STEVAN HARNAD



STEVAN HARNAD (http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad) was born in Hungary, did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University and is currently Professor of Cognitive Science at Southampton University. His research is on categorisation, communication and cognition. Founder and Editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences <http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs> (a paper journal published by Cambridge University Press), Psycoloquy <http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc> (an electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association) and the CogPrints Electronic Preprint Archive in the Cognitive Sciences <http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ modelled on n the Los
Alamos Physics Eprint Archive and supported by JISC/eLib), he is Past President of the Society for Philosopy and Psychology, and author and contributor to over 100 publications, including Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech (NY Acad Sci 1976), Lateralization in the Nervous System (Acad Pr 1977), Peer Commentary on Peer Review: A Case Study in Scientific Quality Control (CUP 1982), Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition (CUP 1987), The Selection of Behavior: The Operant Behaviorism of BF Skinner: Comments and Consequences (CUP 1988) and Icon, Category, Symbol: Essays on the Foundations and Fringes of Cognition (in prep).

RESTORING THE SOCRATIC DIALOGUE IN THE POST-GUTENBERG AGE OF
SCHOLARLY SKYWRITING

ABSTRACT: The advent of the offline medium of writing, millennia  ago, spelled the beginning of the end for the much earlier online  oral tradition that the advent of speech had vouchsafed for the  poets, scholars, and ordinary citizens of our species. Gutenberg's  Press went on to seal coffin the coffin of that bygone village  chat-group. But the PostGutenberg Galaxy of Scholarly Skywriting is  now resurrecting a "virtual" oral tradition with an incomparably  broader scope, restoring the interactivity of human minds to a  turnaround time much closer to that online speed of speech for  which the speed of interdigitating thought originally evolved  (before it was supplanted by the offline "serial solipsism" of  script). Yet Skywriting (multiple email plus hypermail web archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail) restores that near
 real-time interactivity while preserving the discipline and digital  record of print (verba volunt: scripta manent) on an unprecedented  global scale. Paradoxically, the ordinary citizen has picked up on  this, but the scholars are still living in the Gutenberg Galaxy. I  will describe ways to fast-forward them to the full potential of the Post-Gutenberg present in both research and teaching, through  online self-archiving (freeing the skyreading of refereed research  for one and all) and scholarly as well as pedagogic skywriting.