The document proposes an "Object-Oriented Writing" (OOW) approach to augment writing, especially for philosophy. It draws analogies between object-oriented programming principles and organizing writing. The OOW approach structures arguments, assets, and products in a formalized ontology to improve coherence, reduce redundancy, and enable collaboration. A proposed OOW tool would standardize information from diverse sources into machine-readable formats linked by metadata. It aims to help generate, organize, and share philosophical work. Empirical research prototyping the tool on existing texts could help refine and evaluate the OOW approach.

1. Object-Oriented Writing:
augmented writing for creating
coherent and argumentative texts
Seong-Young Her

2. Problem
● Writing well is difficult, especially for philosophy
● The longer a piece of writing gets, the more difficult it is to keep it coherent
● C.S. Peirce
○ Philosophy as protoscientific competition between siloed thinkers
○ Philosophy as abductive, hypothesis generation
● David Hull
○ Science as A Process: competition between schools of thought
● Interoperability without homogeniety

3. Object-Oriented Programming
● Created as an alternative to procedural programming
● The four principles of OOP
○ Encapsulation: package things discretely by what they are and what they do
○ Data Abstraction: hide irrelevant details from users
○ Polymorphism: one function can handle many parameters
○ Inheritance: reuse definitions to eliminate redundancy

4. Object-Oriented Writing
● OOP as applied to plain writing
● Analogies
○ Encapsulation: keep each argument and definition stable and internally consistent
○ Data Abstraction: generalise and simplify
○ Polymorphism: an argument or a term can do different work depending on the context
○ Inheritance: don’t reinvent the wheel

5. The OOW Ontology
1. Argument: anything that is in the form of premises followed by a conjecture. May be combined
with other arguments in order to form a larger argument, provided that they map to the same conclusion.
Arguments are human-readable text. All arguments have a metadata field made up of one or more
premises and a conclusion.
2. Asset: anything other than an argument that may be included in a product, such as an image, a
link, a citation, or a unique string of text. Any argument must be embedded in an asset, most often a
string of text.
3. Product: a combination of assets displayed to the end user as a single unit in human-readable
form.

6. Benefits as a Mental Model
● Creativity aid for idea generation prior to writing
● Reduce wasted work while writing
● Write more useful introductions in articles and essays
● Identify new uses for old work and old ideas
● Draw more connections between old and new information
● Organise information more efficiently

7. Benefits as an Ontological Schema
● Simple
○ Only three object types to keep in mind
○ Discreteness of arguments discourages contradictions
● Structured
○ Readily formalised
○ Readily standardised
○ Parts work together without much bridging work
○ Relationship between objects in writing can easily be made transparent and unambiguous
● Scalable
○ Machine readable metadata about arguments and how they relate

8. Possible Application of Schema
● Writer with experience in scholarly writing
● Academic or descriptive topic, especially argumentative
● Especially useful for prolific and collaborative authors
● Use as part of a reference manager or a text editor

9. Example Product: Philosophy Group Project
● Group projects are challenging for both tutors and students
● Philosophy is taught as an individualistic activity with some possible co-authorship
○ Even co-authoring is not taught much
○ Discourses and dialogues are restrictive forms of collaboration
● Co-authorship in philosophy is typically limited by the same factors that limit literary writing
○ Philosophy is not meant to be studied in a “literary spirit” (Peirce)
○ Eliminate the literary limitations and facilitate standardised communication

10. Group Essay Writing Activity
● Argument Template
○ P1. [This fundamental premise will be decided in a class discussion.]
○ P2. [This premise should follow from P1]
○ P3. [This premise should follow from P2]
○ P4. [This premise should follow from P3]
○ C. [This conclusion should be opposed to the opposition essay provided by the lecturer.]
● Link to Design Document

11. Digital Tools
● Scaling requires digitisation and automation
● Many augmented writing tools exist
○ Argdown
○ Argunet
○ Grammarly
○ Persado
○ Phrasee
○ ProWritingAid
○ TapRecruit
○ Textio
○ Wordrake

12. Domain-specific Digital Tools
● Some attempts at philosoply-specific tools have been made
○ Argdown: formalise and enrich argumentative writing
○ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
○ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
○ Philpapers
○ InPho: develop structured ontology for philosophical literature; tracks Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
○ PhiloSURFical ontology: tool for browsing philosophical texts with help of concept map
○ Philsource & Philospace: federation of libraries in philosophy; network of desktop annotation applications
● Most were unsuccessful and failed to take off

13. The Aims of the Object Oriented Writing Tool
● Standardise eclectic forms of information
○ Into interchangeable form
○ Into human-readable and machine-readable format
● Allow a diverse range of inputs and outputs
○ Notes
○ Essays
○ Tweets
○ Articles
● Allow user to start from scratch or from a part of a finished product
● Publication and collaborative interaction capabilities

14. Prototyping and Empirical Research
1. Build a clean dataset of disagreement citations from one or more articles that I am already familiar
with;
2. Scrape all SEP articles that include disagreement markers identified in Step 1;
3. Create a concordance list using AntConc from the articles scraped in Step 2;
4. Use spaCy to clean up the text in the list created in Step 3;
5. Use Prodigy to train a neural net on the text and annotate it.

15. Features of the OOW Tool
1. Convert notes and resources in eclectic form into assets and arguments;
2. Produce larger products from a collection of assets and arguments;
3. Extract assets and arguments from existing products;
4. Identify each object by its appropriate metadata;
5. Assign each object its own URI;
6. Display objects in a feed;
7. Handle different file types such as text or images; and
8. Hyperlink and display the relation between objects.

16. Conclusion
● Philosophy is “the thing that gets us to the thing”
● The future is augmented and all writing will be augmented
● We have to construct our niche and prepare for the future
● Thank you!
○ thephilosophersmeme.com
○ twitter.com/metamerlabs