Philosophy of the Web - Alexandre Monnin

Consolidating networks of excellence - WebScience Montpellier Meetup.
Friday May 13th, 2011 at LIRMM, Montpellier, France

PHILOSOPHY OF THE WEB AS
ARTIFACTUALIZATION AND
PHILOSOPHICAL ENGINEERING
Alexandre Monnin
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNAM/Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation


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/


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 al these dimensions.
This would be a philosophy of philosophical
engineering.


INDEED…

 It’s important to get the picture straight for
obvious reasons…


WEB OF PAGES

Homepage

URL (URI)


WEB OF RESOURCES

Homepage

URL (URI)


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


Thanks!

Philosophy of the Web - Alexandre Monnin

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