In building a design approach for computing applications that is responsive to their social and ethical dimensions, Pye's remarks are certainly instructive. He counsels us that all designs are in some senses compromises, and are therefore “failures.” Schwartz's comment prods us to look for new dimensions and possibilities in design, as well as to develop new ways of seeing media – not just new ways of applying new media to old problems. We tend to view new technologies with standards and expectations formed in previous eras: it is indeed difficult to do otherwise. The upshot of Pye's and Schwartz's counseling, simply put, is that computing applications and network-based system approaches in particular are likely candidates for revision, rethinking, and revision again.

I develop the notion of “genre-responsive design” in this chapter, along with some specific considerations for designers, managers, and users. Genres reflect complex political, social, and economic interactions among the individuals and groups with which they are associated. Couplings that genres have with various cultural objects serve to shape users’ expectations of those genres, as well as affect the scope of the genres’ utilization for constructing virtual individuals and groups.

The word “genre” (originally from French, meaning “type”) is largely associated with the realm of literature. In that context it is usually employed to refer to generic varieties of written material, such as novels, poems, and short stories. Viewing a set of computer applications as a genre emphasizes commonalities and family resemblances among set members (although genres can occasionally include loosely knit, heterogeneous compilations, held together for reasons that are largely accidental and historical). Questions about the range of expression that genres afford, and of individuals’ rationales in their choices of genres, occupy the attention of many literary critics (for example, Banta, 1978; Todorov, 1990), media specialists, and active as well as prospective consumers of the genres.

Discourse on genre plays an important role in genre construction. Genre-related notions can be powerful tools for understanding a variety of phenomena associated with human expression. The document you have in your hands right now conforms to a certain set of standards for presentation. Some are set by the American Psychological Society (APA), whosePublication Manual is the generally accepted style book for many written works. Writing standards may seem arbitrary, a trivial nuisance one must put up with in one's journey toward self-expression and group expression. However, these standards serve considerable functions in the development and maintenance of academic disciplines. For example, the adherence to uniform standards of citation that the APA requires bolsters the prestige of psychology as both a profession and a research area, supporting the notion that authors are indeed building on the work of others and adding to the growing stock of knowledge of the discipline as a whole (Bazerman, 1987b).

We all have had experiences we labeled as successful – perhaps even joyful – workplace or educational collaborations, where joint effort was free-flowing and results obtained were far greater than those any individual could have produced alone. The goal of facilitating such interaction with computer networks raises a number of difficult questions. How do we establish adequate platforms for selfdevelopment and self-expression, while providing vehicles for support of productive and efficient collaboration? How do we counterbalance powerful managerial and technological strategies with safeguards for the rights of individuals in their associations? This book takes a first step toward answering these questions.

In Chapter 1, I introduce and develop the notions of the “virtual individual” and “virtual group,” and explore how these entities play critical roles in human expression and interpersonal relationships. In this chapter, I also provide background and analysis on the research and application areas of network-based systems, with emphasis on groupware or “computer-supported cooperative work” (CSCW) approaches and linkages of groupware to the Internet and other large-scale networks. Although groupware and other network-based applications are of relatively recent vintage, they have roots that reach far back into the histories of computing, as well as the social and managerial sciences. I consider these applications in light of their many dimensions, in part by developing the notions of “genre” and “narrative” in relation to the growing varieties of computer artifacts and forms of computer-mediated expression.

This book has its origins in conversations I had with André Fuhrmann at the meetings of the International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosphy of Science in Uppsala in 1991. These exchanges led to a joint essay (Fuhrmann and Levi, 1994) that discussed some peculiarities of conditional reasoning when induction is taken into consideration. One sin begets another and I began contemplating the writing of a long paper combining the version of Ramsey test conditionals I had already advocated with ideas on inductive inference I had discussed ever since I had published Gambling with Truth (Levi, 1967).

As a preliminary, however, it seemed desirable to spell out somewhat more elaborately than I had done before the view of Ramsey test conditionals I favor. At around the same time, John Collins and I started a reading group at Columbia that included as regular participants Markko Ahtisaari, Horacio Arlo Costa, John Danaher, Scott Shapiro, and, for a brief period when he was visiting Columbia, André Fuhrmann. John Collins had presented to the group his account of the structural differences between revision of belief as understood by Alchourrón, Gardenfors, and Makinson (1985) and revision by imaging in a sense parasitic on the possible-worlds semantics for conditionals pioneered by D. Lewis (1973). In the course of his presentations, Collins defended the view that imaging was best suited to characterizing suppositional reasoning whereas AGM revision is suited to changing beliefs. I had already argued (Levi, 1991) that the AGM formalism was inadequate as an account of rational belief change. And I was quite convinced that imaging was ill suited to capture suppositional reasoning – especially in applications to practical deliberations.

Supposing and Believing

Keeping a firm grip on the difference between fact and fiction entails much more than distinguishing between what is judged true, what is judged false, and what hangs in suspense. Any agent who has a clear “sense of reality” distinguishes between what he or she fully believes to be true and what he or she supposes to be true for the sake of the argument. But both what is fully believed and what is supposed furnish the basis for a tripartite distinction between what is judged true, what is judged false, or what hangs in suspense.

Given an agent's state of full belief at a given time, some propositions are judged possibly true because they are not ruled out by the state of full belief and others are judged impossible. In this epistemic sense of serious possibility, h is judged true relative to the agent's state of full belief K if and only if ∼h is not a serious possibility, h is judged false if and only if ∼h is judged true, and the question of the truth of h hangs in suspense if and only if both h and ∼h count as serious possibilities.

If a would-be investor is uncertain as to whether the government will propose an investment tax credit for long-term investments in U.S. firms, the uncertainty will have some relevance to the investor's conclusion as to how to make investments.

Truth, Information, and Full Belief

When an inquirer seeks to improve his current state of full belief, the legitimacy of the alteration made depends on the aims of the inquirer. There are many kinds of aims inquirers might and do have in altering their full beliefs. These aims need not be economic, political, moral, or aesthetic. Cognitive aims may be pursued as well. The kind of cognitive aim that, in my opinion, does best in rationalizing scientific practice is one that seeks, on the one hand, to avoid error and, on the other, to obtain valuable information. Whether inquirers always seek error-free information or not need not concern us here. I rest content for the present with making the claim that agents can coherently pursue cognitive aims of this kind.

A consequence of this view is that states of full belief should be classifiable as error free or erroneous. Otherwise it makes little sense for an inquirer to seek to avoid error in changing his or her state of full belief. Likewise states of full belief should be classifiable as stronger or weaker; for those who seek valuable information should never prefer weaker states of full belief to stronger ones.

The two classifications are interrelated. If state 1 is stronger than state 2 and is error free, so is state 2. If state 2 is erroneous, so is state 1.