WWW4: Philosophy BOF
Place: BC Room
Date: Tuesday, 12 December 1995
Time: 6:00pm - 7:20pm
Organisers:
- Phillip M. Hallam-Baker
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- Mike Sandbothe
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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
-
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker