Re: Political Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Digital Textbook Selection Processes

Hi Adam,

	What I'd like to know is what you think is special philosophically about digital
textbooks from other things that appear on the web? Could you not come up
and write a three page e-mail about digital novels, or digital research papers,
digital Haikus, etc... ad infinitum using exactly the template of the text your wrote
below? Was it not Socrates who taught us to try to find the essential elements
of the concept of the Good, and not get lost in the miriad details of ways things
can be good - which can all of course be important as ways of verifying the correctness
of the analysis of good.

   	I bring this up whilst acknowledging that the same argument can be
applied to the philosophy of the Web. It was Francois Rastier I think who joked that
if we have a philosophy of the Web, why not also a philosophy of naked breasts on the
beach or a philosophy of skateboarding? Of course Rolland Barthes would have
gone off and written just such a philosophy at the mere suggestion of its possibility
of it annoying some bourgeois I think.  But of course we are not trying to create
a philosophy of the web, as much as help show how philosophical issues are
implicated in the creation of web standards. There is a therapeutic dimension
to philosophy that Wittgenstein brought out: people, and in this case engineers,
get tied up in knots in certain types of problems that philosophers have studied 
for a long time. They get tied up in knots, and so it is there are techniquest that can
be used to untie these knots.

Currently I am not sure what your problem is.

Henry

On 9 Jan 2013, at 07:03, Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Web Philosophy Community Group,
> 
> Greetings. There are some salient philosophical topics with regard to political rhetoric, what is entailed from various implicit or explicit ontological suppositions or constructions, for instance with regard to concepts like "us" and "them". Insights into human nature can be obtained from such analysis of rhetoric, dialogue and discourse.
> 
> Onto some of the philosophical topics and discourse analytical topics of political rhetoric, we can envision and observe occurrences in documents across the Web, where "us" is the American people and "them" is the government. We can also envision and observe suppositions and constructions where the public sector buildings' parking lots are filled with the cars of our friends and our neighbors during the hours of 9 to 5; in that supposition, the people in America are all "us". Interestingly, the people in the public buildings, when discussing the American people, the public, also make use of "us" and "them" suppositions and constructions.
> 
> Rhetorical suppositions and constructions, including but not limited to those of the variety of "us" and "them", are often utilized to express ideas succinctly in discourse and often "us" pertains to the speaker and an audience in public speaking and "them" is some subset of mankind or society under discussion.
> 
> Political rhetoric also often includes simplifications which predate mass media; for instance, the government was Bill Clinton, then was George W. Bush, and is, today, Barack Obama. Such simplifications can also be observed in public opinion polls, including online public opinion polls, where there are the approval ratings of the few visible representatives, or of the entire Congress, as opposed to more detailed or granular public opinion polls which might invite citizens to engage in civil discourse.
> 
> With regard to philosophical topics of political rhetoric, context, linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis, and argument reconstruction are topical. Suppositions and constructions, as aforementioned, may pertain to semantic models, conceptual backdrops, the contexts of utterances pertinent to meaning. In the philosophy of science, the semantic view of theories indicates models as relating to theories. Each concept’s or theory’s definition includes, beyond semantics, logic and mathematics, its inclusion in a set of models. Each model contains a set of interoperating concepts and theories. Suppositions or constructions can pertain to models, abstractly, semantic backdrops, parts of the context in which statements or utterances are made and have meaning. Additionally, in spoken language, there is also both prosody and intonation.
> 
> In addition to philosophical, linguistic, and social science topics, formal methods in argument reconstruction are topical. The understanding of such things, the capability to circumnavigate topics, to have agility in terms of suppositions and constructions, models, to be able to argue any side of each topic, are some of the goals of the study of argumentation.
> 
> Argument reconstruction is also a topic interesting to philosophy and we could consider whether philosophical argumentation is distinct from conversational, mathematical, scientific, legal, and political argumentation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentation_theory#Kinds_of_argumentation).
> 
> 
> Onto the topic of digital book selection processes, there are some salient differences between systems for book retail, systems for libraries, and systems for the selection of textbooks in American public schools, though technology and software can enhance and convenience each. Topical concepts include: free market capitalism, breadth of options, multiculturalism, nationalism, centralization and decentralization, government accountability and transparency, roles of the family and of the state, community, public school systems, and numerous state and federal laws.
> 
> While some have considered web-based app store models for the sale of textbooks to schoolboards, others consider models with schoolboard-local databases and client-side software, models where each schoolboard can have each candidate digital textbook in their database and where each schoolboard member can make use of computer technology during group processes. We can see that a niche exists for such tools and equipment, collaborative software, and that argumentation technologies can enhance such software.
> 
> The number of digital textbook options available for schoolboards to select from is expected to increase and, as the dataset is a large number of books, the topic has an additional applicability to library science and to the digital humanities. Digital books will have numerous features beyond ink and paper books as well and discussions about and selection processes of digital textbooks are expected to be more complex than those about and of previous ink and paper textbooks.
> 
> With regard to linking into digital textbooks, we can envision URI formats, e.g. EPUB Canonical Fragment Identifier (EPUBCFI) Specification (http://idpf.org/epub/linking/cfi/epub-cfi.html) or Media Fragments URI (http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/, http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-media-frags-recipes-20111201/), for referencing and linking to broader instantaneous configurations of digital textbooks, including combinations of hypertext, multimedia, and interactive 3D graphics. The capabilities to quote from digital textbooks and to utilize hyperlinks with digital textbooks are important for both collaborative studying scenarios and discussions about digital textbooks. For documents with web components, user interface widgets, the capability to hyperlink into or bookmark into specific configurations of digital textbooks is topical.
> 
> There are additionally the topics of indexing, searching, and retrieving digital textbook content, hypertext, multimedia and interactive 3D graphics, including for both students' desktop search and scholarship scenarios and schoolboards' navigation, discussion, and selection of textbooks from a large number of digital textbooks.
> 
> 
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Adam Sobieski

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