Fwd: CFP and Invitation to "Philosophy and the Web Symposium" Oct 5th, Thessaloníki, Greece

If anyone wants to pursue the philsophical and often *larger*
questions in the Semantic Web, feel free to submit an abstract here!

---CFP and Invitation - please circulate---

PhiloWeb 2011: The Second International Symposium on the Web and Philosophy
Co-located at
Philosophy and Theory of AI Conference (PT-AI),
October 5th 2011, Salonika (Thessaloniki), Greece.
http://web-and-philosophy.org/philoweb2011_pt-ai_salonica/

Deadline: September 15 2011 (author notification: September 22 2011)
Format: 500-1000 words (including references). Pure text or pdf.
Submission: Online - http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=philoweb2011

Registration: Online at http://www.pt-ai.org/registration/ as for the
normal conference, with ability to attend the entire PT-AI conference
Costs: 80€ full, 40€ for students (including conference dinner).
Further information about travel etc. on the PT-AI site.
PT-AI Conference (Keynotes by Hubert Dreyfus, James Moor, Rolf
Pfeifer): http://www.pt-ai.org/


The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of
the twentieth-first century, yet its impact on the fundamental
questions of philosophy has not yet been widely explored, much less
systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the
Internet, is broadly construed as an information space, the space of
all items of interest identified by URIs (Uniform Resource
Identifiers, such as “http://www.example.org”). Originally conceived
as an hypertext system of linked documents, today the Web is rapidly
evolving as a universal platform for data and computation, as URIs are
used to identify everything from data on the Semantic Web and mobile
code.

While the first Web and Philosophy Symposium at the Sorbonne explored
the question of whether or not the Web and philosophy had any
interaction, in this symposium we would like to focus on questions
relating to the relationship between the Web and philosophical
concepts of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. In
particular, questions relating to the possible transformation of
traditional philosophical concepts of language, logic, information,
intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment by the Web are especially
pertinent. While for the last few decades a turn towards embodiment,
sometimes even thought to be limited to the skin of the human body,
has dominated the philosophy of the mind’s relationship with AI, with
the advent of the Web questions of how our intelligence interacts with
technology have now moved back to the forefront. Given human-scale
problem solving on the Web as exemplified by Google or the vision of
the Semantic Web, it seems that the question of replicating human
intelligence in terms of AI may be know viewed as out-dated, and that
a new vision of AI should be built that focuses on how
technically-mediated human intelligence can be “amplified” over the
Web, a vision very much in line with the original “Collective IQ”
vision by Engelbart that was traditionally put forward as a competitor
to the traditional AI visions of Minsky, McCarthy, and others.

Questions that may be addressed include, but are not limited to:

  What is the impact of the Web on philosophy in general?
  Does the Web and Human-Computer Interaction genuinely impact cognition?
  What does the ubiquitous Web do to our notion of intelligence?
  Does Web-mediated collective intelligence challenge the traditional
hypothesis of AI?
  What is human computation and how does this interact with the
philosophy of computer science?
  Does the Web change logic in any way?
  What impact do URIS have on the philosophy of language?
  Can human cognition genuinely be extended by the Web?
  What are the historical and philosophical roots of the philosophy of the Web?
  Does the communication and ubiquity accessibility of the Web alter
our notion of embodiment?
  What does collective knowledge such as Wikipedia mean for notions
of common knowledge?
  What is the relationship of the singularity hypothesis to philosophy?
  Do philosophers of the Web have a special responsibility?

Deadline for submissions is Sept 15th 2011, with results being
returned a week later (Sept 22nd)

We call for abstracts of papers on any aspect of the philosophy and
the Web. Abstracts that are accepted could be considered for
publication in a forthcoming special issue of the Metaphilosophy
journal. Abstracts and a list of speakers will be published online.

Chairs: Harry Halpin, Alexandre Monnin

Program Committee:

  Alexandra Arapinis (Paris 1/IHPST)
  Bruno Bachimont (UTC/INA)
  Fabien Gandon (INRIA)
  Harry Halpin (W3C/MIT)
  Yuk Hui (Goldsmiths)
  Miltiadis Lytras (AUEB)
  Alexandre Monnin (Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne/IRI/CNAM)
  Paul Smart (Southhampton)
  Bernard Stiegler (IRI)
  Henry Thompson (Edinburgh)
  Michael Wheeler (Stirling)

Received on Tuesday, 6 September 2011 19:58:52 UTC