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Il Centro Linguistico I seminari COMUNITA' VIRTUALI VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES AND SCIENTIFIC ETHICS Claude Cazalé Bérard In the present context of scientific research, the notions of "complexity" and "lack of determination/vagueness/uncertainty", the awareness of the "relativity" of presuppositions and results due to the inevitable effect of feedback not only require a continual redimensioning of working hypotheses and theories in comparison with resistance from the object, with the conditions of experience, with modes of treatment, with the evolution of instrumentation and the conditions of transmission of information and hence with the almost simultaneous ?interface with the community of users. They also demand a self-conscious, public gesture of taking on scientific and ethical responsibility, since every act/operation in the field of knowledge considered - in this case, philology - constitutes a typically "hermeneutic" act, that is, selective, transformative and interpretative, with respect to data. This implies an obligation to limit oneself to consider that as results of investigations are gradually obtained, they are areas of local and temporary certainty before new parameters and data come to modify or transform previously defined models of organization. In short, every theory of the text, of language, of communications is to be treated as a simple working hypothesis which is relative, historicized, and destined to be brought into question. It can be contradicted or even made obsolete by the very unpredictability of discoveries and further contributions. In fact, research on the web for "virtual communities" which are united but not closed within a given program makes it possible to look at and treat the manifold data, changeability of paradigms and the variability of conditions and experimental means in a dynamic, interactive way. That is, it makes it possible to take part in a research environment where lack of determination, the uncertain and the unfinished must be taken into consideration as positive rather than limiting factors. Apart from forcing us to cross the dividing line between disciplines (textual criticism, philology, linguistics, semiology, historical anthropology, psychoanalysis, philosophy) and adopt a multi-dimensional approach to texts, this is a true change of perspective which respects the organicity and multiplicity of the systems in use and hence shows its historically contextualized specificity. Moreover, this need brings along with it as a heuristic necessity a statement of methods and definition of interpretative mechanisms. That is, the scholar involved in a project which is openly collaborative and autonomous with respect to inevitably competitive economic interests must assume ethical and scientific responsibility (which itself can be historicized). The question which cannot be avoided is: on the basis of what criteria and methods can the literary text be read, described, interpreted, reproduced, transmitted and preserved? One of the tasks of the "virtual community", if identified as a "community of interpreters" in a specific field of application - like computer editing of texts - is to reach an agreement on the norms to use and on the proper procedures to adopt with respect to the demands of philosophical and literary investigation. That is, to offer means of identification and hence of recognition in the literary text: the code, the system used (linguistic, literary, ideological), the structure (syntactical, logical-semantic, thematic, symbolic). Memorization without scientifically pre-determined - and almost automatic - rules of texts made available to the public at large, without their linguistic, historical, literary, meta-literary environment not only constitutes progress with respect to the critical edition in paper. It also constitutes a limited form of reproduction devoid of any scientific value. Torna al programma