Maps Hung in Fine Arts Museum Press Release

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Philosophy, Art, and Science Merge
Horn's Argumentation Maps Hung in Fine Arts Museum and Featured in Full Page Review in Nature

Seattle -July 1, 2000-The innovative Mapping Great Debates series has had its second presentation in a fine arts museum this year. "We are especially proud of the fact that the argumentation maps have received serious consideration from a full-page review in Nature as well as having been displayed in two European fine arts museums," said Robert E. Horn, project director of the series. The exhibit "InfoArcadia" will run in conjunction with the British Information Design Conference at Coventry. It will include 21 designer-artists from 6 countries.

Horn has produced a set of maps that promise to revolutionize argumentation and philosophical debate. "We originally conceived of these maps only as a teaching tool," explains Horn, who is a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Program on People, Computers, and Design at The Center for the Study of Language and Information. "But as they neared completion we realized that we had created both a remarkable intellectual history of the fifty-year-old debate and a clear picture of where the arguments stand today."

The maps were praised in the journal Nature by Professor Harry Collins. He wrote, "I also like the idea because of the discipline it forces on the editors. Each box has to present an argument in a few words and each has to be linked into a network of argument ramifying forward, backward, and sideways. This leaves no room for mush; the steps have to be exact - more like the lines in a computer program than the discursive form of ordinary text. Some people use the flexibility of ordinary text as a way of avoiding the necessity of working out exactly what they want to say; that sort of thing can't pass muster here. The honesty of the editing comes through in the project's very refusal to stick to the usual diet of the great and the good. One must also appreciate the sheer amount of work that has gone into the preparation." Collins is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Knowledge Expertise and Science, Cardiff University.

Earlier this year, the Stroom Center for the Visual Arts in The Hague, The Netherlands, focused international attention on information design as a newly emerging discipline and art form. It was the first to present information design as fine art in a major gallery. The Mapping Great Debates series was the centerpiece of that exhibit. "Information design combines science, technology, and artistic expression to help people understand and give meaning to their lives as well as to help them accomplish the most practical of tasks," says Robert E. Horn, one of the information designer-artists whose work is presented in the exhibit. "It is this combination of science, technology, and art that makes the information design movement so critical to many aspects of contemporary fine art as well as to conventional graphic design values." Horn is currently a visiting scholar at the Program on People, Computers, and Design, of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University.

Horn's work shown in the exhibit is a series of seven colorful "argumentation maps" that portray one of the "Great Philosophical Debates" of our time on the questions: " Can computers think?" and "Will computers ever be able to truly think and what difference will this make to our conceptions of human identity?" The maps trace diagrammatically over 800 claims and rebuttals in the debate that has raged world-wide over the past 50 years. The maps are innovative philosophical documents, and useful navigational aids to complex concepts, and, at the same time, artistic pieces.

"The argumentation maps show how the linguistic conventions of engineering diagraming, cartooning, and illustration are coming together to form a new language that enables us to express complex ideas in ways that text by itself has a difficult, if not impossible, way of expressing," says Horn, who has recently written a book entitled Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, which is the first to explore the syntax and semantics of this emerging language.

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