L'Opportunisme Cognitif: The Philosophy of Computer Science

Special issue of Minds and Machines (2010)

and

Track in the 7th European conf. on Computing And Philosophy-ECAP 2009

Theme:
Two special editions of Minds and Machines (2007) and the Journal of Applied Logic (2008) dedicated to the philosophy of computer science have already appeared in print. Another special edition of Minds and Machines is planned for 2010. Papers submitted to the "Philosophy of Computer Science" track in ECAP 2009 will also be considered for publication in the special issue of Minds and Machines.

We invite submissions concerned with philosophical issues that arise from reflection upon the nature and practice of the academic discipline of computer science. In particular we welcome submissions concerned with questions such as the following:

What kinds of things are programs? Are they abstract or concrete? (Moor 1978; Colburn 2004)
What are the differences between programs and algorithms? (Rapaport 2005a)
What is a specification? And what is being specified? (Smith 1985; Turner 2005)
Are specifications fundamentally different from programs? (Smith 1985)
What is an implementation? (Rapaport 2005b)
What distinguishes hardware from software? Do programs exist in both physical and symbolic forms? (Moor 1978; Colburn 2004)
What kinds of things are digital objects? Do we need a new ontological category to house them? (Allison et al. 2005)
What are the objectives of the various semantic theories of programming languages? (White 2004; Turner 2007)
How do questions in the philosophy of programming languages relate to parallel ones in the philosophy of language? (White 2004)
Does the principle of modularity (e.g., Dijkstra 1968) relate to theconceptual issues of full-abstraction and compositionality?
What are the underlying conceptual differences between the followingprogramming paradigms: structured, functional, logic, and object-orientedprogramming?
What are the roles of types in Computer Science? (Barandregt 1992; Pierce 2002)
What is the difference between operational and denotational semantics? (Turner 2007)
What does it mean for a program to be correct? What is the epistemological status of correctness proofs? Are they fundamentally different from proofs in mathematics? (DeMillo et al. 1979; Smith 1985)
What do correctness proofs establish? (Fetzer 1988; Fetzer 1999; Colburn 2004)
What is abstraction in computer science? How is it related to abstraction in mathematics? (Colburn 2007; Fine 2008; Hale and Wright. 2001)
What are formal methods? What is formal about formal methods? What is the difference between a formal method and informal one? (Bowen & Hinchey 2005; Bowen & Hinchey 1995)
What kind of discipline is computer science? What are the roles of mathematical modelling and experimentation? (Minsky 1970; Denning 1980; Denning 1981; Denning et al. 1989; Denning 1985; Denning 1980b; Hartmanis 1994; Hartmanis1993; Hartmanis 1981; Colburn 2004, Eden 2007)
Should programs be considered as scientific theories? (Rapaport 2005a)
How is mathematics used in computer science? Are mathematical models used in a descriptive or normative way? (White 2004; Turner 2007)
Does the Church-Turing thesis capture the mathematical notion of an effective or mechanical method in logic and mathematics? Does it capture the computations that can be performed by a human? Does its scope apply to physical machines? (Copeland 2004; Copeland 2007, Hodges 2006)
Can the notion of computational thinking withstand philosophical scrutiny? (Wing 2006)
What is the appropriate logic with which to reason about program correctness and termination? (Hoare 1969; Feferman 1992) How is the logic dependent upon the underlying programming language?
What is information? (Floridi 2004; Floridi 2005) Does this notion throw light on some of the questions listed here?
Why are there so many programming languages and programming paradigms? (Krishnamurthi 2003)
Do programming languages (and paradigms) have the nature of scientific theories? What causes a programming paradigm shift? (Kuhn 1970)
Does software engineering raise any philosophical issues? (Eden 2007)