'pw' Introduction - Base concepts
The idea of pw is,to enable the comparison of different philosophies or philosophical positions, develop them by your own, to build and examine them with the help of a computer and save as 'knowledge'.
One basic requirement for adequate computability is to achive a comparability of philosophical positions or philosophies. Therefore it is necessary to be able to put the meaning of words in different contexts and to analyze them.
Therefore, pw groups possible viewpoints, stated in simple natural language sentences, into subjects (S).These are then step by step formalized and evaluated by the user in an appropriate way (e.g. the truth values serve as a basis for the creation and computation of a complex set of sentences.
The starting points are natural language and a set of rules (PWR) for syntax, working steps, basic values (e.g. truth values) and more. Then, defined steps of possibilities are given to formalize and compute the consistency.
Contexts:
Evaluable sentences are grouped into topics S. These (contexts) S can contain practically any number of sentences E which serve as a basis for evaluation by the user and compuatation of consistency. A sentence E can be an assertion, a definition or a normativ sentence (ought to be...). The meaning of a sentences has to be seen in the context S which the sentence is a member of. A sentence E should include a "thought" in one or few sentences, separated by a ";".
Formalization:
The target is to check the consistency of the set of sentences, which is in pw designed as a process of several steps because at the beginning not all basics for a formalization are defined or have to be choosen, because they themselves are aspects of philosophical investigation and discussion (this form of reasoning will be repeated more then one times).
Analytical consistency:
The 'consistency' is, in the first step, taken intuitively-analytically, eg. when there are no contradictions between the sentences based on the meaning of their words only. This description has not to be taken as the final definition of 'consistency' of the set of sentences in pw or the word analytic. This again is one of the aspects of a project on theoretical philosophy and knowledge itself. For example, there is no given definition of 'analytical' in the first place, like Kant's or Leibniz' definitions (true in all possible worlds).
Sentence-types and Evaluation-types:
To work around some insufficiencies of the natural language (without limiting it to the tasks of this project), there are rules for creating sentences in pw. Every sentence has a type. It can be an assertion, a definition or a normative sentence. According to that there are given some basic evaluation types. Assertions can be true, false, undecidable or not-evaluable. As there is, for example, for assertions the philosophical question 'which logic is the right one?', these evaluation types are to be understood as extendable and - each of them evaluable itself - basic types for processing, selecting and evaluating sentences in pw (which can also be sentences about pw!).
Computation steps (BR):
The consistency computation of the selected sentences is divided into several steps, which enables adding more sentences, changing (consistently) rules and expanding formalizations.
For now, the 1.x version is a client which enables the reading and evaluation of sentences, the computation of the first step and (soon) the second computation step in the form of assertional logic.
For the full assertional and predicate logic based computation, a pwServer computing the next two steps will be made, helping also users to exchange their data and maybe administer the project.
Languages:
The default language of pw should be English (the development is in German). So there are items in the menu and the texts that have to be updated to English in further versions.
pw will not support diacritical signs. These have to be rewritten according to national language standards (like 'ue' in German). Otherwise every language can be implemented. However, the translation of the contents of some file types into the default language (English) is necessary to get a common comparable base for argumentation.
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