CFP: The Philosophy of Computer Science

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Preliminary Call for Papers

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
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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:

1. What kinds of things are programs? Are they abstract or concrete?
(Moor 1978; Colburn 2004)

2. What are the differences between programs and algorithms? (Rapaport
2005a)

3. What is a specification? And what is being specified? (Smith 1985;
Turner 2005)

4. Are specifications fundamentally different from programs? (Smith
1985)

5. What is an implementation? (Rapaport 2005b)

6. What distinguishes hardware from software? Do programs exist in both
physical and symbolic forms? (Moor 1978; Colburn 2004)

7. What kinds of things are digital objects? Do we need a new
ontological category to house them? (Allison et al. 2005)

8. What are the objectives of the various semantic theories of
programming languages? (White 2004; Turner 2007)

9. How do questions in the philosophy of programming languages relate
to parallel ones in the philosophy of language? (White 2004)

10. Does the principle of modularity (e.g., Dijkstra 1968) relate to the
conceptual issues of full-abstraction and compositionality?

11. What are the underlying conceptual differences between the following
programming paradigms: structured, functional, logic, and object-oriented
programming?

12. What are the roles of types in Computer Science? (Barandregt 1992;
Pierce 2002)

13. What is the difference between operational and denotational
semantics? (Turner 2007)

14. 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)

15. What do correctness proofs establish? (Fetzer 1988; Fetzer 1999;
Colburn 2004)

16. What is abstraction in computer science? How is it related to
abstraction in mathematics? (Colburn 2007; Fine 2008; Hale and Wright.
2001)

17. 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)

18. 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)

19. Should programs be considered as scientific theories? (Rapaport
2005a)

20. How is mathematics used in computer science? Are mathematical models
used in a descriptive or normative way? (White 2004; Turner 2007)

21. 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)

22. Can the notion of computational thinking withstand philosophical
scrutiny? (Wing 2006)

23. 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?

24. What is information? (Floridi 2004; Floridi 2005) Does this notion
throw light on some of the questions listed here?

25. Why are there so many programming languages and programming
paradigms? (Krishnamurthi 2003)

26. Do programming languages (and paradigms) have the nature of
scientific theories? What causes a programming paradigm shift? (Kuhn
1970)

27. Does software engineering raise any philosophical issues? (Eden
2007)

REFERENCES

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Important dates for ECAP 2009 conference track (tentative):
* Submission deadline: 23 Feb. 2009
* Notification: 16 Mar. 2009
* Conference: 2-4 Jul. 2009

Track chair: Raymond Turner

Important dates for Minds & Machines special issue (tentative):
* Submission deadline: 1 Dec. 2009
* Notification: 1 May 2010
* Appearance: Dec. 2010

Associate editor: Amnon H. Eden

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