Webscience montpellier

PHILOSOPHY OF THE WEB AS

ARTIFACTUALIZATION AND

PHILOSOPHICAL ENGINEERING

Alexandre Monnin Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNAM/Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation

Consolidating networks of excellence - WebScience Montpellier Meetup.

Friday May 13th, 2011 at LIRMM, Montpellier, France

1 - PHILOSOPHY OF THE WEB?

First suggested by Harry Halpin

Who also co-chaired with Pat Hayes and Henry

Thompson the first philosophical event in the

SemWeb community: IRW2006 (Architecture

and Philosophy of the Web. Identity, Reference,

and the Web, IRW2006, WWW2006 Workshop

Edinburgh, Scotland May 23rd)

http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/irw2006/



http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/irw2006/

IRW2006

The focus was on the architecture of the Web

and the debates that took place over it (mainly

about URIs and resources).

The focus was on the philosophy of language.

Not a big surprise since, as H. S. Thompson

puts it : « The TAG (W3C Technical Architecture

Group) essentially does philosophy”.



PHILOWEB 2010

16 October 2010: I organized the first

interdisciplinary event about Web and

Philosophy in the world at the Sorbonne,

« PhiloWeb 2010: towards a philosophy of the

Web ».

It brought philosophers as well as engineers

and computer scientists together to imagine

what a philosophy of the Web is/should be.



YES, HONESTLY!



SOME TOPICS

Ontology: computer ontologies, metaphysics and technics, ontological dependence and social entities, ontology of relations, of resources

URIs: are they really (philosophical) proper names?

Memory/archive: reference and access on the Web

Collective intelligence: embodiement, representation, individualism and AI

Social issues: privacy, decentralized networks



2 – ARTIFACTUALIZATION?

The becoming-artifact of philosophical

concepts

Philosophical proper names URIs aka « Web

proper names »

Philosophical concepts become part the

material out of which the Web was conceived



WHAT IS A URI?

Three approaches have dominated the

architectural debates:

One inspired by Wittgenstein;



A FREGEAN(/RUSSELLIAN) VIEW



Pictures borrowed from H.S.Thompson

A KRIPKEAN VIEW




RESULT: THE WEBARCH VIEW



Good question!


… BOTH!

How and why?



FROM FUNCTIONS TO FUNCTIONALITIES

Part of the answer lies in the fact that functions

assumed by proper names (rigidity, direct

reference) became functionalities (here,

identification) once artifactualized.

The context had changed: rigidity is relevant in

the context of possible world semantics. What

the Web tries to engineer is universality (the

original « U » behind the acronym of URI).



TERTIUM DATUR

What can the philosophy of technology teach us

about artifactualization?

The technical artifact makes is possible to

« compose » rather than oppose positions that

seemed antagonistic.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk describes

this phenomenon as an exclusion of the law of

excluded middle : « Tertium datur »



PARADOX

That’s the paradox : philosophical proper

names were just a concept, relevant in

metaphysics (real proper name are certainly

not like that!).

They were made concrete as URIs.

At the same time, the context had changed,

imposing new (architectural) constraints, and

modifying what had been physically realized.



MODIFICATIONS

Russellian descriptions became access to http-

representations ;

Kripkean rigidity became identification ;

The wittgensteinian « meaning is use » motto

was bounded by some new constraints (the

authority granted to the owner of a URI).



ARTIFACTUAL UNITY

Still, all these aspects are part of how URIs are

linked to resources as evidenced by the IRW

ontology (Halpin & Presutti 2009)

- irw:acesses (*Russell*)

- irw:identifies (*Kripke*)

- irw:refersTo (*Wittgenstein*)



HALPIN & PRESUTTI 2009



LOGICAL CONTRADICTION OR FACTUAL

OPPOSITION?

I’m a lot less radical than Sloterdijk since for

me these shifts explain why we’re no longer

facing a true/false dichotomy, a logical

opposition, but a factual one (the thing is,

questions that used to be logical or philosophical

ones are now becoming technical and thus

factual ones).



PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY

The discussions, albeit philosophical, concerns an artifact: the Web. Hence, we need to ponder this shift itself. There lie some of the answers that have been sought after so far.

We can no longer separate discipline such as philosophy o f language (maybe even logic) and philosophy of technology (cf. Pat Hayes’s « Blogic »).



3 - PHILOSOPHICAL ENGINEERING?

Why is this relevant for Webscience?

Because it takes as a point of departure the

« philosophical engineering » stance defined by

Tim Berners-Lee and later refined by Nigel

Shadbolt.



SOURCE

“we are not analyzing a world, we are building it.

We are not experimental philosophers, we are

philosophical engineers. We declare "this is the

protocol". When people break the protocol, we

lament, sue, and so on. But they tend to stick to it

because we show that the system has very

interesting and useful properties.” (Wed, 16 Jul 2003 18:17:52 -0400, TAG mailing list, in reply to Patrick Hayes)



CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

The protocol was built with previous ideas an concepts about the world (names!), not ex nihilo.

We have seen that positions previously opposed to one another were displaced and then united in an artifact

Part of the work of the TAG has been to interpret what had been done previously (and the statements of existing recommendations)



MACRO V.S MICRO

The Webscience is supposedly about BIG

things (numbers, social relations, etc.)

The micro level is supposedly well-known and

all that remains to be done is create tools for

the macro level.

WAIT A MINUTE!!!!!!

If people knew exactly what they created or

constructed (a theory famously put forward by

Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico* who

equated verum and factum, what is true with

what has been done), would the very basis of

the Web be known under as many acronyms as

URIs x 2/URLs/URNs(/URCs x 2)?

* one of the sources behind Sloterdijk’s reasoning. Whence the importance of theorizing philosophical engineering: it echoes

many ongoing discussions.



…AND WHAT IS EXACTLY A RESOURCE?

I have my opinion but there’s not time to state

it! (according to the specs, it’s « anything at

all », which is why the W3C has - seemingly

wisely - avoided the temptation of standardizing

this notion).



PHILOSOPHY OF PHILOSOPHICAL ENGINEERING

The Web’s characteristics, even from an

architectural point of view, were as much

constructed and interpreted as they’re

discovered afterward. We need a theory that

would account for all these dimensions.

This would be a philosophy of philosophical

engineering (but let us also keep the engineering

aspect of it).



INDEED…

It’s important to get the picture straight for

obvious reasons…



WEB OF PAGES

URL (URI)

Homepage



WEB OF RESOURCES

URL (URI)

Homepage



WHAT’S NEXT?

Harry Halpin was awarded a Marie Curie

fellowship (Project PHILOWEB) to stay 2 years in

Paris at the Institut de Recherche et

d’Innovation (Centre Pompidou) to work on a

book about the Philosophy of the Web.

PhiloWeb 2011 and 2012 will take place in

Mountain View (Google) and London

(Goldsmiths)



CURRENT (CONCRETE) DIRECTIONS

Finish the job: what is a resource (A.Monnin)???

Shift from metaphorical bookmarks to Webmarks

for archiving purposes (Nicolas Delaforge) and

characterize information resources available on

the web more precisely (A.Monnin + N.Delaforge).

Anticipate the issues raised by the Web of objects.

Question that will be discussed in a forthcoming

« Philosophy & engineering » workshop (@IC 2011,

#Philoweb) in Chambéry, that I organize next week.



HTTP://WWW.DAILYMOTION.COM/PHILOWEB



OTHER LINKS

http://web-and-philosophy.org/

http://www.slideshare.net/PhiloWeb

http://twitter.com/#!/PhiloWeb

http://twitter.com/#!/aamonnz











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Thanks!



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