The Web may critically transform the way we understand the activity of proving. The Web as a collaborative medium allows the active participation of people with different backgrounds, interests, viewpoints, and styles. Mathematical formal proofs are inadequate for capturing Web‐based proofs. This chapter claims that Web provings can be studied as a particular type of Goguen's proof‐events. Web‐based proof‐events have a social component, communication medium, prover‐interpreter interaction, interpretation process, understanding and validation, historical component, and styles. To demonstrate its claim, the (...) chapter discusses the Kumo and Polymath projects, both of which employ Web‐based communication as part of proving. Web proving is a novel type of proving activity that may have a serious impact on the change in mathematical practices, despite the fact that it is not currently a universally acceptable methodology. The Web may critically transform the way we understand the activity of proving. The Web as a collaborative medium allows the active participation of people with different backgrounds, interests, viewpoints, and styles. Mathematical formal proofs are inadequate for capturing Web‐based proofs. This chapter claims that Web provings can be studied as a particular type of Goguen's proof‐events. Web‐based proof‐events have a social component, communication medium, prover‐interpreter interaction, interpretation process, understanding and validation, historical component, and styles. To demonstrate its claim, the chapter discusses the Kumo and Polymath projects, both of which employ Web‐based communication as part of proving. Web proving is a novel type of proving activity that may have a serious impact on the change in mathematical practices, despite the fact that it is not currently a universally acceptable methodology. (shrink)

This is the first interdisciplinary exploration of the philosophical foundations of the Web, a new area of inquiry that has important implications across a range of domains. - Contains twelve essays that bridge the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology. - Tackles questions such as the impact of Google on intelligence and epistemology, the philosophical status of digital objects, ethics on the Web, semantic and ontological changes caused by the Web, and the potential of the Web to serve as (...) a genuine cognitive extension. - Brings together insightful new scholarship from well-known analytic and continental philosophers, such as Andy Clark and Bernard Stiegler, as well as rising scholars in “digital native” philosophy and engineering. - Includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web. (shrink)

This chapter explores the notion of the Web‐extended mind, which is the idea that the technological and informational elements of the Web can sometimes serve as part of the mechanistic substrate that realizes human mental states and processes. It is argued that while current forms of the Web may not be particularly suited to the realization of Web‐extended minds, new forms of user interaction technology as well as new approaches to information representation do provide promising new opportunities for Web‐based forms (...) of cognitive extension. In addition, it is suggested that extended cognitive systems often rely on the emergence of social practices and conventions that shape how a technology is used. Web‐extended minds may thus depend on forms of socio‐technical co‐evolution in which social forces and factors play just as important a role as do the processes of technology design and development. (shrink)

As our civilization careens toward climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. The dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has been invalidated by modern science. Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity's age-old questions -- Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? -- from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, (...) evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom. The result is a breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world. It offers a compelling foundation for a new philosophical framework that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on a flourishing Earth. The Web of Meaning is for everyone looking for deep and coherent answers to the crisis of civilization. -- Amazon. (shrink)

The Web may critically transform the way we understand the activity of proving. The Web as a collaborative medium allows the active participation of people with different backgrounds, interests, viewpoints, and styles. Mathematical formal proofs are inadequate for capturing Web‐based proofs. This article claims that Web provings can be studied as a particular type of Goguen's proof‐events. Web‐based proof‐events have a social component, communication medium, prover‐interpreter interaction, interpretation process, understanding and validation, historical component, and styles. To demonstrate its claim, the (...) article discusses the Kumo and Polymath projects, both of which employ Web‐based communication as part of proving. Web proving is a novel type of proving activity that may have a serious impact on the change in mathematical practices, despite the fact that it is not currently a universally acceptable methodology. (shrink)

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. Even swifter (...) is the Web-driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web. (shrink)

