File Entry: Science, the Virtual and the Actual: a real stand-off

Abstract: The World Wide Web is a source of social encounter occurring over undefined distances. If physical parameters of social encounter are considered uncontrollable for studies in a natural setting, the internet world, when dissected philosophically with respect to physical witnessibility of engaged identities, provides a model in which distance is absent. Upon comparison of meaning in science method and theory as it is necessarily rooted to common perceptional experience, it is proposed that established criteria of virtual, real, and actual employed for description in internet communication studies not only constitute 'world,' but 'universe' in which the gap between the actual and virtual has a physical meaning. Philosophical analogy is made from a proposed universal model to theory proposed by Albert Einstein, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn and applied in an attempt to bridge conceptually the social and natural sciences. A release of identity-funding inhibition to the extension of the range of witness beyond the immediate environment, associated with cognitive generalization of phenomenon involving a null hypothesis, seen universally to singularly account for cognitive and behavioral trends towards modern times, is proposed to be the consequence of physical factors that are external to cultures. Discussion relating ‘paradox’ as ‘paradox of the injuring concept’ is rendered in terms of a physical divide between the virtual and the actual.