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Central Themes and Open Questions in the Philosophy of Computer Science

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Abstract

This paper introduces the Global Philosophy symposium on Giuseppe Primiero’s book On the Foundations of Computing (2020). The collection gathers commentaries and responses of the author with the aim of engaging with some open questions in the philosophy of computer science. Firstly, this paper introduces the central themes addressed in Primiero’s book; secondly, it highlights some of the main critiques from commentators in order to, finally, pinpoint some conceptual challenges indicating future directions for the philosophy of computer science.

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Notes

  1. An early example is Rapaport’s (2005a).However, there were clearly many papers concerned with the philosophical aspects of computer science that were published before. Notable cases are Moor (1978) or Fetzer (1988), just to give a couple of examples. But it was only in the 2000s that philosophers understood their engagement with computer science as part of a distinct subdiscipline.

  2. See, for example, (Tedre 2014), followed by (Turner 2018), (Primero 2020), and (Rapaport 2023). Two previous books are Colburn (2000) and Vallverdú (2010), but they are more focused on the philosophy of artificial intelligence and only marginally on the philosophy of computer science.

  3. This paper is not intended to be an introduction of Primero’s (2020) book; for an overview of the contents of the book, the interested reader may refer to Symons and Abumusab (2021) or to Angius (2022).

  4. The reader interested in details should refer to Primero (2020) itself or to the useful recap in (Primiero 2023) included in this collection.

  5. See Symons and Horner (2014; 2020) for detailed discussions of the role of software specification in the characterization of error.

  6. For explicit applications to computer science see Searle (1990) and Putnam’s responses to the triviality objection in computational theories of mind (1987).

  7. One should go back to some side-considerations of Turing (1950) to find a previous examination of the issue of miscomputation in computer science.

  8. The issue of software error has been developed in detail by other authors, see for instance (Horner and Symons 2019; 2020).

  9. Symons and Horner have a contrasting account of some of the implications of the verification problem for software intensive science (2014).

  10. For the sake of precision, Primiero (2020) discusses simulative methods, rather than testing, when formulating his experimental foundation. Angius (2022) should be understood as an extension of Primiero’s analysis.

  11. An additional novel programming paradigm comes from automatic code generation, for instance using generative AI.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Science, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Nicola Angius

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

    John Symons

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  1. Nicola Angius
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Angius, N., Symons, J. Central Themes and Open Questions in the Philosophy of Computer Science. glob. Philosophy 33, 51 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-023-09704-z

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