical meaning-making ability that connects referents to representations.
When these humans encounter patches of sense-data via their sensory organs,
the object impresses a representation into their heads, a sort of 'photocopy' or
mental image with the selfsame content as the object. When the content is mentally
encoded into an information-bearing message that transfers to another receiving
agent, that agent's shining aura of intentionality shines in the same manner as the
sender - i.e. they subjectively share the same true object as a referent of both their
representations. This is the picture of meaning being 'inside the head,' and it is
precisely this picture which is crumbling as a result of our study of the Web.
The objectivity of Fregean sense causes a profound shift in the metaphysical
presuppositions of classical representational theory. Indeed, this is the source of
Fregean's division of the subjective idea from the objective meaning, and his utter
hostility to any thought of subjective ideas being the basis for mathematics and
logic, as demonstrated in his review of Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic (Frege
1894). Frege does not completely discount the notion of referents as subjective
ideas, but instead notices that sense determines the possible referents which various
objects can satisfy (Frege 1892). So, instead of imagining the magical aura of
meaning being a property of the agents, imagine that any object that encounters
a human agent is bestowed a shining aura of meaning - which superficially appears
to be the sort of explanation that we are advocating in our social 'meaning-as-use'
position. However, this picture misrepresents our notion of the social as ridiculously
human-centric, as any humanist notion of the social as a magic meaning-sauce is
exceptionally ill-suited to understanding the notion of machine-driven semantics
on the Web, where humans may be simply out of the loop entirely for a given
interaction. Instead, a more adequate picture of Fregean meaning-as-objective
would have all objects shining with meaning, with humans just being another object
on par with blocks, trees, and so on. Meaning is literally a property of the world. Yet
does this picture not simply descend into a sort of mysticism? Saying everything is
meaningful is structurally the same as saying that nothing is meaningful since there
is no difference that can make a difference.
Each generation must overcome its own subject-object contradiction, including
the generation of the Web. The subject-object dichotomy reveals itself as a
dichotomy between referent and representation, and reappears within the repre-
sentation itself as a division between encoding and content. The point of social
semantics is this: Meaning is not just a mapping between encoding (representation)