WWW4: Philosophy BOF

Place: BC Room
Date: Tuesday, 12 December 1995
Time: 6:00pm - 7:20pm

Organisers:

Phillip M. Hallam-Baker

Mike Sandbothe

Objectives

• Bring together people interested in the philosophical issued raised by the Web.
• Discuss the issues people consider most relevant.
• Identify areas for further consideration.
• Find ways of taking this work forward, we might start a mailing list, hold a session at the Paris conference, have a workshop.

Issues

Hermeneutics

How do we arrive at an understanding of documents written by belief systems which differ from out own?

Dialectic

What is the interaction between readers and authors? The Web permits every reader to become a published author, unlike in print media in which the power of authors to influence readers is disproportionate to that of readers upon authors. Is there a dialectic in the sense of joint constitution? Is there a structure to the discourse of Web publication which may be identified and reasoned about?

Logic of Link

What do we understand by hypertext linkage? What do we mean by a hypertext? How does our understanding of a document change when we arrive at it from different contexts? Does a kind of transversal logic of linkage exist and how can we describe it?

Ethics

We may approach ethics in two ways, first we may ask what ethics people should live by, secondly we might ask what ethics they apply. The Internet community clearly has a well defined ethical sense as is evidenced by the Canter and Segal, Rimm and similar incidents. What is less clear is the nature of the ethical standards applied. In two recent cases a serious fault in a computer product was publicized through the Internet. In one case the stock price fell dramatically, in the other case it rose equally dramatically. Are ethical standards raised when a community is in close communication? How do diverse communities establish a common set of ethical standards when brought together? >

Semiotics

What type of sign is a URI? What properties does it posses? What levels of interpretation of a URI should we consider?

Participants

If you would like to be added to the list of participants and make a brief statement concerning your interest in the workshop please send a brief note in mail.

Roger Hurwitz

Pascal said God's Circumference is everywhere but his center is nowhere, that is the model of the Web.

John Mallery