Belief and particularity

This, the third part, constitutes the ‘heart’ of this book. On the basis of the framework provided by our analysis of the basic premise ([TBP]), of our development of the explanatory model ([Exp]) and of our examination of some of the key properties of cyberspace and interaction we will attempt here to provide a model that will explain why human agents may come to act in ethically different ways according to whether they are inside or outside cyberspace.

The debt owed to Emmanuel Levinas and the ‘Legal Tender’ experiment referred to in the opening chapter will be evident in the explanation provided. Thus we will, in short, explain the basic premise on the basis of considerations of how an agent's belief in the reality of a particular other person may be tied to certain beliefs, and how the absence of ‘the face of the other’ in certain kinds of interaction in cyberspace may limit the availability of the evidence required to form these underlying beliefs.

Before entering into these investigations, we will begin this chapter by sketching the structure of the analysis and the reasoning of the chapters that make up the third part of the book. Following this, we will set out on the first stage of providing an explanation by introducing three hypotheses linking an agent's belief in the reality of a particular interacting person with certain other beliefs.