Philosophical Engineering (eBook)

Harry Halpin is Postdoctoral Associate with the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Visiting Researcher at the Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation du Centre Pompidou, France, as part of a European Commission-funded Marie Curie PHILOWEB project. His research interests range from the complex dynamics of tagging to the philosophical foundations of Anonymous. He is the author of Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web (2012), which analyzes the impact of the Web on theories of semantics. Alexandre Monnin is Head of Web and Metadata Research at the Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation du Centre Pompidou, France, and Associate Researcher at INRIA and CNAM. He has published research on tagging, the architecture of the Web, and its importance for ontology. In 2010, he organized the first interdisciplinary PhiloWeb conference and in 2012 he held the first international seminar on the topic, both at the Sorbonne. He co-initiated SemanticPedia, the semantic platform for Wikimedia projects in French.

Notes on Contributors

Introductory Note

DUNCAN PRITCHARD AND LEE JOHN WHITTINGTON

1 Luck as Risk and the Lack of Control Account of
Luck

FERNANDO BRONCANO-BERROCAL

2 Strokes of Luck

E. J. COFFMAN

3 Luck Attributions and Cognitive Bias

STEVEN D. HALES AND JENNIFER ADRIENNE JOHNSON

4 Frankfurt in Fake Barn Country

NEIL LEVY

5 Luck and Free Will

ALFRED R. MELE

6 You Make Your Own Luck

RACHEL MCKINNON

7 Subject-Involving Luck

JOE MILBURN

8 The Modal Account of Luck

DUNCAN PRITCHARD

9 The Machinations of Luck

NICHOLAS RESCHER

10 Luck, Knowledge, and "Mere" Coincidence

WAYNE D. RIGGS

11 The Unbearable Uncertainty Paradox

SABINE ROESER

12 Getting Moral Luck Right

LEE JOHN WHITTINGTON

Index

'A surprising number of those responsible for the technical
standards of the Web have a background in Philosophy. This eclectic
collection brings together diverse perspectives on how the big
questions of philosophy relate to the engineered realities of the
Web. How do philosophical debates about representation, semantics
and reference apply to Web documents and identifiers? Could the
all-pervading presence of the Web even be changing how we
think?'

--Dan Brickley, Google

'This is a collection of essays that contributes to our
understanding of the philosophical issues raised by the Web. The
editors are to be congratulated for their constructionist
methodology ("philosophical engineering") and for their
"denaturalising ontology" program. Contemporary philosophy needs
more of both.'

--Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of
Information Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford