Use of hypertext for argumentation

Coming to the second aspect of hypertext you mentioned, the use of hypertext for argumentation. Can you tell us something about this?

David Kob - This is also something which has not been explored but it is of great interest to me. It seems to me that hypertext offers a possibility to present very complex structures of argumentation in ways that might potentially be clearer than you find in a linear book, because you can make the relationships between the parts of the argument by direct linkage of various kinds and you’re not constrained to put the argument piece by piece and hope that the reader remembers on page 50 the important point that was made on page 25. You can in fact link page 25 to page 50 and your reader can go back and forth directly. So there is a possibility that complex formal structures of argument could be more adequately expressed in hypertext. It is also possible that comments and questions and additions to such forms of argument could then be directly attached, in which case you would begin to develop a dialogue which would not simply be in the form of I say this, you say that, I say this, you say that.

But rather your comments would be attached to portions of what I said, and so we might have many streams of dialogue coming off the argument, and gradually a whole network would develop, which might be rather hard to follow because it would have many paths, but that network would include a whole debate about complex argument, counterarguments, and presumably would also include mapping that would tell you what was going on in such a collection.

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Collection of shots

Metz makes a strong argument for recognising that the major narrative units in cinema are not shots and their immediate relations (edits) but the series that are formed through collections of shots. These series, Metz's autonomous segments, form the major narrating blocks within cinema. This would indicate that it is not the content of an individual shot, nor the relation established between two fragments, that provides what might be characterised as minimal narrative units. Hence, if there is no intrinsic order required between parts then any principle of organisation or coherence will apply at a higher level.

Persuading others

From a semiotic perspective the problem with hypertext can be understood to be one of rhetoric. By rhetoric I mean “The art of using language so as to persuade or influence others....”The Oxford English Dictionary".

I would wish to extend this to include all philosophical discourse or certainly all philosophical argument. The purpose of any academic argument is to persuade others to accept the legitimacy of some viewpoint. Developing a persuasive argument is, of course, partly a matter of logic (that is some accepted code of reasonableness) and partly of evidence; but it is also partly a matter of presenting one’s reasonable analysis of appropriate evidence through established print or other representational conventions.

See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts
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Logical structure

As David Kolb puts it, the key to using hypertext to show logical structure is to be willing to mix presentation of structure within a single writing space, and hypertext links to other writing spaces.

Let single writing spaces present passages of argument, diagrammed or analyzed however is convenient. Let hypertext links take the reader to the arguments that support the parts of the argument presented on the page. Don't try to show all the structure either on the page or in the hypertext links. The single writing space would show fine structure where individual propositions relate to one another over a relatively small span that does not tax the reader's short-term memory. The hypertext links would show how larger blocks of argument relate to one another. Such a mixed presentation would take advantage of the power of prose paragraphs to present fine structure, and also of hypertext's ability to lay out typed relations between blocks of prose.

By not using hypertext to model every move, we would assist perception rather than burdening it. (from Socrates In the Labyrinth).

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See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

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Meaning and truth

In semantics, the truth condition of a sentence is almost universally considered to be distinct from its meaning.

The meaning of a sentence is conveyed if the truth conditions for the sentence are understood. Additionally, there are many sentences that are understood although their truth condition is uncertain. One popular argument for this view is that some sentences are necessarily true--that is, they are true whatever happens to obtain. All such sentences have the same truth conditions, but arguably do not thereby have the same meaning.

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What is a text?

What is a text?

We often refer to a book as a text because it represents a wholeness, a complete story or a scientific report, for example. Texts are also often the start and completion of an argument. Since the focus of this work is on argumentation, I would like to pay special attention to text in terms of argument, and view text as the entity through which arguments are made, the means of presentation for the argument, if you will. (tformaro.com)

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts