There are no facts, only arguments

What if we would organize all human knowledge into one big argument database? Scientific publishing should mean adding arguments to the database rather than sending letters to journals.

What if we would have Wikipedia -like process for organizing discussions about any topic in such a way that when you have a question, you could find all known answers along with evidence of why you should believe or should not believe them.

Propositions should not be owned by anyone. Anyone should be able to edit any proposition like Wikipedia pages now. Argumentation is not about finding out who is right and who is wrong. It should be a collaborative effort to understand all aspects of a given topic.

We should have tools that utilize the structure inherent to argumentations. Argumentations are not just prose. They consist of propositions and each proposition can take part in many different arguments. We should not have to write thousand times "Earth is round" even if we deduced thousand conclusions based on it. We should be able to write the same proposition in many languages and make it explicit that they all express the same propostion in the database. This way all of the argumentation around a given topic gets interlinked and easy to discover and assess.

One fool can blurt more misguided arguments than ten sound people can prove wrong. But if we had a powerful computer aided and community powered process for collaborative argument analysis, we might just be able to make sense even of todays online debates.

And if online debates are too messy to make sense, at least the scientific community could benefit from better ways of organizing the knowledge we already have. It's about time to start using computers instead of letters for scientific communications.

If you think this is a vision worth exploring, drop me an email at .