A Brief History of Semantics

I'll make this brief, but I do believe there are some developments in the long history of semantics that will still be relevant in the twenty-first century. There are some philosophical arguments that we must be aware of, or we can waste considerable time.

Figure 1.1 outlines some of the key developments in the history of semantics. For our purposes, some of the key developments included the following:

Figure 1.1: Key developments in the history of semantics.

• Spoken language—Most people rank the use of a spoken language with the development of tools as the defining event that separated our ancestors from the rest of the primate family. Semantically, early man had to make a giant leap from screaming and pointing to the use of abstract sounds to represent things that were not in the immediate environment.

• Written language—The advent of writing raised the bar considerably. Tone and gestures were no longer available as adjuncts to aid with the communication of meaning. Perhaps the most important development was the ability to communicate with people who were not present. Syntax and grammar gradually developed as writing became more formalized.

• Ancient Greece—The self-reflective knowledge of meaning with which our language was dealing had to wait until the Golden Age of Greece to be articulated. We don't know much about Socrates' formal position on semantics, other than that his famous Socratic method was mostly aimed at finding deeper meaning in thoughts, words, and deeds. Plato's forms are a good representation of his take on semantics. He believed that we infer knowledge of the perfect forms (for example, a circle) from the less than perfect examples we come in contact with (round things). His metaphor of the cave concerns how we can make inferences only indirectly about the essence of things. Aristotle's wideranging contributions included a great deal on classification and the establishment of identity, both central concerns for semantics. His syllogisms form the basis of how we can infer knowledge of a particular item, once we ascribe it to a type.

• The Enlightenment—The semantic embers burned dimly through the Middle Ages, and even the Renaissance, with its advances in many areas, saw little new work on semantics. Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and Ren Descartes shifted the semantic debate to focus on what could be observed and verified experimentally. A series of later Enlightenment thinkers—Empiricists such as David Hume, Thomas Reed, John Locke, and George "If a tree falls in a forest" Berkeley— debated the role of the human observer as establishing context in a world otherwise devoid of meaning.

• Pragmatism—Charles Pierce was responsible for several early and thought-provoking, high-level conceptual ontologies and for a formal approach to logic applied to semantics. William James, another pragmatist, brought us some of the concepts of verification and the belief that nature is to be understood deductively.

• Linguistics—By comparatively investigating human languages, and especially anthropologically studying the languages of cultures that have not been exposed to mainstream languages, we have learned a great deal about what aspects of language are likely innate and what aspects are a product of culture. Some of the notable contributors included Alfred Korzybski, Noam Chomsky, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Eleanor Rosch, and George Lakoff, who, although they were not all purely in the linguistic field, all contributed greatly to the twentieth century's advances in this field. In particular, Rosch and Lakoff have contributed some of the seminal work on what constitutes a category or a type, a topic that those of us in the business of information systems use constantly with little understanding of what we are describing.

• Artificial intelligence (AI)—The AI community has contributed many subfields to this pursuit, including the formalization of ontologies (organization of meaning of terms), inferences (how we deduce new information from presented information), and interpretations (for example, how a computer system can be built to interpret spoken English).

This brings us more or less up to the present. Yes, I've slighted some groups or individuals, but I wanted to get as much of the flavor for the long history of the subject as possible without becoming tedious. Throughout this rich history, people have been refining fields of knowledge, primarily within the domain of philosophy, specialized to study various aspects of the way we understand our place in the cosmos. In the next section we introduce some of these fields of study as they relate to semantics.