Harry Halpin

The question of how technology impacts the existing forms of epistemology and forms a new kind of socially extended epistemology deserves a thorough philosophical investigation. Traditionally, epistemology has been bound to a vision of knowledge as internal beliefs justified via logical inference. This view was externalized by artificial intelligence research into knowledge representation. Yet historically this form of research has failed, with knowledge representation being unable to cope with the Frame Problem: How to capture a changing and fluid world in a formal system that can be mechanized? Today, people use search engines, tagging, and social media to leave an enactive “social trail” through the vast amount of information, creating new kinds of distributed and extended knowledge that challenges traditional theories of epistemology. This shaping of the epistemic environment allows humans to socially solve the Frame Problem and extend the bounds of knowledge via technological means.

The question of whether rights can be enforced by code underlies the maintenance of Internet protocols by the IETF in the wake of the Snowden revelations of NSA mass surveillance. Arguments over the expectations of users for access and privacy between the respective inventors of the Web and the Internet laid the ground for a new conception of net rights founded upon the extended mind thesis. A number of legislative initiatives attempted to form a “Magna Carta” for the Web to enforce these nascent net rights such as the right to private communication, but these efforts uniformly failed. Yet the repair and maintenance of the technical standards of the Internet itself by the IETF produced a new kind of immanent constitution for the Internet based upon the use of cryptography to defend these rights.

The question of whether rights can be enforced by code underlies the maintenance of Internet protocols by the IETF in the wake of the Snowden revelations of NSA mass surveillance. Arguments over the expectations of users for access and privacy between the respective inventors of the Web and the Internet laid the ground for a new conception of net rights founded upon the extended mind thesis. A number of legislative initiatives attempted to form a “Magna Carta” for the Web to enforce these nascent net rights such as the right to private communication, but these efforts uniformly failed. Yet the repair and maintenance of the technical standards of the Internet itself by the IETF produced a new kind of immanent constitution for the Internet based upon the use of cryptography to defend these rights.

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. Even swifter is the Web-driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web.

The ontological presupposition of artificial intelligence (AI) is the liberal autonomous human subject of Locke and Kant, and the ideology of AI is the automation of this particular conception of intelligence. This is demonstrated in detail in classical AI by the work of Simon, who explicitly connected his work on AI to a wider programme in cognitive science, economics, and politics to perfect capitalism. Although Dreyfus produced a powerful Heideggerian critique of classical AI, work on neural networks in AI was ultimately based on the individual as the locus of intelligence. Yet this conception of AI both fails to grasp the essence of large language models, which are a statistical model of human language on the Web. The training data that enables AI is the surveillance and capture of data, where the data creates a model to approximate the entire world. However, there is a more hidden ideology inherent in AI where the goal is not to perfect a model but to control the world. As prompted by an argument between Mead and Bateson, social change is prevented by the application of cybernetics to society as a whole. The goal of AI is not just to replace human beings, but to manage humans to preserve existing power relations. As the source of intelligence in AI is distributed cognition between humans and machines, the alternative to AI is collective intelligence. As theorized by Licklider and Engelbart at the dawn of the Internet, collective intelligence explains how computers weave together both human and non-human intelligence. Rather than replace human intelligence, this produces ever more complex collective forms of intelligence. Rather than meta-stabilize a society of control, collective intelligence can go outside individualist capitalist ontology by incorporating the open world of the pluriverse, as theorized by Escobar. Collective intelligence then stands as an alternative ontological path for AI which puts intelligence at the service of humanity and the world rather than a technocratic elite.

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. Even swifter is the Web‐driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web.

This is the first interdisciplinary exploration of the philosophical foundations of the Web, a new area of inquiry that has important implications across a range of domains. Contains twelve essays that bridge the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology Tackles questions such as the impact of Google on intelligence and epistemology, the philosophical status of digital objects, ethics on the Web, semantic and ontological changes caused by the Web, and the potential of the Web to serve as a genuine cognitive extension Brings together insightful new scholarship from well-known analytic and continental philosophers, such as Andy Clark and Bernard Stiegler, as well as rising scholars in “digital native” philosophy and engineering Includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.

This is the first interdisciplinary exploration of the philosophical foundations of the Web, a new area of inquiry that has important implications across a range of domains. Contains twelve essays that bridge the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology Tackles questions such as the impact of Google on intelligence and epistemology, the philosophical status of digital objects, ethics on the Web, semantic and ontological changes caused by the Web, and the potential of the Web to serve as a genuine cognitive extension Brings together insightful new scholarship from well-known analytic and continental philosophers, such as Andy Clark and Bernard Stiegler, as well as rising scholars in "digital native" philosophy and engineering Includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. Even swifter is the Web-driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web.

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. Even swifter is the Web-driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web

We examine a crucial question for the World Wide Web: What does a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) mean? Crucial for the next-generation Semantic Web, can it refer to things outside web-pages? The Web is a universal information space for naming and accessing information via URIs. However, the classical philosophical problems of meaning and reference that have been the source of debate within the philosophy of language return when the Web is given as the foundation for a knowledge representation with the Semantic Web. Debates on the Semantic Web about the meaning and referential status of a URI are explored as analogues to debates about the meaning and reference of names in the philosophy of language. Three main positions are inspected: the logical position, as exemplified by the descriptivist theory of reference, the direct reference position, as exemplified by Putnam and Kripke’s causal theory of reference, and a Wittgensteinian position that views URIs as a public language, as exemplified by Web search engines. These positions show that debates within the philosophy of language are alive and well on the Web, and so in the philosophy of computer science

Built upon the foundations of the Internet, the World Wide Web has been the most significant technological development within recent history, sparking a reformulation of both capitalism and resistance. The Web is defined as a « universal information space » by its inventor Tim Berners-Lee of the W3C, reflecting the universal scope of politics and struggle today. Yet while its effects have been scrutinized, the Web itself has received little inquiry. The composition of the governing networks that control the infrastructure of the Web have only recently been engaged with by activists with the ICANN affair and WSIS protests. The Web is governed by a network that is composed of an « immaterial aristocracy » of radical democratic « hackers », corporations such as Google and Microsoft, and non-governmental organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and World Wide Web Consortium. These networks continually negotiate between the needs of global capitalism and the desires of immaterial labour on the Web

Does the centralization of the Web change both the diffusion of knowledge and the philosophical definition of knowledge itself? By exploring the origins of the Semantic Web in the philosophy of Carnap and of Google’s machine learning approach in Heidegger, we demonstrate that competing philosophical schools are deeply embedded in artificial intelligence and its evolution in the Web. Finally, we conclude that a decentralized approach to knowledge is necessary in order to bring the Web to its full potential as project for the spread of human autonomy.