Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 197

use of a name in a language game. However, it is a beginning, and an important one.
As a methodology for formally specifying the behavior of machines, formal logic
has barely begun.
Searching and tagging the large hypertext Web leads to a 'statistical semantic
web,' where the meaning of a resource is given by the combined activity of
users with that of massive statistically-driven algorithms that are based on the
computational trace of the sense of a resource. In this way, the bet of using URIs as
a universal naming scheme for things can just as easily be tied to statistical methods
from information retrieval as to logic-based knowledge representations. Obviously,
the use of URIs should be tied to both. To apply Wittgenstein to the Semantic Web,
the first observation is that the Semantic Web is a new language-game. There is
no reason why language-games in a Wittgensteinian sense have to be restricted
to natural languages, for Wittgenstein himself notes that “new types of language,
new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become
obsolete and get forgotten” (Wittgenstein 1953). The struggle over the Identity
Crisis within the Semantic Web is precisely the struggle over the conventions of
meaning needed for a new language. Remember that for social semantics the terms
'language' and 'sense' can be neutral between formal languages for computers
and natural languages for humans. Formal languages are often mistakenly thought
to be meaningless due to their not taking into account the concrete activity that
occurs as a result of their use, instead mischaracterized as pure “syntax churning”
(Harnad 1990). Given that agents can be computers just like humans, and computers
have their own norms for behavior in terms of protocols, then there seems to
be no reason why computers cannot create meaningful new language-games. So
from the perspective of social semantics, when a new URI comes into play on the
Semantic Web, the agents do not have to specify the referents of the URI to use
it meaningfully. If the referent of a name has to be specified for the name to be
used, it only has to be specified to the minimal conditions necessary to co-ordinate
actions between agents. Contra Berners-Lee's direct reference position, only in very
rare language games does the referent of some representation have to be specified
in an 'unambiguous' manner. In fact, acknowledging the kinds of complex social-
technical interactions of language and the world exemplified by the feedback loop
between humans and search on the Web may indeed be more likely to do justice to
the potential of the Web. There is much work to be done, for all we have presented so
far is an informal sketch of social semantics, and a computationally operationalized
and testable science of social computation is clearly the next step. In fact, there is
no reason to believe that we will even understand the worlds we are bringing into
being without the collective intelligence of the Web.

7.4 Towards Collective Intelligence

To explain collective intelligence, we should lean upon the Extended Mind thesis
(Clark and Chalmers 1998). Clark and Chalmers introduce us to Otto, a man with
an impaired memory who navigates about his life via the use of his notebook, in