Incoherent hypertexts

People who aren't very familiar with hypertext writing, but who nonetheless want to impress you with their knowledge, often claim that hypertexts are incoherent, that they lack the structure and rigor of conventional, linear prose. For example, Sven Birkerts writes in his Gutenberg Elegies that

Humanistic knowledge . . . ultimately seeks to fashion a comphrensible narrative. It is, in other words, about the creation and expansion of meaningful contents. Interactive media technologies are, at least in one sense, anti-contextual. They open the field to new widths. . .

The danger should be obvious: The horizon, the limit that have definition to the parts of the narrative, will disappear.

Others simply fear that there is no place for links within a coherent narrative, that hypertext is the exclusive province of technical manuals on the one hand and incoherent postmodernism on the other.

This fear arises from a combination of three factors: superstition, sloth, and a fundamental misunderstanding of narrative. The roles of superstition and sloth are simple. Those who dislike computers (especially those who aren't very familiar with them) fear that their mysterious force will somehow damage the sort of writing they enjoy. Those who don't take the trouble to read much hypertext, similarly, often delude themselves by imagining that their failure is a virtue, that hypertext isn't worth reading because it cannot be worth reading. The sheer improbability of myriad successful artistic forms throughout the eons should make us doubt such ab initio arguments about human expression.


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Hegel's Hypertext

How to Use http://www.hegel.net/ to Understand Hegel ,

Unfortunately, Lenin's famous aphorism: “It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” is more true today and more pressing in its significance than when it was written 80 years ago.

Most Marxists will tell you that Hegel invented dialectics and that he was an ‘objective idealist’, but very, very few have actually read Hegel. However, Marx and Engels wrote very little by way of explaining Hegel’s ideas (Engels’ Socialism: Utopian& Scientific, § II and § I of Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy are the best general introductions available), but we know from Marx’s 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and his 1844 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General that Marx formed his own view by way of a critique of Hegel, and the 1859 Grundrisse, Marx’s preparatory notes for Capital make it clear that the critique of Hegel was central to his thinking throughout his life.

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Process of self-production

The dialectic is the process of self-production of subjectivity, of the absolute subject, and as such is its "necessary action".

According to the structure of subjectivity, the production process has three layers. First of all as consciousness, subjectivity is drawn immediately to its object. This immediate, therefore indeterminate, representation, Hegel names 'being', the universal, the abstract.

But the relation of the object to the subject is thereby overlooked. Only through this relating back of objects to the subject, will the object as object for the subject, and the subject for itself, that is, as relation to the object, be represented Nevertheless, as long as we only distinguish between object and subject, refection and being, and remain tied to these distinctions , the movement from object to subject has not yet produced subjectivity as this totality for itself. The object, being, is doubtless already with the subject as mediated by reflection, but this mediation itself is not yet itself the presentation of this innermost movement of the subject for itself. Only when the thesis of object and the antithesis of subject becomes discernible in its necessary synthesis , is the movement of the subjectivity of the object-subject-relation established in its trajectory.

This trajectory is departure from the thesis, progression through antithesis, transition as synthesis, and, as this totality , the return of this posited establishment to itself. This trajectory gather the totality of subjectivity in its developed unity. So assembled it grows, 'con-crescit', becomes concrete. Accordingly, dialectic is speculative. 'Speculari' means to discern, to set before, conceive, com-prehend [be-greifen]. Hegel states in the introduction of the 'Science of Logic' (ed. Lasson, Bd. I, S. 38) : Speculation consists "in conceiving the opposed in its unity".

Hegel's characterization of speculation becomes clearer when we take note that with speculation the synthesis results not only from conceptual unity, but , in the first place and always, from the conception of 'the opposed', as such. To this belongs the conception of opposites as appearing against and within one another, which as the reign of antithesis is in this manner presented in the "Logic of Essence" ( that is , the logic of reflection). From this self reflecting appearance, this mirroring, the 'speculari' ('speculum': the mirror) receives its sufficient determination.

So considered, speculation is the positive totality of what dialectic must signify here: not transcendental delimitation critically or polemically thought, but the mirroring and reuniting of opposites as the spirit's process of self production.

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Linear modes of thinking

Europe is divided between the pragmatic, empirical, inductive thinking of Anglo-Saxon and North Sea cultures and the rationalist, deductive thinking of the rest of the continent.

Anglo-Saxons are uncomfortable with theories and generalisations and concepts. They prefer to deal with data. Other Europeans are uncomfortable with dealing with data unless it is on the context of an idea or a system. The difference is reflected in the history of European philosophy and in the way our children are taught in schools, in the way football teams are managed and how we structure memos, reports and presentations.

