Stefan Gruner

On the basis of an earlier contribution to the philosophy of computer science by Amnon Eden, this essay discusses to what extent Eden’s ‘paradigms’ of computer science can be transferred or applied to software engineering. This discussion implies an analysis of how software engineering and computer science are related to each other. The essay concludes that software engineering can neither be fully subsumed by computer science, nor vice versa. Consequently, also the philosophies of computer science and software engineering—though related to each other—are not identical branches of a general philosophy of science. This also implies that not all of Eden’s earlier arguments can be directly mapped from the domain of computer science into the domain of software science. After the discussion of this main topic, the essay also points to some further problems and open issues for future studies in the philosophy of software science and engineering

Over the past four decades, software engineering has emerged as a discipline in its own right, though it has roots both in computer science and in classical engineering. Its philosophical foundations and premises are not yet well understood. In recent times, members of the software engineering community have started to search for such foundations. In particular, the philosophies of Kuhn and Popper have been used by philosophically-minded software engineers in search of a deeper understanding of their discipline. It seems, however, that professional philosophers of science are not yet aware of this new discourse within the field of software engineering. Therefore, this article aims to reflect critically upon recent software engineers’ attempts towards a philosophy of software engineering and to introduce our own philosophical thoughts in this context. Finally, we invite the professional philosophers of science to participate in this interesting new discourse.

In their Minds and Machines essay How would you know if you synthesized a Thinking Thing? (Kary & Mahner, Minds and Machines, 12(1), 61–86, 2002), Kary and Mahner have chosen to occupy a high ground of materialism and empiricism from which to attack the philosophical and methodological positions of believers in artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (AL). In this review I discuss some of their main arguments as well as their philosophical foundations. Their central argument: ‘AI is Platonism’, which is based on a particular interpretation of the notion of ‘definition’ and used as a critique against AI, can be counter criticized from two directions: first, Anti-Platonism is not a necessary precondition for criticizing AI, because outspoken Platonist criticism against AI is already known (Penrose, The emperor’s new mind (with a foreword by M. Gardner), 1989). Second, even in case that AI would essentially be ‘Platonism’ this would not be a sufficient argument for proving AI wrong. In my counter criticism I assume a more or less Popperian position by emphasizing the openness of the future: Not by quasi-Scholastic arguments (like Kary and Mahner’s), but only after being confronted with a novel ‘thinking thing’ by future AI engineers we can start to analyze its particular properties (Let me use a history analogon to illustrate my position: In the 19th century, mechanized aviation was widely regarded impossible—only natural organisms (such as birds or bees) could fly, and any science of aerodynamics or aviation did not exist. Only after some non-scientific technicians had confronted their astonished fellows with the first (obviously) flying machine the science of ‘Artificial Aviation’ came into existence, motivated by the need for understanding and mastering that challenging and puzzling new phenomenon).

Approximately a century after the bio-philosopher Hans Driesch had published some of his most interesting books, which had been to some extent misunderstood and subsequently fallen to some extent into oblivion, the relevance of some of Driesch's ideas for our own time is, since recently, beginning to be rediscovered. This is, inter alia, because the philosophical triple-relation between the notions of 'mind', 'living body', and 'machine' is still not compellingly clarified by any of the various competing philosophical 'schools' until today, whereby the advent of the programmable computer as an entirely new type of 'machine' has made all the related problems even more complicated. Within this science-philosophical context, this review article revisits and briefly recapitulates some of Driesch's most 'salient' thoughts on the mind-body-problem, and additionally provides some bibliographic auxiliary materials which nowadays students of Driesch's ideas might find useful. The writing of this review was motivated by the desire to clarify some often-seen misunderstandings of Driesch's concept of 'soul' within his two-fold framework of 'vitalism plus phenomenology', as well as by the desire to reconnect our contemporary science-, mind-, nature- and computer-philosophical discourses with one of their most important historic sources.

‘Information’ is a fundamental notion in the field of artificial intelligence including various sub-disciplines such as cybernetics, artificial life, robotics, etc. Practically the notion is often taken for granted and used naively in an unclarified and philosophically unreflected manner, whilst philosophical attempts at clarifying ‘information’ have not yet found much consensus within the science-philosophical community. One particularly notorious example of this lack of consensus is the recent Fetzer-Floridi dispute about what is ‘information’—a dispute which has remained basically unsettled until today in spite of a sequence of follow-up publications on this topic. In this chapter our philosophical analysis reveals with reference to Gottlob Frege’s classical semiotics that the above-mentioned Fetzer-Floridi dispute cannot come to any solution at all, because the two competing notions of ‘information’ in that dispute are basically synonyms of what Frege had called ‘sense’ versus what Frege had called ‘meaning’. As Frege had convincingly distinguished sense and meaning very clearly from each other, it is obvious that ‘information’ understood like ‘sense’ and ‘information’ understood like ‘meaning’ are incompatible and cannot be reconciled with each other. Moreover we also hint in this chapter at the often-forgotten pragmatic aspects of ‘information’ which is to say that ‘information’ can always only be ‘information for somebody’ with regard to a specific aim or goal or purpose. ‘Information’, such understood, is thus a teleological notion with a context-sensitive embedding into what the late Wittgenstein had called a ‘language-game’. Shannon’s quantified notion of ‘information’, by contrast, which measures an amount of unexpected surprise and which is closely related to the number of definite yes-no-questions which must be asked in order to obtain the desired solution of a given quiz puzzle, is not the topic of this chapter—although also in Shannon’s understanding of ‘information’ the quiz puzzle scenario, within which those yes-no-questions are asked and counted, is obviously purpose-driven and Sprachspiel-dependent. We conclude our information-philosophical analysis with some remarks about which notion of ‘information’ seems particularly amenable and suitable for an autonomic mobile robotics project which one of the two co-authors is planning for future work. To separate this suitable notion of ‘information’ from other ones a new word, namely ≪enlightation≫, is coined and introduced.