Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 37

of Bretano, the reference relation is considered intentional due to its apparent
physical spookiness. After all, it appears there is some great looming contradiction:
if the content is whatever is held in common between the source and the receiver
as a result of the conveyance of a particular message, then how can the source and
receiver share some information they are disconnected from?
On the surface this aspect of 'representation' seems to be what Brian Cantwell
Smith calls “physically spooky,” since a representation can refer to something with
which it is not in physical contact (Smith 1996). This spookiness is a consequence
of a violation of common-sense physics, since representations allow us to have some
sort of what appears to be a non-physical relationship with things that are far away
in time and space. This relationship of 'aboutness' or intentionality is often called
'reference.' While it would be premature to define 'reference,' a few examples will
illustrate its usage: someone can think about the Eiffel Tower in Paris without being
in Paris, or even having ever set foot in France; a human can imagine what the Eiffel
Tower would look like if it were painted blue, and one can even think of a situation
where the Eiffel Tower wasn't called the Eiffel Tower. Furthermore, a human can
dream about the Eiffel Tower, make a plan to visit it, all while being distant from the
Eiffel Tower. Reference also works temporally as well as distally, for one can talk
about someone who is no longer living such as Gustave Eiffel. Despite appearances,
reference is not epiphenomenal, for reference has real effects on the behaviour of
agents. Specifically, one can remember what one had for dinner yesterday, and this
may impact on what one wants for dinner today, and one can book a plane ticket to
visit the Eiffel Tower after making a plan to visit it.
We will have to make a somewhat convoluted trek to resolve this paradox.
The very idea of representation is usually left under-defined as a “standing-
in” intuition, that a representation is a representation by virtue of “standing-in”
for its referent (Haugeland 1991). The classic definition of a symbol from the
Physical Symbol Systems Hypothesis is the genesis of this intuition regarding
representations (Newell 1980): “An entity X designates an entity Y relative to a
process P ,if,when P takes X as input, its behaviour depends on Y .” There are two
subtleties to Newell's definition. Firstly, the notion of a representation is grounded
in the behaviour of an agent. So, what precisely counts as a representation is
never context-free, but dependent upon the agent completing some purpose with
the representation. Secondly, the representation simulates its referent, and so the
representation must be local to an agent while the referent may be non-local: “This
is the symbolic aspect, that having X (the symbol) is tantamount to having Y (the
thing designated) for the purposes of process P ” (Newell 1980). We will call X a
representation, Y the referent of the representation, a process P the representation-
using agent . This definition does not seem to help us in our goal of avoiding physical
spookiness, since it pre-supposes a strangely Cartesian dichotomy between the
referent and its representation. To the extent that this distinction is held a priori,
then it is physically spooky, as it seems to require the referent and representation to
somehow magically line up in order for the representation to serve as a substitute
for its missing referent.