News

Giuseppe Primiero (vice-president of the HaPoC Commission) has been nominated member of the Executive Editorial Board of the Journal Philosophy & Technology (Springer) for the Area of Philosophy of Computer Science & Technology. The Journal will inaugurate a new supplements series, for issues entirely related to each of the areas of competence in the Executive Editorial Board. If you have plans to edit a collections of papers in the area of History/Philosophy of Computer Science, please do contact Giuseppe at G.Primiero@mdx.ac.uk to discuss P&T as a possible venue for publication!

CfP available on the website of the Society for the Philosophy of Information:

http://socphilinfo.org/news/cfp/485-seventh-workshop-philosophy-information-conceptual-challenges-data-science-and

An excerpt from the book The Innovators by Walter Isaacson on the women who programmed ENIAC.

http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/

Workshop at the Fifth World Conference on Universal Logic
25-30 June 2015
University of Istanbul
http://www.socphilinfo.org/news/cfp/469-workshop-logic-and-information-5th-unilog

In this workshop we want to approach the relation between logic and information from the perspective of the philosophy of information, as well as from a logical perspective, and draw attention to a number of questions that have historically received attention, or have only been individuated in recent years. These include the possibility of a genuine informational conception of logical consequence, the relation between informational and computational approaches, the relation between information and logics of questions, and the difference between (what van Benthem calls) implicit informational stances in logic like that of intuitionist logic and explicit stances like that of epistemic logic.

Keynote speaker
Luciano Floridi (OII, Oxford University)

Call for abstracts
Extended abstracts (1000-1500 words) should be sent via e-mail before November 15th 2014 to: workshop@logicandinformation.be

Organisers
The workshop is hosted by Universal Logic 2015 and organised in collaboration with the Society for the Philosophy of Information.
Workshop chairs are: Patrick Allo and Giuseppe Primiero

This workshop is co-located with the 5th Universal Logic and organized by Petros Stefaneas (National Technical University of Athens, Greece) and Nicola Angius (University of Sassari, Italy). Deadline for extended abstracts submission is November 15th, 2014.

http://www.uni-log.org/wk5-PCS.html

When I was a programmer, and even when I was a teacher of programming, I would wonder about where data structures and algorithms came from, and to what extent people use pass-by-value, pass-by-reference, and pass-by-name for communication in daily life, and whether we use those techniques for activities besides communication, and whether the universe somehow uses those techniques, and about many other speculative questions. Now those questions attract me to the philosophy of computer science. But the phenomena yielded by computing don’t seem to be commonly studied as philosophical subjects. Most inquiry is embedded in, and therefore directed by, the computational model, applying symbols, inductive definitions, and set-theoretic operations to philosophical questions about computing. I propose turning this inside out, identifying the significant artifacts of computer science and giving them philosophical treatment in their own right, outside of the digital realm.

In this spirit, I offered a contribution during the HaPoC symposium at IACAP 2014, applying questions of ontology to the algorithm. What else is possible? See a few ideas at the blog “Teaching the Philosophy of Computer Science,” at http://teachingphilofcs.blogspot.com/, particularly the most recent entry, for June 27, 2014.

Formal models and explanations are important. They give us incomparable insight, foundation, and inspiration. The other approach suggested here should be regarded as complementary. And there must be work out there already that falls into this category, of which I am simply ignorant; members who are conversant with such work are invited to note it here.