Meaning

Semantics is the study of meaning; the meaning behind the words we use. Semantics enable explainability and automation at scale. Semantics is a core enabler of communication.

In his book, Inhabiting Babel, the author Nicholas Figay makes the following statement in an author's note on page 5: (emphasis is mine)

"Drawing from work in systems engineering, modeling, interoperability, and ontologies, this book seeks to show that meaning is always mediated, situated, and carried by human collectives. Models, graphs, and algorithms do not eliminate this mediation; they displace it and sometimes render it invisible."

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So what precisely does that phrase mean? "Meaning is always mediated, situated, and carried by human collectives."  That sentence is making three tightly linked claims about how meaning actually works in the real world. Breaking that one phrase down into those three claims, for clarity, you get:

“Meaning is mediated”

Meaning never arrives raw. Meaning is always filtered through language, symbols, tools, processes, institutions, and practices.

• You don’t access “reality” directly.
• You access reality through concepts, categories, metaphors, measurement systems, narratives, and shared vocabularies.

So: Meaning is always shaped by the mediums and structures we use to express that meaning.

“Meaning is situated”

Meaning depends on context: social, historical, cultural, professional, technological.

• A word, gesture, or concept means different things in different communities.
• “Arm,” “bank,” “bat,” “park,” “right” each shifts meaning depending on the domain.

So: Meaning is never universal; it’s always anchored in a particular situation, some specific context.

“Meaning is carried by human collectives”

No individual creates meaning alone. Meaning emerges from shared practices, norms, agreements, and interpretations.

• Accounting standards are a collective.
• Scientific concepts are a collective.
• Everyday language is a collective.

People tend to often underestimate this: Meaning lives in communities of stakeholders; not in isolated minds of individuals. And so meaning is more about, it seems, the "shared cognitive understanding and mutual knowledge that people have when they communicate information and interact with each other within a collective,  a.k.a. area of knowledge (i.e. intersubjectivity).

Putting it all together, the initial sentence is saying:

Meaning is not something inherent in just words or objects. Meaning is produced through shared human systems, shaped by context, and sustained by communities of stakeholders.

This appears to be similar to the message of David Weinberger in his book Everything Is Miscellaneous.

Meaning seems to be the bridge between information and knowledge. Data does not seem to have meaning, it has the potential to have meaning. A signal is the physical carrier of communication

• Noise is the random, irrelevant, or misleading variation that obscures the signal.
• Signal is the medium which has a measurable pattern which becomes data when the data is captured, encoded, and given symbolic form.
• Data is raw and unprocessed and tends to be understandable only in one, usually local, context. Data is encoded and captured but an unorganized and uncontextualized signal.
• Information is data that has been processed, classified, organized, and put into context, therefore understandable globally by anyone. Information is an organized, structured, and contextualized signal.
• Knowledge is refined and that has been further processed, further organized, interpreted, and/or structured in some way making the information super-useful and therefore valuable. Knowledge is information that has been made actionable.
• Insight and wisdom is even more valuable and come from applying knowledge to some specific situation such as making a decision.

Information becomes "meaningful" (e.g. information becomes filled with meaning) through interpretation, and that meaningful information becomes knowledge when it is justified, shared, and made actionable.

Communication is the successful alignment of meaning across minds. Communication = Signal + Meaning + Shared Context. Communication can be human to human, human to machine, machine to machine, machine to human.

Meaning is the "interpretable function" that makes information actionable; knowledge is the justifiable, actionable result of the meaning creation process. Meaning arises when information is interpreted within a shared conceptual frame, the "context" or the process of being "situated". Communication is the effective exchange of meaning.

Machine-readable knowledge representations matter because they stabilize meaning so that humans and machines can both reach the same conclusions from the same information. This allows human-machine teams to be created.

An ontology is a formal model of meaning that is interpretable to both humans and machines.  An ontology describes and explains the things that exist, how those things relate to one another, the properties of those things and relations, and the rules that govern the things and relations. That formal model needs to be complete to properly manage epistemic risk. (Note that I use the term theory rather than ontology to describe the formal model.)

Additional Information:

• Intersubjectivity
• Essence of Accounting
• Conceptualization
• Work
• Carving Up Reality
• Digital Proficiency