This chapter argues that existing systems on the Web cannot approach human‐level intelligence, as envisioned by Descartes, without being able to achieve genuine problem solving on unseen problems. The chapter argues that this entails committing to a strong intensional logic. In addition to revising extant arguments in favor of intensional systems, it presents a novel mathematical argument to show why extensional systems can never hope to capture the inherent complexity of natural language. The argument makes its case by focusing on (...) representing, with increasing degrees of complexity, knowledge in a first‐order language. Nevertheless, the attempts at representation fail to achieve consistency, making the case for an intensional representation system for natural language clear. (shrink)

This article explores the notion of the Web-extended mind, which is the idea that the technological and informational elements of the Web can sometimes serve as part of the mechanistic substrate that realizes human mental states and processes. It is argued that while current forms of the Web may not be particularly suited to the realization of Web-extended minds, new forms of user interaction technology as well as new approaches to information representation do provide promising new opportunities for Web-based forms (...) of cognitive extension. In addition, it is suggested that extended cognitive systems often rely on the emergence of social practices and conventions that shape how a technology is used. Web-extended minds may thus depend on forms of socio-technical co-evolution in which social forces and factors play just as important a role as do the processes of technology design and development. (shrink)

A compact, coherent introduction to the study of rational belief, this text provides points of entry to such areas of philosophy as theory of knowledge, methodology of science, and philosophy of language. The book is accessible to all undergraduates and presupposes no philosophical training.

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. Even swifter (...) is the Web‐driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Tale of Two Philosophies: URIs between Proper Names and REST; From References to Referentialization; and Toward Ontological Politics.

This chapter contains sections titled: Is Philosophy Part of Web Science?; Representations and the Web; Enactive Search; Cognitive Extension and Cognitive Intelligence; From the Extended Mind to the Web; and the Web as Collective Intelligence.

The Web may critically transform the way we understand the activity of proving. The Web as a collaborative medium allows the active participation of people with different backgrounds, interests, viewpoints, and styles. Mathematical formal proofs are inadequate for capturing Web-based proofs. This article claims that Web provings can be studied as a particular type of Goguen's proof-events. Web-based proof-events have a social component, communication medium, prover-interpreter interaction, interpretation process, understanding and validation, historical component, and styles. To demonstrate its claim, the (...) article discusses the Kumo and Polymath projects, both of which employ Web-based communication as part of proving. Web proving is a novel type of proving activity that may have a serious impact on the change in mathematical practices, despite the fact that it is not currently a universally acceptable methodology. (shrink)

Knowledge can be expressed in language using a plethora of grammatical means. Four major groups of meanings related to knowledge are Evidentiality: grammatical expression of information source; Egophoricity: grammatical expression of access to knowledge; Mirativity: grammatical expression of expectation of knowledge; and Epistemic modality: grammatical expression of attitude to knowledge. The four groups of categories interact. Some develop overtones of the others. Evidentials stand apart from other means in many ways, including their correlations with speech genres and social environment. This (...) essay presents a framework which connects the expression of knowledge across the world's languages in a coherent way, showing their dependencies and complexities, and pathways of historical development in various scenarios, including language obsolescence. (shrink)

