What are the core topics of Computer Science, and how are these topics studied? Those are the central questions of the Philosophy of Computer Science. However, how those questions are to be answered is a matter of ongoing debate and social construction. Guided by the questions answered by Shirley Gregor in her seminal work on theory in the field of Information Systems, this paper aims to understand how contemporary work on the philosophy of Computer Science answers these questions. In particular, we examine four recent books explicitly examining the topics and methodologies of Computer Science. While each of the books takes a different perspective and uses a different approach, all of them reach similar conclusions: Computer Science is firstly the study of computation, algorithms and their implementation and verification. In terms of the methods employed, the four books agree there are three separate traditions: a mathematical tradition, an engineering tradition and an empirical scientific tradition. The disciplinary boundaries of Computer Science are redrawn in each of the books, emphasizing mathematical, qualitative and empirical work over other forms of knowing. This paper also aims to ask the question what potential aspects of computer science that are currently undone. Which research methods are we not using due to the focus on mathematical, engineering or scientific reasoning? What research questions fall outside of the scope of current Computer Science? And are we as computer scientists influencing the world of computers and beyond enough?
The mathematical discourse on empirical equalities systematically uses the figure of equality in “abstract spaces” adapted to each case. Instead of these “ascents into ontology”, we prefer an enrichment of the formal language that can precisely convey the fact that some quantities are not visible, in a given context, because they are too large or too small. This notion of visibility in a context will be formally transcribed by a binary predicate of contextual visibility, which links a formal quantity x and a context of visibility c. A formal quantity is a rational number, which could be visible or not, depending on the context. The definition of contextual visibility will then be just a renaming of the binary predicate of relative standardity of RIST [Péraire 1992]. We validate this way the practices of physicists like P. A. M. Dirac [1927], or H. B. G. Casimir [1948] who have “defined” their empirical relations by applying them, which is not the mathematicians’s usual way of doing.
Our digital societies bear the hallmarks of non-convivial technologies as identified more than fifty years ago by Ivan Illich in his seminal book Tools for Conviviality (1973). In a context of ecosystemic and socio-economical crises, we argue in this paper that Illich’s ideas remain remarkably relevant, not only for understanding the negative effects of digital technologies but also as guidelines for embedding digital technologies in a degrowth scenario. As computer scientists, we therefore propose a research agenda for developing design for conviviality, a strongly normative value sensitive approach to the design of digital artefacts and systems. We discuss in particular two examples, digital infrastructures and business process management, which seem to be very much in need of a convivial rethinking.
This article investigates the undone science of software scalability. Software engineering literature focuses on the multiple ways that software can scale up, but too rarely on the possibilities, or necessities, of making it scale down. Drawing from geographical studies, we hypothesize that scales are constructed, rather than given, and argue that the design and use of specific computational artifacts—programming languages, data structures and protocols—are active participants in such material construction. Through a series of case studies, we discuss how computational artifacts can realize computing at both local and global scales.
The concept of “undone science” has emerged since the 2010s in the research in social sciences at the intersection of studies on social movements and science and technology studies. It refers to research questions that are neglected, ignored, or left unfunded, even though they deserve to be explored. The aim of this special issue is to apply this concept to computer science, by examining whether the way this discipline is structured (including its sociological, economic, and political dimensions), as well as the paradigms that shape it, make it possible to identify epistemological and ethical questions that are crucial for its development and conception.
High-performance machine learning models generally suffer from a lack of transparency that calls into question the ability of humans to understand how they work. Through the study of CoMo, an interactive learning system that allows users to associate sounds and gestures, we show that a form of model understanding can emerge from user-model interactions. This interactive approach offers an alternative to explanation- and interpretation-based epistemologies. Although data- and computation-intensive deep learning systems are not well suited to this form of interactivity, shallow learning models offer underappreciated epistemological advantages in contexts where machine learning can be made interactive.
There have been three geometrizations in history. The first is historically due to the Pythagorean school and Plato while the second comes from Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Newton, and the third geometrization of nature begins with Einstein’s general relativity. Here the term geometrization of nature means the conception according to which nature (with its different meanings) is broadly described by using geometry. In this article, I focus on the third geometrization, in which the black hole shadow phenomenon relates shape to dynamics. As a consequence, spacetime symmetry could play the role of the formal cause in black hole physics. Spacetime symmetry as a formal cause of spacetime could be an interesting point in the kinematics-dynamics debate in the theory of relativity.
Written version of a talk given in February 1935 at the Institut d’histoire des sciences, Paris. The original paper was published in 1935 in the second issue of the journal Thalès. All rights reserved.
This article examines one aspect of the Vienna Circle’s very rich and ambiguous relationship with phenomenology, taking as its object the question of the status of intentionality in Carnap’s Logical Construction of the World. After developing several interpretations of the integration of the intentional relation into the system of constitution, I show that the parallels that it is tempting to draw between the Husserlian and Carnapian concepts of intentionality do not take into account a fundamental aspect of the problem—the absence, in Carnap’s work, of a concept of object that would be thought in the mode of objectity to which phenomenology relates all lived experiences in the mode of the intentional relation. The dialogue between Husserl and Carnap thus appears to be distorted.
Introduction to Alfred Stern’s paper on « The Vienna Circle and neopositivism », published in 1935 in the second issue of the journal Thalès.
