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APA NewslettersSpring 2001
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Implications
for Philosophy of Argumentation Mapping and Visual Language |
In this talk I will explore five areas which come together in the recent series of argumentation maps our project at Stanford has been creating-Mapping Great Debates: Can Computers Think? These five areas are:
1. Visual language, which is emerging as a new international auxiliary language, consisting of the tight integration of words, images, and shapes (and described in my book, Visual Language)
2. Argumentation mapping, a new diagraming technique for mapping debates, that gives us considerable new capacity to analyze complex ideas (and the focus of our project at Stanford);
3. Information design and knowledge management, two new disciplines, that are creating the foundations for the next stage of the world wide web;
4. Computers which are the subject matter as well as the tool used in our project about artificial intelligence and cognitive science;
5. How all these new tools, ideas and languages can affect philosophy, a study of much that is important about our lives.
Among the other topics I will address are the display of complex ideas, the creation of novel approaches to navigation and access; why paragraphs are an outdated unit of composition and thinking and what to do to replace them. Finally, I will suggest that the congruence of all these ideas suggests a new approach to the ethics of knowledge sharing, which I take to be what the university is all about.