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Factasia Development

Strategic Notes

Historical Background
I first started developing this web site in 1994. I decided to turn it into Factasia in 1996, intended but failed to ramp up development in 1998, and suspended development to work on another site (x-logic.org) early 2000 From there on things went speedily downhill and I seriously lost my way. Now I'm trying to get going again, reviewing the rbjones.com website and aiming to deploy here the techniques for doing formal logic on the web which I developed for the x-logic site.

So I need a completely new strategy which takes account of who I now am and what I might hope to achieve.

Breadth AND Depth
You may have noticed that I'm trying to achieve the impossible: breadth and depth. I'm very interested in logic, so its easy for me to think that logic is important. But is it? If I step back for a few seconds I have to recognise that, for most people in the world, logic is a rich man's entertainment. Water is important. That people should have clean drinking water is important, an end in itself. Logic is a handy bag of tricks, only of value as a means to more vital ends.

Its very important to me to keep this in sight, and so I refuse to allow Factasia to focus down on a piece of technology. I want to pay attention to what's really important, and to understand the way abstruse technologies can help us with the important issues.

So here's a piece of the strategy. I'm painting on a huge canvass, and I'm painting top down, breadth first. Its a bit like painting the Forth Bridge, trying to raise standards and fill in detail across the whole site. But I also have one or two corners which get special attention. 50% of my time on a bit of depth first. Logic is one, and logical truth is the deepest point so far.

Philosophy
If any single subject area has a special status it it philosophy, since philosophy is the only subject which can be as broad as Factasia must be. Also, the method, across the piece, is just meditation.

My strategy is to use the (possibly tacky):

The Global Superbrain
theme to encourage the philosophical side to focus on the real world. This theme has two sides to it which connect both with the logical/analytic side of philosophy and also with the broader moral/social/polical/economic side, allowing the philosophy to be driven by practical purposes flowing from an articulated value system.
Methods
I still need to fill out my story on logical methods. This is what A Framework for Formal Analysis is about. Philosophically fundamental to this is the definition of logical truth which is probably the deepest thing I am working on.
See Also:
Throughout the site there are sketches of topics, most of which I intend eventually to fill out in greater detail. So one way to get an idea of where I am going is to have a look over the site as is. There are also some other pages which are intended to provide a forward picture at different levels. For an architectural sketch see:
The Factasia Bridge
and for some wild speculations about the future content and character of the site see:
What is Factasia?
Both of these pages are overdue for an upgrade.
The:
Coming Up
page is an ongoing experiment in forward thinking about Factasia.


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