A Brave New Modular World

What has hypertext done for you lately?
  March 16, 2002

It occurs to me that hypertext may be an interesting approach towards the structuring of formal arguments (such as, oh, I don’t know, philosophy papers).  Take my Truth entry below, for example.  I can think of a zillion things that need to be explained in more detail to prop up the argument.  How do we understand “completeness” when talking about the state of the world?  How do we define “part of the Truth”?  The list goes on.

I could write little side “chapters” taking on each question, each one drawing on all others as necessary, all of them interlinked.  The argument would essentially become a collection of independent philosophical “modules” which, when taken in their entirety, support each other and successfully make the main point.

The traditional narrative of a formal argument is linear.  There is an advantage to linearity in that one has less of a chance to create a circular argument.  The risk of inadvertent circular reasoning would increase with the use of hypertext.  However, it is possible that freedom from excessive structure will allow to make richer arguments and develop better ideas.

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