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| Version française |
"In particular we will exclude the notion of 'observable' in favour of that of 'beable'. The beables of the theory are those elements which
might correspond to elements of reality, to things which exist. Their
existence does not depend on 'observation'. Indeed observation and
observers must be made out of beables. I use the term 'beable' rather
than some more committed term like 'being' or 'beer'...."
J.S. Bell
In spite of the immense fuss and hype about information highways and super-InfoAutobahn my first point is the humble remark that we are far from living in anything like a networked environment. At the time of this writing the actual number of people who have access to network services is infinitesimal. The only partial exception is the U.S. In almost every other place I've been an infinity of problems besets those who want to skip the tedious routine of writing digitally something on a wordprocessing system to print it on a sheet of paper which is digitized by a fax machine which sends it to another fax machine which prints it again (to those familiar with ftp the absurdity of the fax machine should be more than just obvious.) The problems may be put down to technological backwardness. Certainly in terms of infrastructures and compatibility we are far from living in the famed global village. Countries (relatively developed countries) lack the hardwiring necessary for computer networks. At the same time cultural problems are out there as well. The sheer existence of forms of connectivity which escape traditional forms of control brings about troubles for minds bent on red-taping anything (I won't even mention the cryptoissues.) To cite just one example there are sites in which access to ftp, telnet, and their ilk is limited in order to protect standards of copyrights and military secrecy. The hardest problems are, I think, the problems coming about in places in which a computing culture remained stuck at what I term "the enhanced typewriter stage". Does a message on a net count as a communication with a signature? Much of this will seem preposterous to an audience which "knows" who wrote these lines without having any physical evidence of the existence of a writer to begin with. It is not an idle question for hundreds of small time bureaucracy-mongers all over the place. Together with the financial dire straits of many places, poor phone lines and the near-absolute monopoly of telecommunications by the state, the culture of paper writing is a big obstacle to the making of virtual reality real.
The main countertendency to the difficulties presented above is the very nature of the process which we call virtual reality. This is the crucial reason nets have not been killed. They afford amazing level of savings in the collection, retrieval, and access to information for countries where the sheer cost of printed publications stops them from being available. This is the case for the vast majority of third and two-and-a half world countries. I need not mention the costs of subscription for libraries of journals. Nets and their spawned siblings (the Web, Gophers, ftp sites) make accessible what would be prohibitively expensive otherwise. The battle for virtual reality can be won steering a difficult course between sheer conservativism and hard-nosed arguments about the cost-effectiveness of making investments in computers and whatever is needed to get them hooked up vs. the reliance upon older and in fact obsolete methods of information sharing.
What is the impact on the humanities of networking on a massive scale? Here I can offer only a series of educated guesses and some experiences. It seems to me that what is happening to the humanities is getting closer and closer to an assimilation of them to what were the styles of work of the "hard" sciences of yesteryear. The trend is towards modes of scholarly work that rely less and less on the system-building which still is typical of books. The mode which is becoming more and more popular in the humanities is the "snappy" remark, the humanities-based equivalent of the quick communication of a result in disciplines where the burden of formalization has already been carried by prior generation. This in part is what explains the almost unbearable level of jargon which discussion lists exhibit in the humanities. The jargon is the equivalent of the shorthand used when you need to explain that Fermat's last theorem was proved by appealing to a conjecture on curves. In the tradition of the humanities the FORM was the form of the book. The book is not just what counted for tenure decisions but it was also what showed to the external world that the author was a scholar. "Scholar" here has to mean more than man of the school, the term has to denote the demonstration of the ability to master a body of literature, adding its little critical coda. If you look at what marks the beginning of the humanities (Thales? Homer?) one of the distinguishing features is the sense of starting from scratch over and over again. Each time the universe has to be put on its right footing again. The emergence of networking within the community of the professional of the humanities has brought about what I see as a great fragmentation. Subdisciplines flourish without much hope (or attempt for that matter) of having anything in common. In one way this is of course annoying: many of us, at time myself too, harbor the idea that the intelligent "conversation" of humanity should be in principle open to everyone with an open mind. This is certainly not the case.