The Vienna Circle was a group of scientists and philosophers who met around Moritz Schlick in Vienna between the two world wars. What they had in common was a rejection of systems-based thinking and metaphysical questions deemed to be eternal, a focus on the most recent developments in science and a desire to clarify problems through logical analysis. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was at the heart of their discussions, but Wittgenstein himself was only in contact with them indirectly, through Schlick whom he fascinated. The end of the Vienna Circle and Schlick’s fate are linked closely and, indeed, tragically, because of Schlick’s assassination in June 1936 at the University of Vienna.
A representation of the Vienna Circle emerged in France in the 1930s, in a context that was hardly conducive to a positive reception. Over the following three decades, its transmission led to the formation of a distorted image that began to be questioned and was occasionally challenged in the 1970s, then more forcefully in the 1980s, before a rehabilitation movement helped to overcome a representation that was more a matter of collective imagination than of patient reading of the texts. This article examines the constitution of this representation, the history of its difficult transmission, the awakening of interest in it in the 1970s, then how it was gradually overcome from the 1990s onwards and in contemporary philosophy.
My article aims to characterize a second use of the metaphor of the boat loaded with scientific statements that constitute, along the turbulences of history, the development of knowledge in view of the happiness of men. Neurath’s Anti-Spengler expresses the will to counteract the fatalist conception that underlies the thesis of culture bound to decline. Logic viewed in the light of Goethe’s morphogenesis is irrational, as Spengler shows. So far, it has become an obstacle to rationality of science, instead of bringing to men what makes them united in a reconciled society of happiness.
This article describes how Musil, Wittgenstein, and Hayek discuss key aspects of the scientific conception of the world defended by the Vienna Circle. I argue that they highlight the difficulties of a framework that contrasts the progress of knowledge and rationality with the resistance of conservatism. The classical image of the progress of knowledge must give way to the impossibility of its representation and to a form of skepticism : knowledge is necessarily fragmented and dispersed but, more originally, rationality can no longer be conceived in isolation from what is natural and traditional. Our language and our concepts consist of practices that are both inherited and embedded in our form of life.
Poincaré’s position is often presented as semi-intuitionist, especially in relation to his position in arithmetic. This article examines Poincaré’s relationship to an intuitionist position. In the first part, we examine the relationship between the Kantian tradition and intuitionism, and the reception of Poincaré’s approach by Brouwer and Heyting. In the second part, we present a detailed analysis of Poincaré’s conception of induction as an a priori synthetic judgment based on pure intuition and in relation to the foundations of geometry. For the latter, Poincaré presupposes a power of the mind to form groups and continua, of which we possess an intuitive knowledge.We conclude that although we are accustomed to some mathematical conceptions of Poincaré and Brouwer are rather closely related, Poincaré and Brouwer differ fundametally in their approaches from a conceptual point of view. Contrary to the neo-intuitionists of the Brouwerian tradition, for Poincaré the use of language is not only an efficient tool for memorizing or communicating, but also, and above all, an essential part of the genesis of mathematical conceptualization.
Descartes’ mathematical philosophy is sometimes identified with intuitionism. To appreciate this assertion, it is firstly necessary to understand the precise concept of intuition that Descartes elaborates in his great treatise on method, the Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Secondly it is then necessary to examine the interplay of intellectual operations capable of producing truth, namely intuition, deduction, and an operation that extends deduction which Descartes calls enumeration. We aim to show that intuition is certainly the norm of knowledge, but that real science, i.e., the ability to invent and solve any question, relies much more on the variety of deduction called enumeration.
This paper aims to clarify the philosophical content of the terms employed in the description of the opposition between intuitionism and the view called “Platonism” concerning whether mathematical truth depends on the human mind or expresses properties of eternal abstract objects. We argue that reconstructed in terms of its historical origin, Aristotelian aphairesis characterizes the mathematical practice not only of the ancient Greeks, but likewise of mathematicians of all time. To this end, we analyze the emergence of mathematical aphairesis in Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s account of what mathematics is about and describe the mathematical being of Viète’s Logistica Speciosa in terms of Aristotelian aphairesis.
This article aims to highlight certain salient points from the Sphaerics of Menelaus, of which we have published the Arabic versions (see Menelaus’ Spherics: Early Translation and al-Māhānı̄/ al-Harawı̄’s Version. Edition, translation and commentary, Berlin; Boston, 2017). We will see how Menelaus is fully aware that he is inventing a new type of geometry which entails two fundamental decisions. These are the axiomatic decision to suspend Euclid’s fifth postulate and the logical decision to suspend the use of the excluded middle. Menelaus specifically states that he will not resort to reasoning by absurdity in his argument, which marks a date in the history of mathematics. Does this undeniable proto-intuitionist tendency make Menelaus an intuitionist mathematician in the modern sense? Not completely, since we can observe the underlying presence, here and there in his treatise, of a classically Euclidean mode of demonstration.
This article studies the way in which al-Samaw’al al-Maġribī (d. 1175) develops a conception of truth that he systematically applies to all fields of knowledge, based on his reflection as an algebraist on the notion of problem. This doctrine is characterized by a marked tendency to interpret constructibility, and therefore modalities, in terms of calculability. Given certain initial propositions, what is necessary is what is calculable from those propositions, the impossible is what is incalculable, and the possible is what cannot, at the present moment, be shown to be either calculable or incalculable. This position leads al-Samaw’al to adopt an intuitionist understanding of the mathematical subject that is opposed to any form of Platonism, where truth is not independent of the idealized time of discovery.
