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Implications for Philosophy of Argumentation Mapping
and Visual Language
Proposal:
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
-
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)
- 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);
- information
design and knowledge management, two new disciplines,
that are creating the foundations for the next stage
of the world wide web;
- computers
which are the subject matter as well as the tool
used in our project about artificial intelligence
and cognitive science; and
- 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navigation and access; why paragraphs are an outdated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.
BIOGRAPHY:
For
the past few years, Robert E. Horn has been a Visiting
Scholar in the Program on People, Computers, and Design
at The Center for the Study of Language and Information,
Stanford University. He is the author of the recently
published book Visual Language: Global Communication
for the 21st Century . He is project director of the
recently released Mapping Great Debates project, (publisher:
www.macrovu.com)
and especially proud these days that these argumentation
maps have received a full-page review in the journal
Nature as well as been hung in a recent fine arts
exhibit at the Stroom Center for the Visual Arts in
The Hague and at the Coventry School of Art and Design.
His book about structuring information, Mapping Hypertext,
(distributor: www.infomap.com)
has become a classic source of ideas for web site
design. He has been the CEO of an international consulting
company that he founded (Information Mapping, Inc.)
and has taught graduate courses at Harvard and Columbia
Universities.
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