So there are two things that are being intertwined here, and not profitably. The first would be the non salutary reduction of virtual to online, and the related binary of online-offline, that has also likely outlived its usefulness as a seemingly clarifying binary. The second is the meaning of "virtual" as a modifying adjective -- its epistemic, and maybe ontological, and most definitely philosophical value. Rob Shields -- amongst many others -- has written an excellent book that provides an excellent overview of scholarly work on "virtual" as construct (The Virtual). A construct can't be falsified - rather, its use contested. So, communities can be analyzed as "virtual" that existed long before anything like "online" - which one could argue is Benedict Anderson's argument about "imagined communities" mediated by the artifact of the newspaper. So, what do we/you mean by "virtual"? Mary On 10/20/06 12:28 AM, "Sam Tilden" <tildensam@yahoo.com> wrote:
Ascribing virtuality to communities of people who inter-relate on the internet are no less robust than those generated in "Realspace associations. Most evidence suggest communities form and are robust but are they virtual? The social scientists in our midst have affirmed the formation of communites that is not in dispute.
On another note, scholarship, it seems to me, is about constantly seeking refinement for the understanding of basic principals. More often, like piety, just slightly out of reach.
While there may not be agreement on what is knowledge, it is the quest that defines the role of scholarship. The people you mentioned may not have agreed on the precise details of the method but they did have a basic understanding that methods were necessary. One thing they did agree on is, to some degree of certainty, that the results once known would be observable by others.
As I said earlier, unsuported assertions are either opinions or fictions no matter how elegant or literary.
Communities yes, but virtual communities can be easily falsified.