Even without recurring to example from the INTERCANA (internet+arcana) one could cite examples from the numerous "postmodernist" discussion groups in which a thorough familiarity not only with the relatively opaque texts of several french theorists, but a complete ease with the manipulation of a language where more often than not conceptual grammar is out to lunch (viz. the frequent plainly contradictory statements, to be re-interpreted in terms of jokes about jokes made by so-and-so in such-and-such context, and so forth). By itself this is not the proof of anything in particular: I shall just venture a guess about the impact of this kind of fragmentation brought about by the nets. The humanities come closer to reaching the status of (Kuhnian) mature sciences: "work" is the solution of puzzling features which are internal to paradigms themselves. Seldom, if ever, there is a revolution. I am not even sure there can be a revolution in the humanities traditionally conceived: what seems to me to be the case is that the revolutions, when they do happen, happen in the form of the detaching of a discipline from its humanistic "roots" e.g. take the case of linguistics, when specific progress came in the form of the Chomskyan revolution, based on the simple principle that a linguistic theory produces testable results in terms of predictions over sets of responses [behavioral responses of speakers and competence test over what would be perceived as morphologically deviant]. The final judgment over this situation, which is still very much a projection of trends which are present but are by no means prevalent now, has to be left open. It may be the sign of a relative stabilization of the humanities as disciplines enclosed in themselves and as such radically useless or it can be seen as the terminus ad quem of a process of specialization which in and by itself is a sign of their maturity as disciplines.
We are told Plato would cast away from the academy those who did not know geometry and that at the same time the only author he would refer to was Socrates. Narrowing my focus I want to look at philosophy in particular within the context of the humanities. The fragmentation I mentioned above happens in philosophy virtual spaces as well. The agora is wider and more distributed across national boundaries (it would be very interesting to study the impact of networking in countries where English is either not the prevalent language of academic exchange or is otherwise very little practiced [China is on internet: shall we witness a blossoming of new graphic interfaces that will make Chinese computing smoother?]). The participants feel much less the pressure of the traditional university environment: the students finally feel entitled to ask those 12 dumb questions everyone wanted to ask and always felt too afraid to. The drawback is of course that the ratio of information to absolute Quatsch is very high.
The other side of the coin is the rebirth of serious philosophy in the old mode. The Socratic method is after all a way of permitting the asking of questions which seems too obvious to deserve scrutiny. This is what is happening more and more: small questions are asked, at times half in jest, and they give rise to sequences of examples, attempts, counterexamples which are falling short of giving answers convincing for all parties involved in the search, but certainly convincing enough up to the level of tiredness we all encounter (cfr. Socrates' suggesting to his interlocutors that the sun is going down and it's time to worry about domestic matters as opposed to the public discussions of the Athenian agora.)
Again, bear in mind, that what I am describing is a largely idealized picture of what is happening in a large sector of the academic community of philosophers, but what is fascinating of the effect of the nets is exactly the observation of how simple technological changes bring about changes of mentality. Again the shift from the system-building to the "snappy" that I noticed in the humanities at large has a particular effect on philosophy. It drags it back to its primeval state of chaos.
Is there any internal effect on philosophy of virtual reality? By "internal" here I mean not just an effect on its modes of production but rather an effect on the kind of doctrines themselves that are presented and discussed. Here I have to limit myself to the few areas I am vaguely competent about. I think the networking shows as the middle age scientists would put it in corpore vili that order can arise out of chaotic interactions (here "chaos" has to be taken both in the technical and in the common usage sense). Discussions starts from the most unlikely problems (how to teach students in introductory courses in logic truth-functional semantics for conditional sentences) and quickly reach a fixed point in which very serious questions are considered (the most recent example I can report is one discussion in one of the logic lists which starting from truth-functional rules quickly moved to the comparison between the performances of people untrained in logic vs the trained ones in the Wason choice problems [the question may seem esoteric but it hits right at the heart of the link between logic as a formal discipline and the reasoning skills of humans]. What do examples like this show? They show something which has been in the air for a long time but it has never quite cut much too much ice in many quarters. We have a "traditional" view of minds as wholes enclosed within one individual (or being an individual) following rules for the direction of intellect (for those of you who are familiar with Descartes the terms have to sound very much almost worn out.) What "philosophical" networking shows is that we do not need rules: interactions can be as chaotic as one wishes and by and large they reach fixed points of some level of interest or the die out in a sort of evolutionary process. This does not prove in any technical sense of the term the superiority of connectionist models over rule-based cognitive models for the functioning of the mind. It does lend an extra measure of credibility to the claim that in philosophy of mind we should consider more closely the possibility that minds are not individual in any sense connected to what ordinarily we conceive of individual bodies. At the same time the order or the semblance of it may be a further hint in the direction of the emergence of a natural semantics over a system whose only "rule" are very few constraints which are purely syntactic in nature. Would this show something for ethics as well?
Adriano P Palma
Institute of philosophy & the cogsci center
National Chung-cheng university
Ming-shung, Chia-yi County
The republic of China on Taiwan, 621
Off.ph#+886 5 242-8181
FAX# +886 5 272-1203
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