This article approaches the Internet in terms of the metaphor of space and examines the web as a terrain for social agency in the local context. The main concern is how the global Internet is currently being used for locally oriented purposes, particularly with the kinds of actor roles that locally oriented web spaces construct for users and the modes of interaction these spaces enable and encourage. Finally, consideration is given to how the web could be developed as an arena (...) for dialogical collective processes where it is possible for citizens to take up a role which includes public deliberation and participation. The article is based on the assumption that the spatial metaphor would be empirically more fruitful if understood and employed in a down-to-earth manner that relates locally oriented web spaces to issues of physical localities and also takes notice of the locally established practices of public communication. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the web-rhetoric of companies offering home-based personal health monitoring to patients and elderly people. Two main rhetorical methods are found, namely a reference to practical benefits and a use of prestige words like “quality of life” and “independence”. I interpret the practical benefits in terms of instrumental values and the prestige words in terms of final values. I also reconstruct the arguments on the websites in terms of six different types of argument. Finally, I articulate (...) a general critique of the arguments, namely that the websites neglect the context of use of personal health monitoring technologies. Whether or not a technology is good depends on the use of the technology by a particular individual in a particular context. The technology is not good–or bad–in itself. I support this critique with a number of more specific arguments such as the risk for reduced personal contact. For some elderly people social contact with care providers is more valuable than the independent living made possible by remote monitoring, for others independence is more important. (shrink)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, a considerable amount of people seem to have been lured into believing in conspiracy theories. These people deliberately disregard expert advice by virologists and physicians concerning social behaviour that is aimed at reducing the number of new infections. Disregarding traditional experts and their advice is just one example of what, in the philosophy of science, is referred to as a crisis of expertise – the phenomenon whereby people seem to have lost their trust in traditional expert (...) advice and are looking for alternatives. In the following paper, the trend to use Internet technology as an epistemic alternative will be analysed in detail by investigating the question of whether the Internet really allows people to become epistemically more autonomous. The focus will be on the epistemic and moral vulnerability of people resorting to new media tools instead of relying on traditional expert opinion. It will be shown that some important presuppositions about the Internet and, in particular, social media tools as alternative ways to collect information and find emotional support in a group of like-minded people cannot be maintained. (shrink)

Web scraping involves using computer programs for automated extraction and organization of data from the Web for the purpose of further data analysis and use. It is frequently used by commercial companies, but also has become a valuable tool in epidemiological research and public health planning. In this paper, we explore ethical issues in a project that “scrapes” public websites of U.S. county jails as part of an effort to develop a comprehensive database to enhance HIV surveillance and improve continuity (...) of care for incarcerated populations. We argue that the well-known framework of Emanuel et al. provides only partial ethical guidance for the activities we describe, which lie at a complex intersection of public health research and public health practice. We suggest some ethical considerations from the ethics of public health practice to help fill gaps in this relatively unexplored area. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a much-discussed subject in the business world. The Internet has become one of the main tools for CSR information disclosure, allowing companies to publicise more information less expensively and faster than ever before. As a result, corporations are increasingly concerned with communicating ethically and responsibly to the diversity of stakeholders through the web. This paper addresses the main question as whether CSR information disclosure on corporate websites is influenced by country of origin and/or industry (...) sector. Analysing the websites of 127 corporations from emerging countries, such as Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand and South Africa, it becomes evident that both country of origin and industry sector have a significant influence over CSR information disclosure on the web (CSRIDOW). Based on the data studied, country of origin has a stronger influence over CSRIDOW than industry sector. (shrink)

This chapter can be considered as made up of two parts, a general discussion of the notion of mathematical practice and the limits of its use, comprised by the first three sections, and a particular case study that is presented in order to exemplify the idea of the web of practices, which occupies the remaining three. The presentation of my approach to the notion of mathematical practice is brief and synthetic but more articulated theoretically than in a previous book (Ferreirós (...) 2016). Considerations in Sect. 3 about mathematical cognition and ethnomathematics have to do with the “limits” of mathematical practice, i.e., with practices that do not fall under that rubric.The case study concerns the evolution of the function concept, which offers a complex example of the web-of-practices approach. We start with early Modern developments that led to the eighteenth-century idea of function (as “analytical expression”) and the nineteenth-century “logical” idea of function, showing how complex is the spiderweb of interrelated mathematical and scientific practices knotted around the function concept. In the last section, I consider the difficult question of the most basic practices and cognitive experiences that form the basis of the idea of function. I propose that two conceptions – a dynamic and an algebraic or operational one – coalesced to give rise to the early Modern idea of function. (shrink)

This article argues that existing systems on the Web cannot approach human-level intelligence, as envisioned by Descartes, without being able to achieve genuine problem solving on unseen problems. The article argues that this entails committing to a strong intensional logic. In addition to revising extant arguments in favor of intensional systems, it presents a novel mathematical argument to show why extensional systems can never hope to capture the inherent complexity of natural language. The argument makes its case by focusing on (...) representing, with increasing degrees of complexity, knowledge in a first-order language. Nevertheless, the attempts at representation fail to achieve consistency, making the case for an intensional representation system for natural language clear. (shrink)

