Mary Keeler

Towards a Pragmatic Web

The Semantic Web is a promising step toward improving virtual community information systems. It gives information a clearer meaning, better enabling computers and people to cooperate. However, still lacking is the purpose of the information: how is it going to be used and evolve? In a Pragmatic Web, the context of the information would be defined as well, as the community examines goal-based conditional inferences in its work in progress. Scientific collaboratories could benefit substantially from such an approach. The PORT collaboratory was established to provide a model for pragmatic collaboratory evolution. In this paper, we outline a pragmatic community information systems development process by combining PORT with the Conceptual Graphs-based RENISYS method for the legitimate user-driven specification of community information systems. Peircean pragmatism provides a self-critical approach for tool selection in virtual communities.

Games of inquiry for collaborative concept structuring

Googles project to digitize five of the worlds greatest libraries will dramatically extend their search engine reach in the future. Current search-engine philosophy, which asserts that ”any search starts with a question to be answered,” will need to be advanced in terms of Peirces philosophy: ”Any inquiry begins by creating an hypothesis to be tested, or with abduction.” As conceptual structures researchers prepare to meet access challenges in the world of large Internet knowledge stores, they have a solid foundation in Peirces theorized stages of inquiry: abduction, deduction, and induction. To indicate how conceptual structures tools must augment collaborative, Internet-based inquiry, we imagine a future scenario in the context of a user-centered testbed, where Peirce scholars apply Peirces pragmatic theory in their complex manuscript reconstruction work. We suggest that games of inquiry can be developed to formalize user collaboration and technology needs, for improved specification of tool requirements in the testbed context.

Hegel in a Strange Costume

Charles Peirce was influenced by German philosophy to conceive logic as one of a carefully related set of theoretical disciplines called the Normative Sciences, strategically located in his Classification of the Sciences between Phenomenology and Metaphysics. Barely enough evidence is available from his archived manuscripts to indicate how he might have developed that part of his philosophy in the three disciplines of esthetics, ethics, and logic-as-semiotic (I will use his preferred spelling, semeotic), which he says support his purpose for pragmatism in a theory of inquiry. I have investigated that evidence to find how his philosophy treats some neglected issues in modern philosophy (nominalism, intuition, automation) which limit the advancement of conceptual structures research, and suggest that his normative science will be required for effective knowledge creation and communication.

Revelator Game of Inquiry: A Peircean Challenge for Conceptual Structures in Application and Evolution

In unpublished manuscripts from Peirces last decade, he emphasizes his dialogic and interactive view of logic-as-semeotic, exemplified by the Existential Graphs. Recently published research of these manuscripts solidly supports the project of creating a game for instituting his pragmatic methodology to demonstrate his full semeotic logic. Revelator is my conception of that game, to pursue Peirces ideas for improving the economy of inquiry. Revelators design somewhat resembles many well-known games, such as bridge, chess, crossword puzzles, and even poker, but its core purpose is to reveal complex relations among the conditional propositions, by which players represent their conjectures as plays in the game. The game design invites the application and evolution of Conceptual Structures technology to aggregate, integrate, and display the complex logical behaviorof these propositions. Plays are treated as rule-defined agents that can adapt in complex conceptual environments to form multi-agents, promoting the emergence of collaboratively formulated and selected models of possible knowledge (or robust hypotheses). Peirces full vision of a dynamic logic continues to challenge Conceptual Structures to become an engine of inquiry.

PORT: A Testbed Paradigm for Knowledge Processing in hte hUmanities

The Peirce On-line Resource Testbed (PORT) is, materially, a digital resource of primary data: C.S. Peirces manuscripts, archived in the Houghton Library at Harvard, which have remained largely and essentially inaccessible for 80 years. Building upon this “raw data” archive (as digitized page images, transcribed text, and indexed links), we have the opportunity to increase the contributions of scholars and researchers in a networked, continuing resource development testbed. Conceptually, Peirces pragmatic philosophy encourages us to treat this form of communication as a continuing argument, with premises, conclusions, and an account of the interpretational procedure by which the result is reached from the evidence. But Peirces pragmatism also cautions that judgment should proceed heuristically—not algorithmically, since the conceptual basis for judgment established by any group of inquirers may, at any time, be mistaken. With inquiry conceived as an ongoing, sophisticated communicational challenge, the collective “editorial role” in this procedure is to stabilize collective inquiry with respect to the manuscript evidence. This model of an on-line research testbed requires a conceptual map or meta-representation of the work of individual scholars, as well as a means for representing the possible order(s) of the primary materials. In this respect, our work with knowledge processing researchers to develop PORT as a testbed for tool development depends less on producing definitive algorithms for editorial work than on maintaining an intelligible communication pathway for a community of scholars carrying out in practice Peirces idea of inquiry as a self-correcting and self-directing experiment.

Using Brandom’s Framework to Do Peirce’s Normative Science: Pragmatism as the Game of Harmonizing Assertions?

I introduce Robert Brandom’s Inferentialism, which he calls a ”rationalist expressivist” form of pragmatism, relating it to C.S. Peirce’s unfinished project of Normative Science with its method of pragmatism as the logic of abduction, and suggest how Brandom’s notion of a game (which I call Harmonizing Assertions) might serve as an effective methodological instrument in conceptual structures research, for its ultimate challenge of the human-computer tool interface.

Collaboratory testbed partnerships as a knowledge capture challenge

The difficulty of maintaining effective testbed partnerships, among users of computer-based tools and builders of those tools, has been an obstacle to the success of science collaboratories. Testbed partnerships are as essential for knowledge-tool advancement as that advancement is to the support of effective partnerships, because knowledge tools must be instituted in a context that truly augments (rather than merely tries to replicate) human inference in collaborative contexts. We propose a game framework for engaging content-tool users and context-tool developers in testbed partnerships, and an architecture for modular knowledge-tool integration, as initial steps in the effective advancement of knowledge capture and improvement of testbed partnerships.

Games for co-evolution of digital resources and knowledge tools

Successful digital resources have resulted from effective partnerships among content experts and tool builders, but such relationships are difficult to establish. Collaboratory testbeds were originally conceived as a response to that difficulty, but have been largely unsuccessful. We contend that effective testbed partnerships are as essential for knowledge-tool advancement as that advancement is to the support of effective partnerships, since knowledge tools must evolve to augment rather than merely to replicate human inference. We are building a game framework as a method for instituting testbed partnerships and an architecture for modular knowledge-tool integration, as essential steps in the co-evolution of knowledge tools and digital resource testbeds.

PORT: Peirce Online Resource Testbeds

This overview of PORT covers the goals to achieve, the institutions involved, and the status of the project. Proposals for funding PORT development are pending, but this preliminary report provides URLs to sites where the work has begun.