APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Communication is the heart of scholarship. It is easy to picture scholarship as a solitary pursuit; the scientist alone in the lab, the professor poring over dusty tomes in the library, Descartes in his well-heated room alone with his demons. Still, the end product of scholarly research is the publication and that is intended for an audience, however small and obscure.

Philosophical scholarship requires our reading and commenting on the work of others. Thus, the means of communication will have significant impact on the forms and directions of scholarly pursuits. We are in a time of extraordinary changes in the means of communication, largely due to computers. Wise scholars will attend to those changes and gain from them.

Conferences are among the main modes of scholarly communication. Transportation technology has made large-scale national and international meetings a reality in this century. A conference of importance to all interested in those areas of thought common to this newsletter is the annual Computers and Philosophy conference (CAP) co-sponsored by the APA Committee on Philosophy and Computers and the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. Robert Cavalier has done a terrific job the last 13 years in making CAP a premier venue for philosophers, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists.

This year the conference was held August 5–7, 1999, at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) campus, Pittsburgh, PA. In keeping with the spirit of investigating innovative technology, this year CAP will become digitally extended via a live video link with Oregon State University (OSU). Using PictureTell compressed video, OSU participants attended the CMU meeting. The opening session of CAP was a series of speakers on "Multimedia Authoring and Digital Video." Actually using a digital video medium to present and broadcast discussion of these topics demonstrates how seriously CAP takes its role in putting ideas to the test. The keynote address, Authentic Intentionality, was given by John Haugeland of the University of Chicago. He is editor of Mind Design (1981) and Mind Design II (1997), and author of Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (1985), and is working on a book about Heidegger. The keynote was attended by an audience in Oregon via video.

Being able to attend an event from a location 3,000 miles away is a powerful indicator of the changes occurring in communication. PictureTell is a compressed video medium similar to that used to transmit video from space missions. The form being used at CAP transmits over telephone lines. The units are cheap and portable enough to be practical for many institutions and PictureTell sessions can be broadcast multipoint, allowing several different sites to conference together. An international multipoint broadcast is a goal for CAP 2000. It is likely that other conferences will start using these capabilities to extend the reach of scholarly communications. This will change the economics of conference participation and bring new voices to the discussion. Effective presenting by video is different from live performance, and new techniques for communicating abstract and complex ideas will surely evolve. This innovation at CAP is an event worth noting and will be covered well in the next volume of Philosophy and Computers.

eJournals (electronic jounals) are a crucial aspect in the shifts in academic communication. Robert Causey’s ongoing investigation into the developments of eJournals is an excellent source of information as to the developing character of scholarship.

Four distinct and thoughtful views about using internet technology for teaching philosophy grace the Teaching in Cyberspace section. These articles include criticism of web-based teaching as well as techniques for practical implementation.