Sophology

Sophology was developed first with the purpose of solving the most serious problems we face, those that put the greatest numbers of human lives and greatest amount of human happiness at risk. That is what I believe it has the greatest potential for, and it is what I most hope it will be put towards. While it has the full potential to be used by individuals as a philosophy, the complexity of so many problems means that the formal, thorough, and systematic application of sophology as its own academic discipline will be essential. The results of that study will be extraordinarily fruitful.
Possibilities for research in this field have become historically unparalleled with the recent advent of digital mapping and easily portable computers with spatial location capabilities. At the core of sophology lies the idea that of the information we can receive, we get much of the most influential from other people. These technologies allow the questions “who's talking,” “where,” “about what,” and “for how long” to be measured with incredible precision and ease for enormous numbers of individuals at once.
It MUST be remembered however, in the course of these studies, the depth of the potential for abuse of this information. Information is what people use to act. If you control it, you control their actions. The reason I believe that this study will still do far more good than harm is that I believe ignorance is a greater factor than malevolence in a large number of truly horrific situations. If we use these tools to highlight for ourselves what and who we are ignoring, whether we think we are or not, our inclination will be to pay more attention- not less. Information is not necessarily dangerous by itself. It can be extremely dangerous when some people have it, and others do not. Even with this belief, extreme care must be taken when pursuing these goals, and in particular, the content of conversations is not the desired answer to the question "about what." This is not meant to be surveillance. This question can be answered in extremely vague terms, even including only whether or not the people in the conversation themselves were the subject of their discussion, and still tell allow us to infer deeply important things, without putting anyone under unnecessary scrutiny.
It is so important to study information comprehensively at the level of the individual because the individual is the fundamental unit of society. That is thus where we should study it if, in our studies, we want to see reality reflected most clearly. It is time to make as much of a science as can be made out of this singularly important phenomenon.
To this end, a piece of software is in the final stages of being written for the iPhone platform that records the answers to these questions. It is intended to be used in conjunction with geographic information systems (GIS) and and graph analysis software such as NetworkX, to understand interaction patterns in time and space.
In addition to the findings that will come from new scholarship, the existing number of disciplines that have done work relevant to sophology, and their accompanying body of knowledge that can be drawn on to inform and supplement them, is enormous. However I will maintain the importance of devoting an entire discipline to sophology, rather than dividing the relevant studies between the many places they are now. To consider them together with the framework I have endeavored to develop will allow a conceptual unification of the work that has been done, with all of the benefits that come from such a unification. Not only could this extraordinary work now be looked at in a way that would allow the once separate studies to inform one another, it would allow many important, and very different questions, to be asked of the new field directly.
A full length work that is in the final stages of editing is still necessary for a thorough treatment of both the theory and evidence I have so far described only briefly, but this is a good place to start.