What they have in common is that they are linear modes of thinking. They are based on logical reasoning, categorisation and a belief in cause and effect. Other ways of thinking - intuition, emotional intelligence, lateral thinking, free association and flashes of insight from nowhere – are mistrusted unless they can be logically substantiated.

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Hypertextual imagery

Gregory Ulmer suggests that image category systems will provide the new logic under electracy and that each person must redefine Aristotle's commonplaces in light of their own experiences and the internet's support for images. Then we will be able to forge imagery that can support collective thinking.

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Problem of induction

Observing an event once does not predict it will occur again in the future.

This remains true regardless of the number of observations one adds to the pile. Or, as Taleb, recapitulating David Hume, has it: the observation of even a million white swans does not justify the statement "all swans are white." There is no way to know that somewhere out there a black swan is not hiding, disproving the rule and nullifying our "knowledge" of swans. The problem of induction tells us that we cannot really learn from our experiences. It makes knowledge very problematic, if not impossible. And yet, humans do behave -almost without exception- as though they believe that experience teaches us lessons. This is forgivable; there is no better path to knowledge. But before proceeding, one must account for the limits that the problem of induction places on our claims to knowledge.

And humans seem, at every turn, to lack this critical self-awareness.

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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.

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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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Science of thought

Logic might have been defined as the science of the pure Idea.

Pure, that is, because the Idea is in the abstract medium of Thought. But logic might have been also defined as the science of thought, and of its laws and characteristic forms. But thought, as thought, constitutes only the general medium, or qualifying circumstance, which renders Ideas and Lexias distinctively logical. If we identify the Idea with thought, thought must not be taken in the sense of a method or form, but in the sense of the self-developing totality of its laws and peculiar terms. Hypertext and lexias.These laws are the work of thought itself, and not a fact which it finds and must submit to.

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Abstract thinking

Hypertextual is a kind of logic.

The problem lies partly in a difficulty — which in itself is nothing but want of habit — for abstract thinking; i.e. in an inability to get hold of pure thoughts and move about in them.In our ordinary state of mind, the thoughts are clothed upon and made one with the sensuous or spiritual material of the hour; and in reflection, meditation, and general reasoning, we introduce a blend of thoughts into feelings, percepts, and mental images. Thus, in propositions where the subject-matter is due to the senses — e.g. ‘This leaf is green’ — we have such categories introduced, as being and individuality.

But it is a very different thing to make the thoughts pure and simple our object.

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Meaningful statements

The logical grounds of interpretation have gone entirely—especially when we deal with the literary text, which is “above the norm” in rhetorical meaning.

Both logic and grammar are questionable when we read a literary text. Grammar assumes a simple logical one-to-one relationship between language unit (word, sentence, etc.) and meaning. Rhetoric contests that assumption. Logic postulates the possibility of universal truth (a concept that independently of its objects remains unchangeable, eternal and unaffected by rhetoric). We know from de Saussure that such a concept has no place in a system like the language system, which provides meaning only through the values that the differences between signifiers allow.

In other words, when we make meaningful statements we do so by acting on the combined resources of difference and rhetorical substitution. This gives us considerable freedom but at a cost—we can no longer hope to control or to limit the structures of linguistic meaning and the multiple possibilities of confusion that always threaten.

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Rhetoric and grammar

The difference between metaphorical substitutions and metonymic combinations (rhetoric and grammar) can be seen as a kind of repetition of a deeper and older opposition: between rhetoric and logic.

But (a big, big but) metonymy is not a grammatical category. It is no less figurative than metaphor. The predicative structure of a sentence (noun/verb/phrase) cannot guarantee its meaning.

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Computational methods

According to L. Floridi, one can think of three main ways for applying computational methods towards philosophical matters:

Conceptual experiments in silico: As an innovative extension of an ancient tradition of thought experiment, a trend has begun in philosophy to apply computational modeling schemes to questions in logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, and so on.

Pancomputationalism (or the fallacy of a powerful metaphor): By this view, computational and informational concepts are considered to be so powerful that given the right Level of abstraction, anything in the world could be modeled and represented as a computational system, and any process could be simulated computationally. Then, however, pancomputationalists have the hard task of providing credible answers to the following two questions:

how can one avoid blurring all differences among systems, thus transforming pancomputationalism into a night in which all cows are black, to paraphrase Hegel?
what would it mean for the system under investigation not to be an informational system (or a computational system, if computation = information processing)?

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