Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 40

Presentation

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Fig. 2.7 The referential chain

entities that may exist in the past or the future. The existence of a representation does
not imply the existence of the referent or the direct acquaintance of the referent by
the agent using a representation - a representation only implies that some aspect of
the content is non-local. However, this seems to contradict our 'input' stage in the
representational cycle, which implies that part of our definition of representation is
historical: for every re -presentation there must be a presentation, an encounter with
the thing presented. By these conditions, the famous story of Putnam's example
of an ant tracing a picture of Winston Churchill by sheer accident in the sand
would not count as a representation (1975). If a tourist didn't know where the
Eiffel Tower was, but navigated the streets of Paris and found the Eiffel Tower
by reference to a tracing of a Kandinsky painting in his notebook, then the tourist
would not then be engaged in any representation-dependent meaningful behaviour,
since the Kandinsky painting lacks the initial presentation with the Eiffel Tower.
The presentation does not have to be done by the subject that encountered the thing
directly. However, the definition of a representation does not mean that the same
agent using the representation had to be the agent with the original presentation. A
representation that is created by one agent in the presence of a referent can be used
by another agent as a 'stand-in' for that referent if the second agent shares the same
interpretation from encoding to distal content. So, instead of relying on his own
vision, a tourist buys a map and so relies on the 'second-order' representation of the