This article examines the relationships between gender and technology in Spanish feminist praxis online and argues that different perspectives on online feminist community-building offer distinct responses to cyberactivism, which is considered central to sustaining efforts for social change. To ascertain whether Spanish virtual communities and cyberactivism have the potential to address the challenges posed by the relations between gender and technology, we analyse feminist scholar Remedios Zafra's theoretical proposals, and the different ways in which this theory intersects with the cyberactivism (...) put forth by two feminist web portals, Ciudad de Mujeres and Mujeres en Red. We will discuss to what degree particular Spanish feminist theory and practice online adapts to or challenges utopianism regarding the liberating potential of technology. We will also examine how, in the face of critical arguments about such liberatory possibilities, two options present themselves for women's effective use of technology: inhabiting or occupying the web through the construction of feminist communities online. (shrink)

Although commonly confused, the values inherent in copyright policy are different from those inherent in scholarly standards for proper accreditation of ideas. Piracy is the infringement of a copyright, and plagiarism is the failure to give credit. The increasing use of Web-based electron publication has created new contexts for both piracy and plagiarism. In so far as piracy and plagiarism are confused, we cannot appreciate how the Web has changed the importance of these very different types of wrongs. The present (...) paper argues that Web-based publication lessens the importance of piracy, while it heightens the need for protections against plagiarism. Copyright policy protects the opportunity for publishers to make a profit from their investments. As the cost of publication decreases in the electronic media, we need fewer copyright protections. Plagiarism is the failure to abide by scholarly standards for citation of sources. These standards assure us that information can be verified and traced to its source. Since Web sources are often volatile and changing, it becomes increasingly difficult and important to have clear standards for verifying the source of all information. (shrink)

The Web initially emerged as an “antidote” to accumulated scientific knowledge, since it enables global representation and communication at a minimum cost. Its gigantic scale and interdependence allow us our ability to find relevant information and develop trustworthy contexts. It is time for science to compensate by providing an epistemological “antidote” to Web issues. Philosophy should be in the front line by forming the salient questions and analysis. We need a theory about Web being that will bridge philosophical thinking and (...) engineering. This chapter analyzes existence and spatiotemporality in the Web and how it transforms the traditional actualities. The resulting issues concern the self‐determination of a being and the way in which the Web could be a free and open platform for innovation and participation. (shrink)

In the history of external information systems, the World Wide Web presents a significant change in terms of the accessibility and amount of available information. Constant access to various kinds of online information has consequences for the way we think, act and remember. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have recently started to examine the interactions between the human mind and the Web, mainly focussing on the way online information influences our biological memory systems. In this article, we use concepts from the (...) extended cognition and distributed cognition frameworks and from transactive memory theory to analyse the cognitive relations between humans and the Web. We first argue that while neither of these approaches neatly capture the nature of human-Web interactions, both offer useful concepts to describe aspects of such interactions. We then conceptualize relations between the Web and its users in terms of cognitive integration, arguing that most current Web applications are not deeply integrated and are better seen as a scaffold for memory and cognition. Some highly personalised applications accessed on wearable computing devices, however, may already have the capacity for deep integration. Finally, we draw out some of the epistemic implications of our cognitive analysis. (shrink)

In the history of external information systems, the World Wide Web presents a significant change in terms of the accessibility and amount of available information. Constant access to various kinds of online information has consequences for the way we think, act and remember. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have recently started to examine the interactions between the human mind and the Web, mainly focussing on the way online information influences our biological memory systems. In this article, we use concepts from the (...) extended cognition and distributed cognition frameworks and from transactive memory theory to analyse the cognitive relations between humans and the Web. We first argue that while neither of these approaches neatly capture the nature of human-Web interactions, both offer useful concepts to describe aspects of such interactions. We then conceptualize relations between the Web and its users in terms of cognitive integration, arguing that most current Web applications are not deeply integrated and are better seen as a scaffold for memory and cognition. Some highly personalised applications accessed on wearable computing devices, however, may already have the capacity for deep integration. Finally, we draw out some of the epistemic implications of our cognitive analysis. (shrink)

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. Even swifter (...) is the Web-driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web. (shrink)

_Psychology on the Web: A Student Guide_ is directed at those who want to be able to access psychology Internet resources quickly and efficiently without needing to become IT experts. The emphasis throughout is on the location of high quality psychology related Internet resources likely to be useful for learning, teaching and research, from among the billions of publicly accessible Web pages. Whilst the author has drawn on a large volume of technical literature, it is written on the basis of (...) practical experience acquired over many years of using Internet resources in the context of teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the social sciences covering a wide range of topic specialisms, and in informing academic staff. In addition to extensive coverage of topics relating to the efficient location of files and Web sites, Part III provides a substantial and annotated list of high quality resources likely to be of use to students of psychology. The work is structured so that it will be found useful by both beginners and intermediate level users, and be of continuing use over the course of higher education studies. (shrink)

We examine a crucial question for the World Wide Web: What does a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) mean? Crucial for the next-generation Semantic Web, can it refer to things outside web-pages? The Web is a universal information space for naming and accessing information via URIs. However, the classical philosophical problems of meaning and reference that have been the source of debate within the philosophy of language return when the Web is given as the foundation for a knowledge representation with the (...) Semantic Web. Debates on the Semantic Web about the meaning and referential status of a URI are explored as analogues to debates about the meaning and reference of names in the philosophy of language. Three main positions are inspected: the logical position, as exemplified by the descriptivist theory of reference, the direct reference position, as exemplified by Putnam and Kripke’s causal theory of reference, and a Wittgensteinian position that views URIs as a public language, as exemplified by Web search engines. These positions show that debates within the philosophy of language are alive and well on the Web, and so in the philosophy of computer science. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has become a much-discussed subject in the business world. The Internet has become one of the main tools for CSR information disclosure, allowing companies to publicise more information less expensively and faster than ever before. As a result, corporations are increasingly concerned with communicating ethically and responsibly to the diversity of stakeholders through the web. This paper addresses the main question as whether CSR information disclosure on corporate websites is influenced by country of origin and/or industry sector. (...) Analysing the websites of 127 corporations from emerging countries, such as Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand and South Africa, it becomes evident that both country of origin and industry sector have a significant influence over CSR information disclosure on the web . Based on the data studied, country of origin has a stronger influence over CSRIDOW than industry sector. (shrink)

Licklider--1960--Man-Computer Symbiosis Roberts--1970--ARPAnet Internet Engelbart--1962-1968--Mouse, linked documents Kay--1970--Dynabook Berners-Lee--late 1980s and early 90s--World Wide Web Brin and Page--1996--Google--first adequate search engine other prophets--Nelson, etc. whom I neglect undeservedly from ignorance.

This paper proposes a new account of bounded or minimal doxastic rationality (in the sense of Cherniak 1986), based on the notion that beliefs are answers to questions (à la Yalcin 2018). The core idea is that minimally rational beliefs are linked through thematic connections, rather than entailment relations. Consequently, such beliefs are not deductively closed, but they are closed under parthood (where a part is an entailment that answers a smaller question). And instead of avoiding all inconsistency, minimally rational (...) believers only avoid blatant inconsistencies (where some beliefs are blatantly inconsistent when they contradict one another on a particular question). Rather than cohering into a single overall world view, beliefs are more loosely connected in what is best described as a web of questions. This view of minimally rational belief naturally gives rise to an account of deductive inquiry on which deductive reasoning is a matter of posing new questions. (shrink)

"Order versus liberty, the individual's need for personal freedom contrasted with the limitations imposed on him by the State, is the ancient dilemma confronted in this classic analysis of the nature, evolution, and functions of the State. Professor MacIver's study is in fact a rigorous reconsideration of all the assumptions political analysts of the past have accepted as self-evident." - Back cover.